How Software Is Being Used to Fill Seats in Smarter Stadiums
The NFL, the most popular and financially successful sports association in the United States, is having a problem they likely didn’t see coming. As the money coming into the league keeps growing, fan attendance at Sunday games has been on the decline for years. How is the league trying to entice fans back into their seats? By embracing the reason for their absence—technology.
The San Francisco 49ers, one of the NFL’s most storied franchises, has the luxury of its home city being one of the software development capitals of the world. The team’s CEO, Jed York, recently explained how the 49ers' new stadium would be software-driven and not hardware-driven, as nearly all stadiums have been built in the past. York and the rest of the organization are encouraging fans to “create your own experience when you’re in the game” and not be limited to only viewing what you can see on the field or on a bulky Jumbotron from your seat.
For example, while you’re in the stadium, you can connect to its wireless network using your smartphone or tablet to watch the game via any of the many high-resolution 4K video cameras installed throughout the facility. You could pick a point of view that offers a better vantage point than your seat, or you could watch closeups of the plays, or you could conceivably tune in to players’ helmet cams.
In the video below, York gives a pretty convincing argument for the team’s decision to focus so heavily on software in order to reclaim fans who’ve abandoned their seats at the stadium for the comfort of their couches at home.
The 49ers' approach is a novel one in that many other teams have simply been trying to outdo each other with hardware—a strategy that has not worked for many. No matter how many enormous TVs a stadium brags about having, for many fans, the view from their own couch is just fine. MetLife Stadium, built just last year and home to both the New York Giants and Jets, does a pretty poor job of promoting its hardware dominance on its website—perhaps because they know that fans aren’t likely to be impressed.
The Miami Dolphins are using software to increase the attendance at their home games but from a different angle. Another reason many fans are staying home these days is to avoid the hassle involved with waiting in lines for everything from the security checkpoints at the gate to the hot dog vendors inside. Dolphins CTO Terry Howard and IBM teamed up to develop software that would create a “smarter stadium” that would allow “integration between gate monitoring systems and audio notification systems” to alleviate “lengthy waiting periods” that were resulting in attendee attrition.
If these new moves don’t happen to work, I know one suggestion that has been made by scores of fans but has seemingly never been put into practice: lower ticket prices.
