How to Turn a Live Hockey Broadcast Into a Cartoon

Tuesday night’s NHL hockey game between the Boston Bruins and Florida Panthers won’t just be a unique viewing experience for many young fans. It will also be a window into the rapidly evolving future of digitally enhanced sports broadcasting.

Termed the “Best Snow Day Ever” by organizers, Tuesday’s showcase on the New England Sports Network is the latest in a growing trend of alternative broadcasts (or “altcasts”) across sports. It comes with a special twist: A fusion of STEM concepts with hockey, using a fully animated game telecast and various interactive features to turn foundational math concepts into fun, game-based exercises. It’s earned the moniker “STEMcast” as a result, a play on other altcast titles like the NFL’s “ManningCast.”

This particular combination of animation and data-based broadcast elements is aimed primarily at younger viewers, who have demonstrated a growing interest in hockey. (For viewers who prefer the traditional broadcast, NESN will also make that available.) But it also showcases many of the burgeoning capabilities leagues and broadcasters have available to them in today’s age of digital content, tools that are increasingly being used to customize and personalize the sports viewing experience for fans across a wide range of demographics.

Consuming sports could soon be an intensely personalized experience where fans themselves control everything from what information they see on their screen to which broadcast angles or replays they see—all derived from the same kinds of backend features being used for Tuesday’s STEMcast. Parts of that future have already arrived.

The takeover of sports broadcasts by digitization can be summed up neatly by a longtime industry professional.

“Users should be able to interact with the content,” says Kjetil Horneland, COO of Ease Live, a major player in broadcast enhancements. “If you have all the content you used to put through an antenna, and now you’re streaming it, why is the content the same? Why is the content the same when everything else around you is dynamic?”

Digital sports content offers numerous avenues to the sorts of interactivity Horneland is referring to. Ease Live specializes in one major category known as broadcast overlays; the company tailors customized graphics and features that run atop existing streaming products, with clients across the major North American sports plus European soccer and more. These products range from straightforward data pop-ups to much more involved overlays.

Ease Live’s partnership with Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network (YES Network) illustrates the kinds of features they bring to the table. The first layer is basic graphic overlays presented on-screen: Live stats, polls, quizzes, lineups, that sort of thing, all of which can be customized for specific audiences. (YES Network covers the MLB’s New York Yankees, the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, MLS’s New York City FC, and the WNBA’s New York Liberty.) These overlays vary widely in complexity, from simple displays to options like customizable replay windows that can be programmed to pop up on the screen.

Another is the “watch party” feature, a concept gaining traction across several sports where fans connect with friends through a second device while watching a live-synced version of a game together. Astute readers will note that this isn’t really an “overlay,” per se, rather a slightly different product using similar backend programs; as this digitalized content world explodes, even proper terminology across applications remains a work in progress.

Leagues and broadcasters have an ocean of similar tools available. Betting-focused stream features are growing in popularity as more leagues partner with sports gambling entities; the NBA, for example, offers an optional betting function within its NBA League Pass streaming product.

Showing live stats on the screen is another big trend. NESN, namely, is one of several networks to build in numbers-based overlays as part of a stat-heavy altcast offering for app subscribers. These kinds of alternative broadcasts increasingly feature live inputs from player tracking systems, such as the “Clippervision” broadcast from the NBA’s LA Clippers that overlays data from camera tracking systems present in NBA arenas. These displays range from basic player information and “expected” shooting percentages for each shot to an overlaid diagram of the court that displays each player and the ball as a moving dot. (As a basketball obsessive with a love for stats and data, take it from me: Clippervision is a nerd’s paradise.)

These digitalized features are proving popular with fans.

“We’ve seen increases in every overlay that we’ve launched after we’ve launched it,” says Sara Zuckert, senior vice president of content strategy and innovation for the NBA. “Each one, year over year, has increased in what percentage of fans are using it. One of the things we’ve found that’s interesting is, generally speaking, fans who use these overlays watch longer.”

Ease Live is able to put actual numbers to those trends. Within just months of their initial launch with YES Network in 2021, they tracked a 26 percent increase in time spent per unique streamer per game—a massive jump in this industry. The company claims a 50 percent average increase in viewer duration and a 56 percent overall engagement boost across all their sports overlays.

The types of things viewers will see on Tuesday night’s STEMcast from Boston are especially unique.

For one, as the NHL’s executive vice president of business development and innovation Dave Lehanski tells me, the layer of material added to the onscreen action can’t technically be called a “broadcast overlay.” NESN and the NHL aren’t applying graphics on top of an existing stream; they’re creating an entirely new animated version of events.

Key here is the NHL’s player- and puck-tracking system, NHL Edge. The program uses infrared emissions from the puck and player jerseys to map the game, aided this season by a dozen or more cameras from Hawk-Eye Innovations that provide a computer vision component. By aggregating those two feeds, league partner Beyond Sports creates an entire virtual 3D world using the x-, y-, and z-coordinates of the puck and each player on the ice.

“As these data points become live, they plop it on this arena,” Lehanski says. “We basically build this animated experience that operates in near-real time.”

