Badminton Technology: BWF Umpire Devices, Referee Tablets, Hawk-Eye and Broadcast

Umpires, referees and tournament software

Badminton World Federation (BWF) sanctioned events are managed through the Tournament Planner / TournamentSoftware ecosystem from Visual Reality, which handles entries, draws, seeding, court allocation and live publishing. On court, the umpire records every rally on a tablet running an umpire scoring app linked to TournamentSoftware, so the on-court scoreboard, the broadcast graphic and the public results page all stay in sync.

Instant Review (Hawk-Eye)

BWF World Tour events use Hawk-Eye Innovations' Instant Review System: 10+ high-speed cameras around the court reconstruct the shuttle's trajectory and produce a millimetre-accurate ball-track for line-call challenges. The same data feeds 'shot of the day' style stats overlays for broadcast. For lower tiers, simpler 2-camera review systems exist, but Hawk-Eye remains the gold standard.

On-court and venue setup

• Umpire chair tablet with scoring app (BWF tournaments are scored on the umpire device; old flip scoreboards are deprecated)
• Court-side LED scoreboard showing game score, match score, server indicator and challenge count
• Centralised tournament control room with TournamentSoftware server and broadcast graphics engine
• Hawk-Eye / Instant Review system for premier-tier events
• Public results website (TournamentSoftware live publishing) and notifications for draw release, match calls and final scores

Broadcast graphics for badminton

BWF-style coverage uses a permanent score bug (current game score, set score, server indicator), lower-thirds with seeding and head-to-head, Hawk-Eye challenge animation, rally-length stat cards, and end-of-match summary. Most tier-1 productions use Hawk-Eye's own graphics package; tier-2/3 productions typically run vMix with a custom BWF template pack.

Broadcast graphics typically include lower-thirds for athlete names and bios, an on-screen scoreboard or 'bug' fed live from the scoring system, dynamic start lists, results pages, head-to-head comparisons, sponsor bumpers, replay wipes, and end-of-session summary cards. Output is usually delivered over SDI from a graphics engine (vMix, Singular.live, CasparCG, or a federation-supplied template pack) into the ATEM or production switcher.