Tennis Technology Stack: Electronic Line Calling, Umpire Tablets and ATP-Style Broadcast

Electronic Line Calling has gone mainstream

ATP Tour adopted Electronic Line Calling Live (ELC Live) across all ATP events from 2025, fully removing human line judges in favour of camera-based ball tracking. The two dominant providers are Hawk-Eye Innovations (a Sony company) and Foxtenn. Both use 10–14 high-frame-rate cameras per court plus computer vision to determine whether the ball is in or out, with calls played out through court speakers in under one second.

Umpire tablets and scoring

The umpire scores on a chair tablet that is the source of truth for point, game, set and match. From there, the score is published to the on-court scoreboard, the centralised tournament management system (typically Protennislive / IBM tournament systems for the Grand Slams, or TournamentSoftware / Cuore for ITF/ATP Challenger events), and the public results portal.

What a tier-2 or national tennis event actually needs

• Tournament management software (TournamentSoftware or Cuore) for draws and live publishing
• Umpire chair tablet with scoring app per court
• Court-side LED scoreboard (often Daktronics or local supplier) driven from the scoring system
• Optional ELC system (Hawk-Eye / Foxtenn) for show courts
• Broadcast graphics engine (vMix or Singular.live) driving lower-thirds, score bug, serve speed cards, statistics
• Public results website with live scoreboard widget and notifications for match calls, set scores and final

Broadcast graphics for tennis

Standard tennis graphics include a corner score bug (set scores, current game, server indicator), serve speed callout, ace / winner / unforced error stings, set summary cards, head-to-head intros, Hawk-Eye 3D ball-track animation for challenges, and end-of-match stats. Lower-thirds run player bios and live ranking implication.

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.