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Inside Larry Ellison’s Insane Plan to Turn America’s Cup Into a TV Spectacle

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Re: Inside Larry Ellison’s Insane Plan to Turn America’s Cup Into a TV Spectacle

#11

Post by nirvana »

This is great news, as sailing is a wonderful sport, and the TV coverage of it in the past has often been hard to find, quite inconsistent and very poorly done.

I don't know why WIRED is increasingly becoming such a snotty, hostile and tabloid publication. I guess it's cool to hate on Ellison for putting money into a wonderful sport.

While we can't afford these huge multi-million dollar boats, we can have much of the same excitement in our own lives racing $20,000-$30,000 boats. And you don't even need a boat-- since crews tend to be 5-7 people owners are often looking for crew!

Good coverage of the Americas Cup will hopefully help bring more people into the sport of racing.

Re: Inside Larry Ellison’s Insane Plan to Turn America’s Cup Into a TV Spectacle

#13

Post by jfb »

nirvana wrote: post #11

This is great news, as sailing is a wonderful sport, and the TV coverage of it in the past has often been hard to find, quite inconsistent and very poorly done. I don't know why WIRED is increasingly becoming such a snotty, hostile and tabloid publication. I guess it's cool to hate on Ellison for putting money into a wonderful sport. While we can't afford these huge multi-million dollar boats, we can have much of the…

"I guess it's cool to hate on Ellison for putting money into a wonderful sport."

There're a lot of better reasons to get your hate on towards Larry Ellison, in my mind.

Re: Inside Larry Ellison’s Insane Plan to Turn America’s Cup Into a TV Spectacle

#14

Post by carmen »

vidarh wrote: post #9
tedunangst wrote: post #3

It takes an active imagination to see sailing as a spectator sport Don't let that stop you from writing 5000 words about it. This reeks of "pick someone to hate, find a reason to hate them, write it up".

That's not the tone I get from the article at all. It starts that way to play up the difficulty of what he's trying to achieve and set it up so that the people it covers later seems even more gutsy and/or amazing for trying and/or achieving the goal. In this case, the hero and focus of the article is not Ellison, but Stan Honey, the guy behind the new software system, and Ellison is just the force of nature that set…

NBC aired a race from Newport a month ago, and a similar round of articles circulated. does anybody remember all the 3D racecourses and SGI logos everywhere in 1992 america's cup? or all the wild Quokka webcoverage of the 95-98 stuff?

Re: Inside Larry Ellison’s Insane Plan to Turn America’s Cup Into a TV Spectacle

#15

Post by aaronbrethorst » 

    Part of the problem with hockey on TV is that flying pucks
    move so quickly they are almost invisible to the at-home
    viewer. Honey proposed digitally inserting a blue glow
    around the puck that would lengthen into a contrail whenever
    it was moving faster than the eye could see.
Funny, the first place I ever read about this was in Wired in the mid-90s. I think they called it "pucktrax." There's virtually no mention of it online anymore, except for a handful of snarky forum posts deriding Fox's use of a "gaudy blue flame."

see: http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/archive/t-606021-p-37.html, among other places.

Re: Inside Larry Ellison’s Insane Plan to Turn America’s Cup Into a TV Spectacle

#16

Post by nikcub »

> The software for the NFL’s virtual yellow first-down line has been rewritten so that it can paint course boundaries on the surface of the water.

Sounds like bad software design. Should have written one generic program that can paint lines and expose an interface to it

Re: Inside Larry Ellison’s Insane Plan to Turn America’s Cup Into a TV Spectacle

#17

Post by bofussing »

nirvana wrote: post #11

This is great news, as sailing is a wonderful sport, and the TV coverage of it in the past has often been hard to find, quite inconsistent and very poorly done. I don't know why WIRED is increasingly becoming such a snotty, hostile and tabloid publication. I guess it's cool to hate on Ellison for putting money into a wonderful sport. While we can't afford these huge multi-million dollar boats, we can have much of the…

I am sure the legions of budding professional sailors hope that the America's Cup series will be a commercial success too. The line-up of sailors in the current series is literally a who's who of elite sailors, if they cannot do well out of this series the prospects are not bright for those further down the food chain.

Re: Inside Larry Ellison’s Insane Plan to Turn America’s Cup Into a TV Spectacle

#18

Post by Someone »

lancewiggs wrote: post #4

The sailing in the Olympics used much of the technology mentioned, including painting virtual lines on the water. The article feels overwrought, but the racing will be amazing. The new big Team NZ yacht is just near me here in Auckland, and feels like a tethered wild beast ready to be unleashed. Watch out for the rise of fixed wing sails, possibly transforming the yachting industry.

I think the racing in the Olympics also showed the limitations of this technology. Many times, the boats are what, on television, looks like miles apart, as some of them think they will get better winds by tacking now, and others think it is better to wait a few minutes before doing so. Between such groups 'meters to the finish line' is a bad approximation to 'seconds to the finish line'. Even with this technology, the sailors commenting on races often could not tell who was ahead.

You can diminish that by placing more buoys to round (effectively making the course smaller), but I am not sure it still is sailing, then.

Re: Inside Larry Ellison’s Insane Plan to Turn America’s Cup Into a TV Spectacle

#19

Post by Gibbon »

cobrien wrote: post #10
Gibbon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also in Auckland. We went down to the wharf to see it the day it was launched. Staggering size... It's a catamaran with a 13m (42.7 ft.) tall solid wing and is expected to be able to hit 50 knots (90+ km/h). They have to anchor it to a tonne and a half of ballast just to keep it from taking off on it's own.

Hey Gibbon -- I'm not sure what catamaran you were looking at, but the America's Cup boats are actually even LARGER than that ... The AC45 (the boat being used in current cup events while the larger AC72's are being designed and built) uses a 21.5m (71ft) wing ... and the boats that will be used in the actual Cup (the AC72) are even larger beasts -- a wing 40m (131ft) tall [1]. The design of and technology going into…

Yeah I got the numbers from a local newspaper article.

It was definitely the AC72 that we went to see.. it was launched in July and completely towered over all the over yachts and surrounding buildings.

The numbers, I guess, are from the AC45 that was launched months ago. Looks like the numbers weren't accurate, but that's the NZ Herald for you.

Re: Inside Larry Ellison’s Insane Plan to Turn America’s Cup Into a TV Spectacle

#20

Post by [deleted] »

cobrien wrote: post #10
Gibbon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also in Auckland. We went down to the wharf to see it the day it was launched. Staggering size... It's a catamaran with a 13m (42.7 ft.) tall solid wing and is expected to be able to hit 50 knots (90+ km/h). They have to anchor it to a tonne and a half of ballast just to keep it from taking off on it's own.

Hey Gibbon -- I'm not sure what catamaran you were looking at, but the America's Cup boats are actually even LARGER than that ... The AC45 (the boat being used in current cup events while the larger AC72's are being designed and built) uses a 21.5m (71ft) wing ... and the boats that will be used in the actual Cup (the AC72) are even larger beasts -- a wing 40m (131ft) tall [1]. The design of and technology going into…

[deleted]
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