CNN “Hologram” Tech Co. Gets Acquired for Sports Stats

Don’t call it a hologram! At least not with our commenters in attendance. Israeli startup SportVU, which makes “automated ID and motion capture technology” and was behind CNN’s sorta cool, mostly weird “beaming in” of its correspondents during Election Night coverage last month, was purchased by STATS, the companies announced today.

The deal was worth “dozens of millions of dollars,” according to Calcalist, the Israeli publication that broke the story.

Northbrook, Ill.-based STATS, which is owned by the Associated Press and News Corp., produces sports information and analysis. SportVU’s technology tracks positioning of the ball and participants within a playing field, which STATS says opens up the opportunity to track new kinds of stats, like “speed profiles, accumulated distances, fatigue, fitness graphs and coverage maps, all in real time.”

There’s no bona fide hologram in the toolkit — which would require generating a 3D representation of an object in the studio, not just stitched into the video feed (which is what CNN did) — but it’s still some pretty cool tech.

According to the Calcalist, SportVU has nine employees and had been developing its technology, which was released in January of this year, since 2005.