How broadcasters can get in the VR game with sports
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With new distribution deals from the NFL on Twitter to ESPN on Sling how we watch TV is now driven by the consumer demand to do more while we watch tune in to watch our favorite team. Enter virtual reality. VR is the first truly transformative technology for sports broadcasting in years – to date, the biggest improvements we've seen have been HD (just better picture) and ""the yellow line."" With VR, we can actually take you to the game, like you're sitting courtside or on the 50year line, while still being able to check their Twitter, trash talk and follow their team in realtime. Speakers : Saswat Panda, CTO, Livelikevr and Michael Davies, SVP Fox Sports
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How broadcasters can get in the VR game with sports
- 1. How Broadcasters can get in the VR Game with Sports Saswat Panda CTO Michael Davies SVP, Field Ops
- 2. VR Today 2 Google Cardboard Samsung GearVR Google Daydream HTC Vive Oculus Rift Playstation VR #foxsportsvr
- 3. VR Today 3 VR / AR Software is estimated to be a $45 - $85 Billion market by 2025 *Figures based off Goldman Sachs ‘Augmented reality starts to liven up the VR/AR market’ July 18, 2016 report*Figures based off Super Data Research VR Report #foxsportsvr
- 4. 4 • Primary driver of new content formats • Sports drives innovation in Television • Surge of Mobile • Growth of Mobile streaming • User interaction is Key to VR Why Sports? #foxsportsvr
- 5. 5 Deliver the best live sports viewing experience - with or without a headset • All begins with the Longhorns • Diverse Backgrounds - Sports, Finance & Gaming • Found existing solutions to be reductive to TV • Set out to create an additive experience LiveLike Story #foxsportsvr
- 7. 7 Enter Magic Window #foxsportsvr
- 8. 8 Progress with Fox Sports VR OU vs. OSU Multi-Angle w/ Stats Red River Rivalry Data Integrations Big 10 Championship Scrimmage Line Cart-Cam MLS Cup Live DVR & Audi Sponsorship SuperBowl Realtime Highlights & Full-Game Replay Big East Tournament Director’s Cut Camera #foxsportsvr
- 9. 9 Key Learnings • Magic Window leads to higher viewership than mobile VR • High-End VR (eg. Oculus Rift, PSVR) gets the most user engagement What’s Next • High-End VR • Mobile VR • Mobile • AR Product Direction #foxsportsvr
- 10. 10 Use a Game Engine (Unity or Unreal) Keep an “Open Book” Mentality Minimize Product Debt How do we stay Nimble? #foxsportsvr
- 11. Saswat Panda CTO, LiveLike Michael Davies SVP, Field Ops, Fox Sports #foxsportsvr
Editor's Notes
- LiveLike: Whitelabel solution powering broadcasters to deliver their content to their users in VR. Working with Fox for about a year now, 6 months publicly on the FSVR app. We started with Oklahoma v. Ohio State in September and have since done major games including the Super Bowl, ‘Red River’ showdown and the B1G 10. We also expanded beyond football with the MLS Cup and the Big East. Have a lot of learnings to share. Fox [MD]: - Give intro about Fox’s experiments and experience with VR. - Doing VR for over 2 years, starting with NASCAR. - Seen a lot of growth in the market
- How many folks here have used a VR headset? How many plan on using it again? Cardboard is a gateway drug High-end mobile (GearVR & Daydream) usage rising, but very slowly. Still weak on immersion. Oculus/Vive sales disappointing. PSVR only one exceeding expectations.
- There is a lot of excitement in the space and that its great to see more and more companies willing to experiment/put resources behind VR. However, it's still early days so the hardware is still evolving. [MD] FOX got a lot of PR Mileage in early days. As the buzz has generally continued to increase and there’s new entrants in the market, doing basic 360 video isn’t newsworthy anymore. Need to apply a different take. Need to push forward on the innovation & have the experience stand on its own.
- [MD] Sports is one of the few things that more than 100,000 people in Washington DC can agree on every Sunday (something fun like that). And sports bring people together. Social interaction is the key to sports. Sports has been the primary driver of new content formats across the last several years Sports drives innovation in Television. HD wasn’t widely adopted until the NFL. Picture in picture was primarily sports driven. DVR is hugely used so fans never miss a second. Surge of Mobile. Scores, match info & social media push mobile and smartphones. Growth of Mobile streaming. Streaming to phones and laptops was one of the first drivers of the new way we look at cable. Great sports content is needed to push the entire VR industry forward. User interaction is Key to VR. Sports lends itself very well to interactivity.
