Some thoughts on alternative ways of experiencing team sports using technology without attending the event.
NYU Tisch institute Chalk Talk #8: The Virtual Season Ticket May 28, 2020 by Vince Gennaro
NYU SPS Tisch Institute for Global Sport
This Chalk Talk discusses the Virtual Season Ticket (VST), as a new product for sports organizations and events and a new viewing experience for fans. The VST allows fans to experience a courtside NBA game, or a 50-yard line seat at an NFL game, from the comfort of their home. The use of a virtual reality headset and other emergent technologies can transport fans to an entirely new gameday experience
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For several years I've maintained that the only way to watch MLB on TV was to fast forward or otherwise skip the DEAD time between each pitch. Supposedly there is only 15 minutes of action in an NFL game, which operates within a 60 minute clock but takes four hours of real time. A 48 minute NBA game takes less real time, maybe 2.5 hours, but is impacted the most by all the time outs that are allowed to accumulate for use at the end of a close game.
The virtual reality approach has obvious merits that I'll now investigate, but it has the drawback that it's happening in real time, which includes inevitable DEAD time.
For a few years MSG Network has had a replay version of the previous day's NBA Knick game called Knicks in 60. It's just what the title implies: the 2.5 hour real time 48 minute game has been condensed to a 60 minute TV event, including commercials and pre/post game commentary.
In addition to its real time presentation, a game on TV could also, for an additional fee, be transmitted on a spare channel with a one hour delay but sped up somewhat like Knicks in 60 but without commercials. In other words, do for us what we're already doing ourselves but relieve us of the tedium of fast forward, opps back up a little, FF, oops, ... I'll stop watching a Yankee tournament game at 10:00 PM and record the rest to avoid the inevitable sucking the life out of it by the parade of pitching changes. The next morning I then FF a lot and watch what now seems like a baseball game. The players can jerk around on their own time.
Markers could be inserted so that we could hit a special FF button that skips predefined (hopefully user defined) DEAD spots, like between pitches.
We've all seen video of a TV truck outside a sports arena in which many monitors show the director various live views of a game from many cameras. The director then manically decides which goes out live. Give us that option, including multiples on our home screen concurrently. I'd have multiple TVs in my viewing room and pick different feeds for each, switching on the fly. I'd love the option of watching pitches from the old behind the plate view and not be trapped into nothing but the view from a center field camera.
We have access to hundreds of channels and probably watch only a small percentage of them. That wasted bandwidth could be used as described above. I think the Olympics has had a limited version.
The bandwidth could also carry special stuff, like three a dimensional hologram. Imagine a special table on which a game is presented. We could move around and see the game from different angles. Unfortunately, moving holographic images are still primitive, so this is the one thing mentioned here that could not be implemented now.
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