Emmy Award Recognizes NBC Olympic Coverage using Orad's Technology
In October 2000, Orad was recognized with an Emmy Award by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for its virtual imaging and sports broadcasting enhancement tools. Orad's technologies were used by other leading international broadcasters such as Germany's ARD, Japan's NHK, Korea's KBS, France2, Australia's Channel 7 and China's CCTV in the broadcast of the 2000 Olympic Summer Games from Sydney, Australia.
"We knew that the action from the swimming venue was going to be terrific in Sydney and the viewing experience was significantly enhanced by both the lane identification and the world record line," said NBC Sports and Olympics Chairman Dick Ebersol. "The flags turned out to be one of the greatest advances in Olympic television ever."
Orad's virtual imaging technology was used during all of the Olympic swimming events, including Australian Ian Thorpe's world-record breaking win in the 400-meter freestyle event. During this event, Orad's technologies displayed the current world record, and were used to display the flags of each of the swimmers to designate the country swimmers were representing. The result allowed viewers to closely follow Thorpe as he set a new world record.
"The combination of NBC's superb use of the system with our technology was extremely successful. We feel like we are riding high at Orad," said Avi Sharir, President and CEO of Orad. "The enthusiastic acceptance of IMadGINE and CyberSport by the world-wide Olympic audience and the recognition we were awarded with the Emmy is a confirmation to us that we are providing a technology that will reshape the future of television sports broadcasting. We hope to further cooperate with NBC in the furture."
About Orad
Orad is a publicly-traded company, whose principal investors are ISL, the world's largest sports sponsorship organization, Intel Atlantic, a subsidiary of Intel Corp. and the ORMAT Group, a publicly traded conglomerate of companies engaged in high-tech investments, optical inspection, alternative energy and sophisticated medical diagnostics.
Founded in 1993, Orad is a world leader in TV production technology and sports broadcasting tools. Orad has received extensive worldwide recognition for its systems at a wide-range of events including the 2000 Emmy Award for the ‘Implementation of Real Time Virtual Imaging for Live Events on Television'.
Orad Inc., Graybar Building, 420 Lexington Ave., Suite 2014, New York, NY 10170. Tel: 212-931-6723; Fax: 212-931-6730.