The NHL will expand the use of Sony’s skeletal tracking Hawk-Eye technology under a multi-year tie-up that could impact how hockey games are officiated and the way they are viewed at home.
The deal makes Sony an official NHL technology partner, with connections ranging from the use of Sony cameras to the company’s Beyond Sports team helping the league recreate hockey games as animated visualizations in real time.
“When you look at the total partnership, the way we set it up, obviously it runs across Sony,” said David Lehanski, NHL executive vice president of business development and innovation. “So it canvases across their whole company in a way that’s going to affect everyone in our community.”
The NHL has used Sony technology for replay reviews specifically since 2015.
“The NHL were the first within the U.S. to do video review, and now that is used almost universally across global sports,” Hawk-Eye, Pulselive and Beyond Sports CEO Rufus Hack said. “We now have 1,500 people who work for our business globally, and actually having them delivering at a world-class level—and understanding what the pressure is of delivering some of these solutions in the heat of battle—is actually almost one of the most important things that we’ve learned from the NHL and early adopters in cricket and tennis that we’ve been able to port into other sports.”
The NFL will use Hawk-Eye for evaluating line-to-gain decisions starting this season, while European soccer leagues have leveraged similar tools for automated offsides and goal reviews. All 32 NHL arenas now have 60-frames-per-second optical tracking setups that follow 29 points on each player and three points on each stick.
Lehanski said the league is evaluating the potential use of tracking data to quickly weigh in on offsides infractions and goals, though the speed and physicality of hockey present unique challenges.
The same tracking data that would be used to assist those calls is already being deployed by teams as a player evaluation tool. Increasingly, it’s changing the way fans watch sports, too.
Early player tracking data has been used for kid-friendly animated broadcasts. With the added precision of limb and stick data, analysts such as P.K. Subban now don VR headsets to put themselves on virtual ice, with 360-degree views of the action.
Going forward, the NHL would like to give fans a similar opportunity. Digital recreations could live within web-based or video game environments that allow consumers to manipulate the perspective and even attempt to recreate on-ice feats. To do so, the league could tap additional Sony arms, such as its PlayStation platform, which includes VR functionality. Beyond Sports has already helped the NHL deliver feeds in Roblox, drawing more than one million unique visitors in the first month of that activation back in 2023.
“We think at Sony, we’ve got a really unique mix of capabilities,” Hack said. “We want to bring in the best of PlayStation, the best of Sony Music, Sony Pictures… so we can really help take the sports industry to a new level.”
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