- Our CEO was alone in Korea, working with Samsung. And he missed watching football with his friends. Cramped in a tiny room by himself watching his favorite team - the Texas Longhorns - on a tiny screen. He wanted to solve that problem and realized that VR was the only truly transformative platform. We got together from diverse backgrounds across sports, finance and game dev to solve the problem. First thing we realized was that existing solutions at the time were reductive to the TV experience. Just ported the standard TV experience over to a bigger screen. Second thing was the fact that you couldn’t really share or enjoy the experience with others - the way you normally watch sports. So set out to create an additive experience that not only gives you the best views at the stadium, but also the best of television, the best of the 2nd screen and in a way that you can simultaneously enjoy with your friends. (I’ll show what that means in a second). LiveLike’s mission is to build a more immersive and better VR product for sports. We aim to deliver the best immersive live sports viewing experience - with or without a headset.
- Simple workflow w/ the goal that it can be handed off to clients at scale. [Saswat describes workflow, giving SB as an example] [MD] Ease of setting up. Low technical footprint. Very small area needed for capture part. Very easy to overlay infrastructure for VR. Important because unlike 3D w/ truck/camerapos/etc, its easy to sneak it in without affecting main concentration (the actual broadcast production).
- In ’15, we got started with the Samsung GearVR. Small market, but we felt like it showcased the potential of where mobile VR was and where it would go. Started working with Fox in ’16. Fox had suggestion of a “Magic Window” experience. [MD] Talk about the reasoning behind why we opted to go for MW. How the game is complementary to a traditional TV broadcast. How we’re moving away from “best seat in the house” thought process.
- [MD] Talk about progress you’ve seen in the product over last 6 months. Done 6 public productions so far and each one is different & an improvement over the other. OU vs. OSU - First multi-angle viewing with stationary cameras Red River - POV schematics to better visualize where you’re jumping to - Embedding Live Data into the environment (eg. Team Schedules) Big 10 - Then scrimmage line cart camera MLS Cup - Live DVR - Audi Brand Sponsorship w/ Audi Live Stats/Player Index SuperBowl - Real-time Highlights - Full-Game Replays w/ DVR Big East - Director’s Cut
- Things we’ve seen: - Magic Window significantly higher viewership than mobile VR. - High-end VR gets the most user engagement. VR is continuing to grow and evolve. We are still seeing huge companies like Fox committing to VR and excited about its potential. The excitement is there but the industry - and the hardware - is still in its infancy. MD: But truth is - we don’t know what the right approach is. What we can do is set ourselves up to be nimble and move fast. Fox Sports VR is set up for this approach.
- MD: Pick a service that’s nimble & can change. Noone knows whats sticky & isn’t. Ideas and tweaks come with not a lot of lead time. a) Rather than native, we’ve built experience with the Unity game engine - Cross platform. Can simultaneously develop on all mobile platforms. Tethered VR requires extra work but can share majority of codebase. - Nimble. A well-architected Unity app can allow you to prototype quickly and efficiently. (eg. Superbowl VR experience built in 10 days). Allows you to make big changes in the product direction. b) Have an “open book” - Working with more clients opens us up to more ideas. We try things, some succeed and change product direction (eg. MW). Others fail (eg. POV schematics). Culture of prototyping. Build it fast initially - doesn’t need to be built for scale, especially since you don’t whether its something that will get used. c) Minimize debt: - Both on the Tech & Product sides. Every project that moves on a fast cycle accumulates debt. Be sure to have retrospectives after every project and schedule time to clean up the system, build the necessary automation tools, etc.
- [MD] Separating ourselves from overall buzz of VR in dynamic & changing world. Any prediction about VR in the last year was incorrect. Keeping mind and eyes open for changing landscapes. Stay flexible and open to new and evolving definitions of technology. - Our tech is growing and evolving and we have extended beyond just football - Continuing to stay flexible with our platform/tech and work collaboratively with FOX to make the best product we can - Super excited about the VR space as a whole, what’s to come and believe we have a lot of exciting work with FOX down the pipeline. - We believe sports is key to the development/production of VR