A digitally enhanced dasherboard (DED) is a

virtual advertising Virtual advertising is the use of digital technology to insert virtual advertising content into a live or pre-recorded television show, often in sports events. This technique is often used to allow broadcasters to overlay existing physical adver ...

product offered by the

National Hockey League The National Hockey League (NHL; , ''LNH'') is a professional ice hockey league in North America composed of 32 teams25 in the United States and 7 in Canada. The NHL is one of the major professional sports leagues in the United States and Cana ...

(NHL) for television broadcasts of

ice hockey Ice hockey (or simply hockey in North America) is a team sport played on ice skates, usually on an Ice rink, ice skating rink with Ice hockey rink, lines and markings specific to the sport. It belongs to a family of sports called hockey. Tw ...

games. DEDs erase and replace the local ads painted on dasher boards that surround hockey rinks with a sequence of static and animated advertisements on each television broadcaster.

History

The first NHL team to sell advertising on its dasher boards was the

Minnesota North Stars The Minnesota North Stars were a professional ice hockey team in the National Hockey League (NHL) for 26 seasons, from 1967 to 1993. The North Stars played their home games at the Met Center in Bloomington, Minnesota, and the team's colors for ...

in 1981. Since then, all teams have sold ads to a mixture of national sponsors and local advertisers. The NHL promotes the DED program as a way for a team's sponsors to continue to advertise on television broadcasts of away games. The NHL had previously introduced virtual advertising over the goal in 2011; Sportvision created the technology that superimposes an ad on the glass at each end of the rink. During the

2016 World Cup of Hockey The 2016 World Cup of Hockey (abbreviated WCH2016) was an international ice hockey tournament. It was the third installment of the National Hockey League (NHL)-sanctioned competition, 12 years after the second World Cup of Hockey in 2004. It was ...

, which is organized by the NHL, the league worked with Supponor, a British firm, to allow each broadcaster to substitute their own advertisements on the dasher boards. At the 2020 All-Star Game, the NHL produced nine localized feeds, each with its own advertising, using DED. Beginning with the 2022–23 season, the NHL expanded its use of Supponor's technology to all teams' rinks, allowing DED to be used on all game broadcasts. Each game has 120 ad increments of 30 seconds, across five zones, on feeds for the home team, the away team, and a feed for international use; the NHL also has a "clean" feed, with no digital modification to the boards.

Gary Bettman Gary Bruce Bettman (born June 2, 1952) is an American sports executive who serves as the NHL commissioner, commissioner of the National Hockey League (NHL), a post he has held since February 1, 1993. Previously, Bettman was a senior vice preside ...

, the NHL's commissioner, predicted that the DED would increase revenue for the league and its member clubs. According to SponsorUnited, which tracks sports sponsorship data, the DED contributed to a 21% increase in sponsorship revenue year-over-year during the 2022–23 season. Seven hundred brands participated in the virtual advertising program.

Awards

The DED program was nominated for the George Wensel Technical Achievement Award at the 2023

Sports Emmy Awards The Sports Emmy Awards, or Sports Emmys, are part of the extensive range of Emmy Awards for artistic and technical merit for the American television industry. Bestowed by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS), the Sports E ...

. ''

Sports Business Journal This is a list of subsidiaries of the American media company Advance Publications Inc. Local media groups The following subsidiaries are owned through Advance Local Advance Media New York *'' The Post-Standard'' (Syracuse, New York) **Syracuse. ...

'' gave the NHL its Sports Breakthrough of the Year award in 2023 for digitally enhanced dasherboards.

Criticism

Early in the 2022–23 season, many fans and journalists were dissatisfied with the digitally enhanced dasherboards, finding the

match moving In visual effects, match moving is a technique that allows the insertion of 2D elements, other live action elements or CG computer graphics into live-action footage with correct position, scale, orientation, and motion relative to the photograph ...

technology to be

glitch A glitch is a short-lived technical fault, such as a transient one that corrects itself, making it difficult to troubleshoot. The term is particularly common in the computing and electronics industries, in circuit bending, as well as among pl ...

y and distracting.

Greg Wyshynski Greg Wyshynski (born March 20, 1977) is an American sportswriter and radio personality, best known for creating Yahoo! Sports’ ice hockey blog ''Puck Daddy''. He has written two books, ''Glow Pucks and 10-Cent Beer'' and ''Take Your Eye Off th ...

observed that the physical dasherboard ads were still visible in reflections on the ice. The DED frequently "ate" pucks that got close to the boards, and the ad substitution created a video delay, causing announcers to seem to react to events that television viewers had not yet seen. In response to criticism, the NHL adjusted the brightness of the DED ads. Keith Wachtel, the NHL's chief business officer and executive vice president of global partnerships, told ESPN that many fans appreciated the cleaner look of the DED when watching hockey telecasts.

References

National Hockey League on television Sports television technology Television advertising {{improve categories, date=November 2023