The Innovation That Grew and Grew
`
`By Richard Sandomir
`June 12, 2014
`
`Could anything be simpler than a box in a corner of a TV screen continuously showing the score
`of a game and the time remaining?
`
`Until mid-June 1994, though, the score box did not exist in the United States. Viewers had to rely
`on announcers mentioning the relevant information or wait to see a line score flash on the screen.
`
`The World Cup, which took place in the United States that year, changed that. But ABC and
`ESPN’s primary goal was not to gratify fans. Instead, they were out to solve a dilemma: satisfying
`five sponsors that wanted their advertising messages to be heard during the games but were
`hampered by the fact that soccer has a running clock and no breaks — except for halftime — in
`which to run commercials.
`
`So ESPN and ABC crafted a constant element on the screen that was also a running ad: the box in
`the upper left-hand corner, featuring a sponsor on top with the time and score below.
`
`“It was a way to satisfy the sponsors’ needs to have some measure of acknowledgment that they
`were attached to the Cup,” Jed Drake, a longtime ESPN executive who was then a senior
`coordinating producer, said last week from Rio de Janeiro. “It was a sales necessity, but we realized
`it had great production value.”
`
`The sponsors — including Snickers, Canon and Coca-Cola — got about 18 minutes of exposure
`apiece during each game, with their logos alternating throughout the contests in larger type than
`the score and the time.
`
`The technology did not work perfectly early on. During the games in the first two days, at Soldier
`Field in Chicago and Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., glitches knocked out the box for
`substantial periods of time.
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`“We had two machines in the truck at Soldier Field and two back in Bristol as backup,” Drake
`said, referring to ESPN’s Connecticut headquarters, “and they started shutting down. The
`salespeople were not pleased. The next game, I assumed everything would work, but we had no
`machines working in the first half, and I was losing my mind.”
`
`Drake was so angry that he punched the side of the production truck and broke a hand.
`
`A rewriting of the software code fixed the problem, Drake said, and the score box recovered —
`and thrived.
`
`ESPN and ABC, although pioneers in the United States, were not the first to come up with the
`idea. The score box was devised about two years earlier, in England, by David Hill, who was
`running Sky Sports and was soon after named president of Fox Sports. His inspiration came as he
`watched, with growing frustration, a soccer match on the BBC.
`
`“I had been walking the dogs near the Wormwood Scrubs prison,” he said by telephone from Los
`Angeles. “I got home and sat down around 20 after 3 and wondered what the score was, and for
`20 minutes I was never told, and I got angry.
`
`“If I were on the football ground, I would have seen the score. So I said if we ever got soccer, I’d
`do it. And when we got the Premier League in August 1992, I did it, and my boss called and said:
`‘That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Take it down.’ Two other guys talked me out of it.”
`
`So, Hill said, when his boss called the next week to again order that the box be deleted, he ignored
`him.
`
`By August 1994, Hill was at Fox, and he introduced what was labeled the Fox box in a preseason
`N.F.L. game, with John Madden offering his Telestrator analysis of it. Hill recalled receiving five
`death threats and contacting the Los Angeles police and the F.B.I.
`
`One letter said something like, “You’re a foreigner, and you’re fooling with football,” said Hill,
`who was born in Australia. “We’ll have to kill you.”
`
`However, the anger abated quickly as the utility of Fox’s box — then transparent enough to see
`the field through it — became evident.
`
`ESPN next used the box for its Sunday night N.F.L. broadcasts. Fox deployed it for baseball in
`1995, and other networks developed their versions. They are now ubiquitous, in myriad sports on
`national networks and regional sports channels, and are more often dashboards stripped across the
`top or bottom of screens than boxes, containing all manner of statistics and ads that drop down or
`pop up out of them.
`
`Some make sounds when they appear on screen, and some flip to reveal promotions, as when
`NBCSN used N.H.L. playoff games to promote the Belmont Stakes.
`
`At ESPN, a small group of employees devotes much of its time to determining how to improve the
`look and impact of these information strips. Spike Szykowny, senior director of motion graphics
`at ESPN, said there had been debate for years about where to put dashboards (top or bottom?) and
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`boxes (which corner?), about adding sponsors to the graphics, about what information to add and
`about how much of the screen the box or dashboard should occupy.
`
`During an interview last month, Szykowny said, “We were working on our new college playoff
`graphic package the other day, and I said to somebody, ‘You’d think we were preparing to do
`major surgery.’ ”
`
`ESPN is using a relatively modest dashboard for the World Cup in Brazil, which began Thursday,
`with the names of the national teams flanking the score and a sponsor’s name sticking out of its
`right side. The design is dictated by FIFA, so the network cannot tinker too much, but the teams’
`jersey colors are there, and information like upcoming games drops down from the dashboard.
`
`Looking back, Drake said he was surprised that it took until the mid-1990s for the score box to
`appear and become an essential part of the viewing experience.
`
`“It’s one of those things that when you see it, you realize, O.K., it makes a lot of sense,” he said.
`“Why didn’t somebody think of it before?”
`
`Email: sandor@nytimes.com
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