Defense Department Wants To Make Use Of Sports Replay Technology

In the immediate fallout of the Jim Joyce perfect game fiasco from Tuesday, a great many observers claimed that Major League Baseball would be better off adopting the type of replay system that the NFL uses. Defenders of the “human element” of baseball scoff at this kind of knee-jerk reasoning, but they’d be hard-pressed to find fault with the technology that the NFL (and MLB, to a lesser extent) uses, given that the military has teamed up with Harris Corporation, the company behind the replay system, to better analyze video feeds from war zones.↵

↵↵⇥The system, called Full-Motion Video Asset Management Engine (FAME) uses metadata tags to encode important details — time, date, camera location — into each video frame. In a football game, those tags would help broadcasters pick the best clip to re-air and explain a play. In a war-zone, they’d help analysts watch video in a richer, easier-to-grasp context. And additional tags could link a video clip to photographs, cellphone calls, databases or documents.↵↵↵As this post on Wired notes, there are other examples of technology initially developed for commercial use to be subsumed into military purposes. TiVo was once cited in a 2007 report from the Pentagon Defense Science Board as a possible springboard to creating a better surveillance system. The army has made use of Xboxs as training devices. ↵

↵↵So the next time there’s a gripe about the shortcomings of instant replay, at least know that it’s not because the leagues aren’t utilizing technology to its fullest extent.↵

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