Crazy idea time.
Occasionally I have crazy ideas. Like mandating encryption on satellites via Executive Order. Or starting a DOD Embassy in Silicon Valley. Or crowdfunding an American-made luxury sock company.
Last night was no exception. Reading about the high drama surrounding a particular sports team’s struggle to get its new stadium approved (won’t mention it here, if you’re in that world, you know about the situation), I had a crazy idea. And was able to fit it into Twitter’s 280-character limit:
I had been thinking about this idea for over a year, for various reasons.
A few things I believe, relevant to this line of discovery:
There are thousands of mid-sized sports stadiums around the country servicing high school sports teams, pro soccer, alternate hockey leagues, minor league baseball, and more. This could certainly be done with one of these teams, though I think a large-ish embedded fan base is important.
I believe that one of the trends of the first half of the 21st century is the creation of new “layers” of reality. What do I mean by layers? Language. Writing. Money. Energy. The latest tectonic shift will be the creation of a coherent series of “information layers” accessible to anybody, which merge with physical space.
Think that there are huge opportunities to provide top-notch services to underserved groups like “companies-not-in-the-Fortune-100” or “people-who-don’t-live-near-one-of-the-ten-largest-cities-in-America”.
The internet is rewiring our brains, Marshall McLuhan style. We are fooling ourselves into believing the simulacrum. I don’t like it, but it’s happening. So, as Werner Herzog says, “do not avert your eyes.” Combine this with #2 and you realize that on some level we are also re-wiring reality. Not to the full extent, but partially.
Cialdini, Adams, and the rest of the persuasion crew are correct. Attention is influence. Act accordingly.
Imagining a Next-Generation Franchise
Reading about the travails of this major league sportsball team, I started thinking: what would a next generation sports franchise look like?
We’ve already seen this manifest itself on the playing field with concepts like Sabremetrics (if you haven’t seen it yet, you really ought to watch “Moneyball”). But what if we apply some of the same thinking to larger concepts in sports franchises?
First things first: nothing about my background qualifies me to write about this. I haven’t watched a professional sports contest in years. And though I rowed “varsity” crew for one year in College, I never played, nor was involved in, professional sports of any kind. I can’t name more than a handful of players on any major league team.
So take it all with a grain of salt. I’m just thinking from outside here.
Minimum Viable Stadiums
The minimum viable product here is: upgrading or building fresh a stadium with integrated, multiple (10+) high definition cameras capable of capturing live, high-definition video from all directions. These feeds would then be live-streamed out to fans who could purchase “tickets” to live games, streamed through VR headsets.
I would put these (admittedly expensive) VR camera rigs in key places for the sport. For baseball: along the first and third base lines, and behind home plate.
At the MVP stage, this could be a standard stadium, with standard ticketing arrangements, but a few camera setups scattered around the stadium.
As soon as I hit “send,” the responses started coming in. The biggest one: why go virtually when you can go in person?
James is right here, but as we discussed down the thread, there may be a big opportunity for a “yes, and” style business model here. Many fans do want to attend in person. But some may want to attend virtually. Like those who can’t afford to attend the game. Or those who physically can’t attend due to other commitments or constraints.
So: costs for the MVP are likely in the low millions (let’s assume the camera rigs are $500,000 each, and that the stadium would need to substantially upgrade its telecommunications infrastructure to accommodate the new data flows).
The other big cost would be creating the application that would enable live (or ever-so-slightly time-delayed) streaming of the event to customers’ VR headsets. The infrastructure likely already exists to some degree, but there’s probably front-end work to be done (creating an app for the headset, then commercial interfaces for web/desktop/mobile so people can buy access to the games using normal platforms.
New Stadium Builds
The IRL situation that sparked this whole line of thinking has some interesting dynamics. The team doesn’t have a big budget. And is somewhat under appreciated by their local community. This got me thinking: what if the team relocated to a city that doesn’t have a major league sports team in the same league? Or doesn’t have a major league team at all?
In the relocation situation, perhaps the team might downsize its stadium, while pursuing a physical/digital hybrid model. If going the mixed experience route, it could open up new possibilities. The foundation of these would be an entirely new type of stadium, built from the ground up to be an immersive experience both for those physically at the stadium, and for those experiencing it remotely.
Specifically:
Re-create the sound of a 50,000 person stadium for a 10,000 person stadium. Acoustic engineers have been designing spaces like orchestra halls for years; i’m guessing they could create cacophony by design if paid well enough. Could even pipe in the digital crowd to the speaker system.
Movie studio quality set design that enables imaginative VR experiences (imagine if you could pay an extra $50 to watch a game in VR that looks like it’s being played in the “Field of Dreams” stadium)
Turn “behind-the-scenes” experiences into paid experiences. Sit in the announcers booth. Hang out in the dugout.
Full controlled replay. Watch a pitch, or a double play as many times as you want, right after it happens. Snip, edit, share it on social media.
This leads to…
New Revenue Streams
A digital-first stadium opens up a lot of new opportunities for doing things sports teams do best: making money. Beyond simply new ways to have fans spend money, it’s also worth noting that this kind of setup would expand the population able to make it to games. Even in small cities with 1-2 million residents, I’m willing to bet that there are plenty of folks who live more than an hour outside of town, or can’t get a babysitter for their kids, or who have moved away from their hometown but still want to root for their home team while getting something like the “stadium experience,” who would pay to attend a game virtually. More profitable potential angles:
Concession partnerships with local businesses able to do on-demand delivery
Innovative viewing angles (like “All-22” for football)
Bespoke advertising targeting for individual VR attendees (Adwords but for the Jumbotron)
Remixed broadcasts like alternate commentary riding on top of the original A/V data stream of the game, which other fans can pay for (think: for fans whose first language isn’t English); the right back-end (possibly on-chain) would enable this to happen seamlessly with the edit, broadcast, and automatic profit-sharing.
Closing Thoughts
This is a really interesting idea for a passionate sports fan, perhaps post-exit, who wants to play around with emerging technologies (VR/AR, blockchain, 5G) while also doing the whole vanity I-own-a-sports-team thing. Many in the twitter threat talked about how certain entrepreneurs (like Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft Co-Founder, Mark Cuban, and the tech entrepreneurs who own the Golden Gate Warriors) are experimenting in this direction already, and I think that we can expect things to continue to move in this direction over the next few years.
I’ll be watching to see if an enterprising sports fan makes the leap to the more long-tail approach of taking a major team to a smaller city, and trying to go digital first. Imagine it as “the team for everybody else.” Could have an underdog vibe. Instead of rooting for a AAA team, root for the other guys.
Until then, I’ll be here on twitter, trying to build tools to secure industrial control systems from cyber threats. So — open offer — if anybody decides to TRY this crazy effort, by the software my new company is going to make, in order to minimize the risk that hackers come after your stadium’s industrial control systems.
I’ll throw in my futurist consulting services for a minimal fee.