Tony Verna
The Inventor of Instant Replay
Peter Drucker once remarketed that “Entrepreneurs, by definition, shift resources from areas of low productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield”.
If so, Tony Verna is an entrepreneur.
In the early 1960s, watching professional sports on TV meant patiently sitting through the gap between plays not filled by a commercial. There was replay capability at the time, but the available technology meant that “preparing these replays required considerable time and effort…with up to ten seconds of video static before each clip, replays were imprecise and hardly instant, airing only during halftime or after the game.
Verna, a young director at CBS Sports in 1963, was convinced that “the long, actionless stretches between football plays could be filled with clips of moments that had just transpired from different camera angles, keeping viewers entertained and engaged with the game.”
Can you imagine watching sports without instant replay? On December 7, 1963, Tony Verna’s simple but ingenious innovation to make replays “instant “ revolutionized the how we watch sports.
