5 Ways The 49ers' Teched-Out Levi's Stadium Is Changing The Game For Fans
This
article includes interviews with San
Francisco 49ers chief
operating officerAl
Guido; Levi’s
CEO and president Chip
Bergh;
NFL Commissioner Roger
Goodell;Sacramento
Kings chief
marketing officer Ben
Gumpert;
49ers museum director Jesse
Lovejoy;
and 49er alum and current VP of football affairs Keena
Turner.
On
Sunday September 14th, the San Francisco 49ers debuted its $1.2
billion stadium to the regular-season crowd. Along with a bridge made
of solar panels that helps make the structure energy-neutral--even
though it's adorned with two 48-foot high LED screens--the stadium is
outfitted with robust 4G and Wi-Fi,
and a museum that includes a STEM-friendly classroom full of
interactive desks. It's topped with an app that not only shows where
to find parking but lets you order food
on-demand directly
to your seat.
This
technology won't fix the NFL's bigger problems right now (nor can it
take the sting out of last night's 28-20 loss to the Chicago
Bears),
but it might transform the way other teams interact with fans during
sporting events. Other stadiums are already starting to replicate
these features. The Sacramento Kings have an app that includes friend
connections and shows multi-angle game replays being readied for the
new Entertainment
and Sports Center to
debut in 2016, according to Kings chief marketing officer, Ben
Gumpert.
With
25 engineers--comprised of some veterans from companies like Facebook
and Yahoo--working on the software and data platforms for Levi's
Stadium, the challenge was incorporating technology without taking
over the game experience.
Here's
a look at what they did this weekend, and what else they have
planned.
In-Seat App
Want
a beer and pizza without leaving your seat? You can with the Levi’s
Stadium App,
which had 80,000 downloads even before the stadium opened.
Integrating
ticketing and in-seat
food delivery to
68,500 seats into the app, which took two-and-a-half years to create,
proved a bigger challenge than expected--though an expected average
wait time of nine minutes isn’t terrible.
Getting
fans to choose stadium seats instead of their couches was one of the
first things Levi’s CEO andpresident
Chip Bergh
asked 49ers owner Jed York to do. Having been involved with the
creation of several stadiums--including Gillette Stadium--Bergh says
he knew the niners had to come up with something big.
“The
NFL, and many sports teams, have really wrestled with how do you get
people to actually show up for games,” Bergh says. “On the East
Coast and on a freezing cold day, there were a lot of empty seats
because it was easier to stay at home and watch it on TV."
The
designers and engineers were "very focused on how they could
make the fan experience inside the stadium more awesome than staying
at home and watching it on TV," he says. You can check how long
the line is at the hot dog stand and how long the line is to go to
the bathroom, "which is really critical by about the third
quarter."
After
working out bugs in time for the first regular-season game, 49ers
chief operating officer Al Guido says the team was careful to not
overpower the live-action game, but to focus the app on bringing the
conveniences of watching at home.
“We've
already linked tickets and parking for almost 70% of our ticket base
right now, which is unheard of in this day and age from an
application perspective,” Guido says.
“A
lot has been talked about in the NFL stadiums around the fact that
the at-home experience from the television perspective is so much
greater than the one in stadium,” he says. “We really just wanted
to enhance that play on the field and your convenience of getting to
the game or ordering food and beverage.”
The
app’s game center will also allow users to see real-time stats and
scores of other games without switching in and out of external apps
like Yahoo sports or NFL.com. “When you are at home, you get
whatever CBS or NBC happens to show you,” Bergh says. “But here,
you are going to be able to command your own replay and your own
camera angle.”
Guido
says more on-demand features are in the works for the next one to two
years such as in-seat
retail delivery and
49er art buying. “We have over 200 original pieces of art in the
building and over 500 photos. We want to allow you to scroll your
phone over pieces of art, or pieces within the museum, and have that
pop up as information.”
The New World Of Sports Data
Waze
integration data from the app will reveal parking patterns and what
roads fans take to get to the stadium. From the food
perspective,
it will collect data on what food and beverage you're consuming and
at what times throughout the game, which Guido says went into effect
at a recent San Jose Earthquakes soccer game.
“We
sold a ton of curry on our first game,” he says. “If you go
around to any other stadium, you'd find the food and beverage
providers say,
‘No way, you're going to sell a bunch of hot dogs and hamburgers.’
When we talk to our food and beverage provider, we can give him all
that data in real time and understand who's ordering it, from where,
and how much.”
The
data will also help in suggesting the best points of entry, exits,
traffic alerts, and ticket transfers made in the app. “We know who
you're transferring them [tickets] to so that we can send you
information on parking and transportation.
“It's really endless on both fronts, the upfront to the customer,
and then the back end to the team,” he says.
Levi’s
Stadium is also poised to set a new openness to API when
it comes to fan data, which, Guido says, is necessary for other
teams’ stadiums to compete. “I think teams need to be committed
to having platforms that are super intuitive--and not just platforms
that are intuitive, but robust data warehouses.”
A
feature in the app called "Faithful 49" will allow users to
“gain yards” by interacting with sponsors like Esurance,
incentivizing fans to get more interactive with the sponsors. It has
lofty terms and conditions which will be interesting to see how other
teams reform with privacy concerns.
“That’s
the one piece that was certainly a bigger challenge than I think
maybe even the tech guys anticipated, because the sports world is so
very different than the tech world with open API. The sports world is
kind of closed off. Getting those partners to work with us wasn't
hard, just figuring out where we wanted to go took some time,”
Guido says.
