Sony has stepped up as the official technology partner of the NFL, helping make the game safer, fairer and quicker. Rufus Hack, CEO of Sony Sports Entertainment Business Unit, joined TheStreet to discuss how the company plans to transform professional football through its advanced technologies.
Related: How Sony is transforming the future of the NFL
Full Video Transcript Below:
CONWAY GITTENS: Sony recently became the official technology partner of the NFL. What new opportunities does this unlock for the league?
RUFUS HACK: So we're incredibly privileged within our Sony sports business to work with 23 of the top 25 sports leagues globally, and extending our partnership with the NFL is something we're incredibly excited about. The NFL obviously being one of the iconic global sports properties, we're really excited to help them across a number of things. So firstly, we're going to be installing our optical tracking cameras in all 32 of the NFL stadiums. And what's that going to mean - that means that we can effectively collect sub 1 second latency skeletal data of all of the NFL matches from next season. And we'll be using that for a variety of things.
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The first thing that we're going to be really focused on is how can we help to improve the product on the pitch through making the game fairer, safer and in many cases quicker and so the first application of that is going to be around automating the line to game. So we're effectively going to be able to automate whether a first down was made and whether the full 10 yards has been achieved. But then once we actually collect the skeletal data and the ball tracking data, there's huge number of other ways in which that can potentially be used. So that can potentially be used to look about whether a player was in bounds when they caught a touchdown pass. It can be looked to see whether there was interference on the quarterback. And so we're very excited about how we can continue to build on this relationship with the NFL to really roll out new ways, as I said, to make the game fairer, safer and quicker.
CONWAY GITTENS: As part of this partnership, Sony is also developing headsets for team coaches. How will these headsets enhance the game and when can we expect this to roll out?
RUFUS HACK: So you're exactly right, Conway. We're going to be introducing the Sony headsets from still to be exactly finalized, but likely from the start of next season. So we have Sony headsets for all of the coaches and obviously improving the audio quality and the speed of transmission. But there's lots of other things that we're doing as part of this wider strategic partnership. We touched on some of the officiating improvements that we're looking to work with the league on. We're obviously doing the headsets, as you referenced, but we're also looking to use this data that's collected for really new immersive fan engagement experiences.
So I think that you're aware that we did something last season with the NFL for one of the London series games, where we recreated one of the games in Toy Story IP, and the numbers around that were quite incredible. We had over 4 million views on ESPN and Disney Plus, with an average of over a million. The average age of the viewer was actually 14 versus whatever it is, mid 50s on CBS or NBC. And actually 62% of people had never seen the game and never watched the game before, so it was genuinely additive. And so we're actually looking to do that again over the next month or so. But actually this game is going to be recreated. One of the Cowboys games at the start of December is going to be recreated in Simpsons IP. So really trying to use the data and working with the league for how do you create new, more immersive and participative sports experiences for younger sports fans.
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