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Tuesday, September 2, 2008

A look at FSN's new graphics

FSN's graphics are probably among the most worth watching in the country, because they are aped by so many teams' own operations. Click below for a look at FSN's new college football graphics:
Highlights: Colorado - Colorado St.
Highlights: Colorado - Colorado St.

It warrants comparison not only with FSN's old graphics...

...but the Big Ten Network's as well (sorry for it being last year's game):

They're sisters and there seems to be a definite BTN influence on these new graphics. (I haven't included Fox's current graphics, which this is clearly an attempt to take after as well.) Perhaps more interesting is that this is more box-like than any FSN score bug since the early part of this decade, rather surprising when you consider it was Fox and FSN that in many ways gave us the modern scoring banner in the first place, yet it doesn't switch sides depending on which way the ball is going. It's somewhat akin to ABC's last college football box before getting absorbed into the ESPN brand in that sense, as well as the sense that the teams are still placed horizontally from one another.

One notable feature of it is that it does not contain the name of the network. FSN's college football broadcasts are national operations that have to go out to the Comcast Sportsnet operations, as well as a couple of others such as MSG in New York. In the past CSN in particular overlaid a modified version of its own logo over the FSN logo. Now CSN can just plop its logo in the upper right corner of the screen and plausibly pass it off as entirely its own operation. For that reason, I would not be surprised if FSN did not port this graphics package to any local broadcast of baseball, basketball, or hockey, even though their old graphics package looks rather amateur (it's hard to think of a baseball version of this graphic anyway), unless Comcast Sportsnet were willing to come up with a similar graphic.

And while I don't have anything against sound in score graphics in principle, this new one has a weird mechanical sound when putting in the new down and distance that's a bit distracting.

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