Watch games even when being there in person isn’t possible

Schools in Anne Arundel County starting livestream

Your boss gave you a late assignment. You’re stuck on I-97 in the thickest Friday traffic. You’re in bed, sick. You don’t live in Maryland.

There are a lot of reasons you might miss your kid’s or grandkid’s game. As of this fall, that’s going to change as long as you have a computer or phone near you.

Anne Arundel County Public Schools announced Wednesday that it has partnered with the National Federation of High Schools Network to livestream every high school game through state-of-the-art, motion-detection cameras, beginning Friday.

The cameras are manufactured by automated sports production systems company Pixellot and already used in 47 state athletic associations.

Though other schools in the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association have adopted this particular technology in a handful of its schools, Anne Arundel is the first county in Maryland to broadcast all of its sporting events in every school’s field and gymnasium.

Games will be streamed through the NFHS at nfhsnetwork.com. Links can be found through each school’s individual athletics page.

The initiative suits Anne Arundel well because of the transience of its population, coordinator of athletics Clayton Culp said.

One school’s community that might benefit most is Meade High, where about 40% of the student population are children of service members. The school, which is located at Fort George G. Meade, offers student-athletes a high school stabilization program designed to help upperclassmen finish out their junior and senior seasons when their parent or parents are transferred to another base or deployed.

“Big part of this for us is getting those folks that can’t come to our games a chance

to watch, whether it’s a military family and it’s their son and daughter or grandma in Iowa or whatever the case may be,” Culp said. “We’re really trying to promote it that way and that’s how we feel about it: trying to give people a chance to support their family members if they’re not local to the area.”

The Pixellot cameras sit in a stack atop a cylindrical tube and are a automated operation that can capture a 180-degree view of a field or floor. It’s a relatively small and unassuming configuration that usually hangs off the wall at the 50-yard line or half-court.

Unlike one camera perched at the top of the bleachers to display the width of a field in a stock shot, the Pixellot cameras use artificial intelligence to zoom in and track the most important action of the moment, according to company adviser Marc Ruskin at the 2018 National Association of Broadcasters convention.

The stack of cameras use various computer algorithms to know where the ball and ball-handler are. As the player, for example, dribbles from the right side of the court to the left, the top camera transitions to the middle camera to the bottom camera to provide seamless footage of the movement.

This was a yearlong undertaking by the county, both installing the cameras and hard-wiring each school to ensure the shortest yet strongest signal, one that could withstand all kinds of weather and seasons.

The county paid $126,250 for 25 cameras, as well as technical expertise and installation, schools spokesman Bob Mosier said.

“The largest part of it is getting the signal to the stadium, making sure we’ve got a wireless signal in almost all cases from the closest point on a school building over to the stadium,” Mosier said. “Our folks have been working on that for about a year.”

Aportion of the subscription fee to the NFHS Network flows directly back to the county athletics department making the new livestreaming program an effective new channel for fundraising.

An annual pass to the NFHS Network is on sale and is currently $69.99. A monthly pass costs $9.99 a month.