“For this audience, younger people and families, our goal was to build a cartoon version of a hockey game. And that’s exactly what we’ve done.”

The team has animated not just a hockey rink but an entire snowscape of sorts to mimic the iconic Boston Commons area, complete with Boston landmarks and other locally-inspired Easter eggs throughout. Blades, the Bruins’ mascot, is animated into the program and will be part of various cutaways that highlight STEM themes.

Throughout the game and between stoppages, the broadcast will use Edge data to drum up stats that can spark basic STEM lessons. Did a given Bruin skate a mile in a single period, for instance? The broadcast might highlight that, then quiz young viewers on how that distance compares to the Boston Marathon. Breaks will feature Bruins players describing math and science concepts, such as how Newton’s three laws of motion apply to hockey.

The format was inspired by a different NHL team’s stat-based altcast, one that also used Edge data.

“When we saw that, I immediately thought, ‘Wow, it would be so cool to have something similar,’” says Andrea Mazzarelli, vice president of marketing for the Bruins. “Why not take this ‘statcast’ concept and flip it on its head and make it more of a STEMcast that’s broadly consumable for a younger audience?”

The Bruins hope this STEMcast will continue providing value long after Tuesday night’s game. Mazzarelli says the team envisions clips of the broadcast circulating around Boston classrooms, helping power STEM education by livening the experience for students. “I think the sky’s the limit with some of this stuff,” Mazzarelli says.

She’s right in more ways than one. The future of this technology is tantalizing, bringing control over many of these features into the hands of individual viewers—and in certain corners of the sports world, that future is already here.

Auto racing fans are among those already tasting some of the juiciest fruits of the digitalized sports tree.

NASCAR recently released a “Driver Cam” streaming product exclusive to Max, where viewers can pick between nearly any driver in a race and lock in on their in-car camera (or a four-driver preset multiview option). When a viewer chooses a specific driver, they also hear audio from the team radio and ambient car noise. I tried it out recently; even though I’m not even remotely a NASCAR fan, it was a remarkable experience. Basic stats like speed, engine rpm, the driver’s distance from the leader, and a race leaderboard on the side of the screen top off a truly immersive experience. Formula 1 has similar features in its F1 TV app.

That kind of extreme personalization could soon be everywhere in the sports viewing landscape.

Want a dedicated feed of your favorite player for an entire game broadcast? Iso cams are gaining popularity and could soon become their own miniature altcast offering. Going even further, Lehanski tells me the NHL is testing 8K cameras that allow broadcasters to crop, zoom, and augment the video feed without the results being grainy; before long, even if a dedicated broadcast camera isn’t following your desired player around all game, automated tools could allow you to select that player and stay with them anyway. You could watch that feed in your primary broadcast or in a secondary window within it.

Personalized replays are another likely application. Want a pop-up window to show a replay every time your football team’s quarterback completes a pass, or every time your basketball team pulls off an alley-oop? Companies like Ease Live can already do that.

“It’s every thinkable combination of those [events],” Horneland says. “Show me all the shots from [Steph] Curry, or show me a sequence of all the dunks from the last month.”

The “watch party” element can benefit from these tools, too. Imagine if, as the host of a watch party for your friend group’s mutual favorite team, you could pause the broadcast and draw on the screen like a color commentator—all without worrying about sync or timing problems (Ease Live and similar companies pour major resources into syncing content to avoid the risk of spoilers). What if you could decide which stats or displays fellow viewers experience? It’s all possible.

Virtual reality will eventually be part of this conversation. But for now, most people I spoke with think VR products are still a bit too clunky and niche to be a major target. That could likely change quickly.

Widespread adoption of personalized digital sports products won’t be without challenges, like managing bandwidth usage and latency reduction. Tech-forward broadcasters like NESN have strong infrastructures in place to manage those, and others that don’t may have to consider upgrading their setups. Lehanski says the STEMcast will operate with under a second of latency from the actual hockey game.

Business elements like rights and permissions could also be roadblocks, but Lehanski thinks the benefits of personalization will win out.

“We’re creating more meaningful and relevant content,” he says. “The distributors, the platform owners, should be happy about that.”

The kinds of engagement increases that various leagues and broadcasters have seen from this kind of technology bolsters Lehanski’s point. Advertising revenue shouldn’t be tough to generate; these same digital features make ads easy to deliver to any streamed broadcast.

Use of player data within streams might be a thornier long-term issue, especially if that data isn’t otherwise available to the public. Player unions are notoriously protective of such info, particularly the sort that could find its way into contract negotiations and directly affect a player’s income. Certain leagues or broadcasters might have to do some collective bargaining.

None of these hurdles feel remotely insurmountable. Much of the heavy technical legwork has already been done.

And it won’t be long before this tech leaks out from live sports broadcasts into other sectors of the entertainment business.

“I think sports is leading on this,” Lehanski says. “There’s so much that can be applied to live TV production, concerts, and other events … If you can figure it out for a live NHL game, you can apply it almost anywhere else.”