Technology is increasingly impacting every facet of our lives. From how we sleep, to driving, to eating, the way we work and the sports industry.
The adoption of technology in sports has produced a mixed bag of results and has often been implemented after a long struggle. You only need to look at the roll out of technology in the world of football to highlight the barriers that have been put in place to restrict its use.
While deploying technology on a large scale, for example across an entire league, has frequently been met with road blocks in certain sports, that hasn’t stopped individual teams and some more forward thinking sports from rolling out technology.
Often the use of technology in sports has been used to augment the fan experience, providing them with a greater and more in-depth experience as they enjoy their favourite sport. Technology has also been used to help clear up controversial moments and to forge a path into new content fields.
With the Super Bowl and the RBS 6 Nations due to kick off this weekend, CBR looks at how technology is going to help make them even greater events.
Super Bowl
This year it is Super Bowl LI, or 51, and it’ll be the New England Patriots taking on the Atlanta Falcons.
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Kick off will be at 23:30 on Sunday 5th, so expect there to be a few tired employees on the Monday morning.
The Super Bowl typically attracts one of the largest global audiences, Super Bowl 50 averaged 111.9 million TV viewers and this year the FOX broadcast feed will feature innovations from Intel.
The chip maker will be providing as many as two dozen player’s eye view clips from the game thanks to a feature called “Be the Player.” The feature is based on the company’s 360 Replay technology which models the real world, which means that virtual views can be seen from any location.
To help create this the company has installed 38 5K cameras above the playing surface at the NRG Stadium in Houston. These feed visual data back to a rack of servers in the stadium and the whole process is speeded up by many of the features in the stadium being pre-rendered.
That helps to speed up the data processing speed because it’s about one terabyte of data for every 15 to 30 second clip.
Other valuable pieces of technology infrastructure at the game will be 1,250 Wave 2 Access Points – so that everyone can connect to the Wi-Fi network, while Verizon has installed over 220 small cells, low-powered radio access nodes that provide short-range cell sites.
There’s been 70 miles of cable installed in order to support the systems in and around the stadium and an underground distributed antenna system.
It’s a massive event that wouldn’t be possible on this scale without the help of masses of technology.
