To conclude part II’s focus on how the elite sports environment is altered by digital technology, this chapter focuses on the spectator experience. Changes in this area may be traced to longer trajectories of media development than simply the digital era and, over time, this shift has nurtured new ways of participating in sport as a spectator. Often the focus of these new experiences is the creation of opportunities for interaction between producers and audiences. Indeed, the fascination with interactivity in the 1990s reveals an absence in how we theorize and make sense of our relationship to mediation. After all, since the dawn of the media age—perhaps even since the earliest forms of recorded history—authors have attempted to foster an active relationship between their content and the receiver. Seo and Jung (2014) even tie the rise of e-sports gaming to the desire for additional spectator consumer experiences, reinforcing the connections across this cybersport nexus, imagining players as a kind of audience.
The mode of this interaction changes with each new medium. When one reads books, interaction occurs through the imagination we invest into the words on the page, how we re-tell the story to ourselves, the environments in which we find ourselves reading, or how we revisit the text again, creating new narratives around the same words. In the early years of newspapers, interactivity involved readers taking the time to write into the newspaper editors, responding to the content in letters pages, for instance. In the age of radio, the desire for interaction was satiated through talkback programs and chat shows, a format later developed through the rise of reality television. Indeed, the history of interactivity may be stretched so far as to lose all connection with the present focus on digital transformations, but it is important to acknowledge these antecedents, if only to recognize that the key principles of what the most cutting-edge designers of virtual realities are trying to achieve today occupy similar ambitions to many of their predecessors who made similar attempts through different means. In the end, all forms of mediated content—from books to holograms—allow users the opportunity to construct narratives that occupy their imagination and which affect their perception of one world by entering another.
In the earliest years of the Internet era, the mode of interactivity was generated from the way that users—no longer audiences—could explore new worlds and produce their own content on their own channels. Since 2008, sports media organizations have tried to use social media to create new ways of interacting with sports, providing additional layers to the spectator experience. For instance, during the 2012 London Paralympic Games, the first-time Games television broadcaster Channel 4 (an independent channel in the UK) used Twitter to create audience polls, whereby viewers were asked to use specific hashtags when responding to questions that were asked on the breakfast show. In this sense, the spectator experience has always been changing, which makes it especially hard to foresee which trend will bring about a categorical change in how media communication takes place. Of particular relevance today is that the additional opportunities for interactivity afforded by digital technology complement, rather than compromise traditional televisual formats. This is crucial because sports are wholly reliant on the sale of television rights to broadcasters.
Many of these earlier interactive formats remain in use and, in some cases, are relatively unchanged. Even 20th-century formats are quite similar to their original design. Radio still relies on listeners telephoning the radio station to chat with presenters and share their views. Also, television chat shows are still very similar to when they were first devised, and people can still create their own. In this sense, new layers of interactivity are added to each new media ecosystem, rather than simply replacing what has come before. Indeed, rather like evolution, with each new innovation, additional functionalities are created, or older functions are honed. Sometimes, new forms of communication are to the gradual—or radical—demise of others, but many remain in place despite the creation of new formats. After all, mathematicians still rely on blackboards as much as they rely on calculators or computers. Digital artists still develop fundamental creative skills in illustration, as grounding for their innovative creative work. Filmmakers still develop ideas and scenes on storyboards, using paper in parallel, perhaps before resorting to a digital environment. Similarly, the utilization of digital technology in sport is an additional means through which to develop experiences of sport performance and not necessarily a replacement for other systems.
Until recently, such trends have hardly had an impact on the area of sport spectatorship—what takes place during the sport itself—and sports broadcasting has been staged primarily as a theatrical performance. Today, spectators can make their own, unique spectator experience, by drawing on a range of live and mediated spaces to create a personal encounter with elite sport. The consequences of this shift to the sports broadcast or the live sports experience remain unclear, but change to ways of working is inevitable. In this context, this chapter explores how digital technology facilitates today’s spectator experience, which, in turn, is also remaking the kinds of expectations spectators have, the communities they form, and the way media organizations develop sports content around an audience.
Early work theorizing the spectator’s experience is not found within the sports literature, but is located among various bodies of theater studies, television studies, and film theory. Notably, Walser (1991) describes both the context of digital worlds and sports as crucially similar, noting that “cyberspace is fundamentally a theatrical medium” (p. 51), rather like sport. On such an understanding, sports are described as events within which persons can experience their bodies and confront their embodiment or, as Walser puts it, “sports evolved out of the human impulse to assert the self, thereby ensuring survival” (p. 52). Virtual worlds provide an environment in which such encounters with our embodiment can take place and in which such encounters cannot help but be juxtaposed to the embodiment of sports.
