One of my favorite parts of watching golf on TV is when the Protracer is brought out. You know that special camera that tracks the ball’s flight path? Something about it is just so exciting, and beautiful.

It really gives you an idea for what these guys can do with the ball, as well as what it actually looks like. Out of curiosity, I tried to learn more about it so I gave Protracer’s founder Daniel Forsgren a call.

Forsgren came up with the idea when he started playing golf in the late 1990s. As he got progressively more and more into the sport, he decided that he was particularly disappointed with the way golf was shown on TV.

“The idea just came to me from watching golf on TV,” he said. “It didn’t tell me enough. I wanted to know how the ball is performing in the air and what the players are actually doing. The announcers seemed to know what was happening but I certainly didn’t. I started to think of ways to improve the broadcast for ways to make it easier for people see what is happening and get a feeling for the ball flight. I felt like it was just someone whacking a ball and then you see a picture of the ball against the clouds and it doesn’t tell you anything.”

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Forsgren quit his job in IT in 2003 and started building a prototype. In layman terms, his system uses a specialized camera that has a custom-built sensor. It is connected to a computer and looks for a white ball and identifies it through each frame of the shot. He says it differs from a radar system that would send out beams looking for a golf ball and get results from reflecting off it.

“A radar is an active system where you transmit something and look at what it returns,” he said. “Our system is like a passive system. It’s not transmitting anything, it’s just watching whatever it can see in the ambient light conditions.”

It took him several years to put the final product in place, and he credits his background in computer gaming to helping him put the pieces together. He started showing it around and it caught the eye of professional Swedish golfer Ove Sellberg, who made an investment and helped him introduce it to the European Tour. There was a good deal of interest, and in 2006 it was ready to be officially demoed. From there he raised more money to start his company, and he hasn’t looked back since.

Today, Forsgren, who boasts a handicap of 8, goes to about 15 to 20 tournaments per year. Usually he hires freelancers to work the system, and these people tend to be those with backgrounds in television broadcasting. He says that his product has never been in more demand, and he was proud to recently be voted by Golfweek.com as the “coolest golf technology” on TV. He does not have many competitors, apart from a few companies that offer a product that is similar, but more designed for golf shops and instructors than broadcasting.

His clients, which are channels like NBC and ESPN, typically pay him per event. Sometimes the channels will use the equipment themselves, or hire Protracer to find the staff to operate it. Rates per event vary and are on a weekly basis, although he gives discounts for extended use.

His hope is to expand the technology into other sports, and he says he sees a lot of possibilities for its use in baseball. He is also working on a product that will make the tracer more available to individual users, but it is still a way off as prices remain high. However, he says costs are gradually coming down and eventually he’d like to get something released.