I tweeted this earlier today but now have decided to post it too.

from SportsBusiness Journal,

Fox Sports President David Hill loved hockey the moment he saw it at the 1988 Calgary Olympics. “It’s fighting on ice,” he said recently. “I love it.”

The NHL, though, was not a big television draw, and Hill believed he knew why — in standard definition, it was impossible to see the puck on TV.

As Fox agreed to a heavily hyped five-year deal for NHL rights in 1994 that cost an average of about $31 million a year, he had an idea. “The only way to make this work would be to make the puck glow,” he said.

That led to FoxTrax, a technology that essentially put a “big blue fuzz ball over the puck, with a red rocket trail that had sparkles on it,” said the glowing puck’s inventor, Stan Honey.

The hype around the puck was breathless. Fox Sports billed it as “the greatest technological breakthrough in the history of sports” before its 1996 launch. It was a description that made Honey uneasy. “I mean, what about the wheel?” he asked.

continued with comments from NHL types. Fox execs., etc. along the way...