Wi-Fi That Works
One
of the biggest problems inside stadiums is that mobile reception is
spotty, leaving people feeling disconnected for hours on end. Levi’s
stadium was designed with a different infrastructure than the
standard Wi-Fi shooting cone; it used a new model called MicroCell
system.
For
the first time in professional sports Wi-Fi boxes have been put under
every 100 seats, offering five times more capacity than the average
in-stadium network.
Thanks to 400 miles of data cables, a fan's seat will never be more
than 10 feet from a direct Wi-Fi signal, says Guido (and hundreds of
geeky fans raving on Twitter).
With
40 gigabits within the infrastructure--compared to the NFL mandate of
10 gigabits--the stadium will likely still be competitive when it
comes time to host Super Bowl 50 there in 2016.
“We
had to build the platform so that it wasn't just good for 2014,"
says Guido. The Cowboys stadium already got retrofitted for
additional Wi-Fi after only four years of being built and hailed as
the most technologically advanced stadium. "In our mind it was
good for 2044. We felt like if the infrastructure was there, the
mobile platforms would just continue to get better and better, and
your opportunities are endless.”
“With
Wi-Fi in the stadium, you allow people to use their devices they
already have,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell says. “We believe
that's the best experience and we hope this will become a model for
future stadiums.”
The
MicroCell approach is reportedly being replicated in new stadiums for
the Atlanta
Falcons and
in Minnesota. The Kings' chief marketing officer, Ben Gumpert says,
"Connectivity and bandwidth will be crucial components of the
technology in the ESC.”
No
stranger to sports tech, The Kings became the first team to accept
bitcoin as payment, incorporated Google Glass during a game
broadcast, and used Oculus Rift to augment to fans the new arena.
Gumpert says they, too are working on a robust Wi-Fi structure.
A Field Of Greentech
While
solar panels aren’t any thing new in stadiums, the niners’ solar
panels are in the form of functional bridges. It's the first of its
kind in the NFL, beating the Philadelphia
Eagles’
10-year-old signature "Go Green" campaign in Lincoln
Financial Field. It’s also perhaps the first power-saving design
that doesn’t look ridiculous--it even shades the poor souls with
rooftop VIP seats.
From
the solar terrace, fans can also see one of the two large LED video
boards. The 48-foot high screens, made by Daktronics, adorn the end
zones. One is 200 feet wide, the other 148 feed wide, each with a
13HD pixel layout that can be used as one massive screen or sectioned
into smaller windows.
And
all that light is working from a carbon-neutral
energy grid.
The first professional sports team to achieve net
zero energy performance in
California, it is also the first professional football stadium with
LEED Gold certification.
Memorabilia Meets The Museum
Instead
of a traditional team gallery, the 49ers' museum includes interactive
content for every player that's ever been on the team in a
cross-searchable database. The All-time Roster--as it’s
called--contains 12,000 photos and 1,295 players’ data.
If
you knew someone who played for the team or played with your dad in
college, you can swipe your way to six degrees of separation and find
multiple points of information and photos of them. “What a lot of
people we found in testing was, they were curious to know who else
went to Illinois that played for us,” 49ers
museum director Jesse Lovejoy says.
“We created that search-for
function."
49er
alum and current VP of football affairs, Keena Turner, says the
creation of such data files are a unique tool to preserving history
of former players like him. “It’s not doing tech for tech’s
sake, but using imagination to learn from our perspective,” he
says. “We like that blend of high
tech and
low tech as an opportunity to recognize every player that ever played
for the team. For me, it's really personal.”
Entering
the museum’s Heritage Gallery, touchscreens line up with artifacts
at different points of the physical timeline showing additional
stories from history with audible and visual stories. Keyed-in
green-screen interviews with coaches are layered with old clips of
plays and animated sequences.
Cortina
Productions also created interactive elements for the museum’s
internal STEM
classroom,
where teachers can control students’ interactive desks during a
learning session. “We felt like we had a platform to make STEM to
help teach kids science, technology, engineering, and math components
of sustainability or technology like what makes a spiral go further,”
Lovejoy says.
Like much of the other tech used in the stadium, the museum’s challenge was using it in a way that wasn't overbearing, says Lovejoy. “I think a lot of times, you can get buried in technology. It was our goal and our job to use it in interesting and unique ways to share depth of content that you can't do on a wall. You can't do it in 30 words.”
Like much of the other tech used in the stadium, the museum’s challenge was using it in a way that wasn't overbearing, says Lovejoy. “I think a lot of times, you can get buried in technology. It was our goal and our job to use it in interesting and unique ways to share depth of content that you can't do on a wall. You can't do it in 30 words.”
Elsewhere
in the stadium, there are interactive games, lessons from players,
Sony touchscreens, and broadcaster simulations that give fans a
chance to be in the action--think of a Dave & Busters dedicated
to your favorite team. The aim is to boost stadium foot traffic
year-round.
Though
Levi’s Stadium is ahead of the pack now, that could change come
2016 as stadiums engage in a neck-and-neck race to see who can
attract more fans, feed them faster, and keep them in the stadium
longer. What does it take to win? The best software.
Or
is it hardware? "We like to say that we built the stadium as a
software-driven stadium, not a hardware-driven stadium," says
Guido. "The funny thing about that is, it takes hardware to
build that infrastructure.”
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