Talk at the 17th Hamburg Congress on sports, economics and media at the 5th of September 2017
Abstract: Video drones not only offer new perspectives but also an extension of the ways in which stories can be told in sports and event communication can be operated. On the one hand perceptual psychological mechanisms, which are already well-known from the production of films (such as, for example, the power and overview suggestive from the top to bottom view), have an effect. On the other hand, the view from the top of a sports event also provides new information that can not be generated otherwise and whose use significantly changes the staging of sports, sports reporting and sports training.
On selected examples from different sports we show that the exploitation of surplus values in the sense mentioned above does not only depend on the increased camera position. Rather it is crucial to capture and understand the domain-specific peculiarities of a sport in order to profitably exploit the freedom degrees of a drone deployment, taking into account the respective profile of requirements and the intended communication target. It is a question of whether a sporting event should unfold below a drone hovering on a fixed position or the drone should follow an athlete or an overall situation. It depends on the extent and distance of the drone deployment, whether and in which angle a movement path is crossed or an event is encircled, etc.
An up-to-date education in media management as well as in sports journalism must not only enable students to tap and understand the profile of requirements in sports and their concretization in the competition but also to take into account the possibilities of communication extended with the use of video drones as well as for spectators, for a live audience and for media-mediated communication. In doing so, aesthetic, journalistic and economic aspects must be taken into account as well as data- and security-legal concerns and psychological effects.