Hawk-Eye Innovations is a British company, now owned by Sony, that builds optical tracking, video replay, and broadcast graphics for live sport. Its technology grew out of work by Dr. Paul Hawkins and engineers at Roke Manor Research and was first used in cricket broadcasts in 2001. Over two decades it became the dominant supplier of ball-tracking and officiating systems across professional sport.
The company groups its products into three families: video replay for capturing and reviewing footage, optical tracking and camera calibration for following balls, objects, and players, and a data layer called INSIGHT for storing and visualizing the results. By its own figures it works across roughly 25 sports - cricket since 2001, tennis since the mid-2000s, basketball since 2016, plus football, baseball, and others - and has delivered over 100,000 days of events in more than 100 countries.
Hawk-Eye sits at the center of many AI-in-sport stories in this library: it powers tennis electronic line calling, MLB’s Statcast pose tracking and automated ball-strike zone, and football goal-line and semi-automated offside systems. Its trajectory shows how a single trusted vision technology can become shared infrastructure across an entire industry.