Telestration is the practice of drawing freehand over live or replayed video so viewers can see exactly what a presenter is talking about. An analyst circles a player, traces a storm's path, or highlights a county on an election map, and the marks appear on screen in real time. The device or software used to do it is called a telestrator.
Telestration is the practice of drawing freehand over live or replayed video so viewers can see exactly what a presenter is talking about. An analyst circles a player, traces a storm's path, or highlights a county on an election map, and the marks appear on screen in real time. The device or software used to do it is called a telestrator.
Physicist Leonard Reiffel invented the telestrator in the late 1950s and first used it on science programs for Chicago public station WTTW. Chicago's WBBM-TV then adopted it for sports and weather segments. NFL analyst John Madden made it famous, using it for years to diagram plays during broadcasts.
Early telestrators used a light pen or stylus on a separate monitor. Today, most telestration happens directly on a touchscreen or tablet, layered over live graphics.
In election coverage, telestration is usually combined with an interactive results map, so the analyst can zoom into an area and annotate it in the same motion.
Telestration turns explanation into something the audience can see. A sentence like "the result here depends on these three counties" lands harder when the presenter circles them as they say it.
For production teams, the practical questions are:
Telestration over live results maps is a core feature of IK Election Insights.