Virtual reality presents a new comprehension of what it means to be embodied and engaged while also being physically active. Yet the origins of the human interest in virtual reality can be traced even further back. For example, Murray Smith (1995) discusses how spectatorship is intimately connected to the age of philosophical romanticism and the birth of the novel, in which dreaming is introduced as a metaphor for the desired mental state one seeks to achieve within literary encounters. The loss of awareness, suspension of disbelief, and acceptance of relocating oneself mentally in another place allows the “spectator as a dreamer” (p. 113) to emerge. While the experiences of film, theater, music, and sport audiences are undoubtedly different in many ways, they each involve a willingness to believe “that the fiction is in fact not a fiction, but either reality itself or a representation of real events and persons” (p. 114). In this sense, the fiction of sports is borne out of its gratuitous logic, dramaturgy, and its being a performance—the meaning of which Hemphill (1995, p. 48) describes as being co-produced by “actors and audiences.” Indeed, Hemphill goes on to note sport’s role in the civilizing process (Elias and Dunning 1992), which is intimately connected to the privatization of leisure spaces, such as theaters and playing fields.
As for other kinds of performance, the way that sports are mediated leads us to renegotiate our relationship to the live experience. Moreover, the historical development of sport spectator experiences evidences the claim that a mediated experience is becoming far richer than the live version. As Morris and Nydahl (1985, p. 101) write of sports broadcasting, “television producers can design sports spectacles laced with visual surprises that present a range of dramatic experiences which the live event cannot.” They also reinforce the way in which sport experiences are made and remade through innovative media content. Morris and Nydahl note “slow-motion replay not only alters our perceptions of the action it reviews but also establishes our expectations” (p. 105). These parameters make the digitally mediated sport spectator experience particularly compelling to investigate from the perspective of future media. Indeed, the integration of live replay screens within sports venues speaks to the audience’s desire for an enriched live encounter and the inadequacy of the live event—free of mediation—to provide this for audiences. While one might dispute the value of simply replaying a goal or incident in one’s head, the technological realization of this through replay is clearly something that audiences have grown to value and may be, therefore, better than just what our memories can do to help us relive such experiences.
There are four overlapping aspects of the digital spectator experience that are changing what it means to be present at a sports event. The first of these has to do with the increasingly immersive nature of the spectator experience. Second, I consider how the use of augmented reality is transforming what we see within the playing field and the perception we have of the live event as a result of this change. Third, I explore how the use of second and third screens, and mobile technology more widely, changes how, when, and with whom one undertakes spectator experiences. Finally, I examine how the use of social media is expanding the duration of the spectator experience and what kinds of things audiences do as social-media-enabled participants.
In the same way that television transformed sport spectating by providing more varied opportunities for people to experience live events and by separating the physical presence of the spectator from the competition arena, virtual-reality technology marks a radical shift in the history of sports spectating. In each case, the developers are striving to create a more immersive experience for the audience. Back in the early days of the digital age, Hemphill (1995) imagined how virtual-reality head cameras could be worn by spectators, enabling total immersion spectating. The user would experience the performance of the athlete, as if they were the athlete. Some of these earliest designs bear a close resemblance to some of the newest technologies that are trying to deliver such experiences. Indeed, in 2014, the Australian Open worked with IBM and Oculus Rift in their ReturnServe project, which allowed fans to experience what it feels like to be on the receiving end of one of the fastest tennis serves in the world. According to IBM (2014),
During the event, visitors were able to step into a virtual Rod Laver Arena using the ReturnServe Oculus Rift headset and use a specially-designed motion-sensitive tennis racquet, so they could return a live serve from one of the best tennis players on earth.
After taking a swing they were able to explore the court in 3D virtual reality and gain an understanding of other ways big data is being used to change the game, from sport to business and beyond. Over 10,000 people tried the experience across multiple locations in Melbourne and Sydney.
The personalization of the audience experience is, thus, a crucial part of creating a greater sense of immersion. For many years, television has offered viewers the possibility of making personal selections of what they watch and how they watch it. However, it has never been possible to transform a player into a real-time data-capturing device, until relatively recently. Today it is possible to attach body cameras to athletes without inhibiting performance. For instance, the use of GoPro cameras or Google Glass each provide a near line-of-sight perspective of the athlete, drawing the remote spectator closer in to their experience and in-competition trials have already begun to broadcast using such devices. In January 2015, GoPro teamed up with the NHL to pilot the use of wearable cameras for players, offering new perspectives on ice hockey for fans. (See GoPro’s website.) This is part of a new program delivered through a partnership between the wireless camera company VISLINK and GoPro once called the GoPro Professional Broadcast Solution and later branded as HEROCast. The start-up company Eye360exp is beginning to create augmented-reality experiences using 360º filmmaking—again with Oculus Rift goggles. Perhaps the day when sports are played in virtual arenas has arrived. Indeed, at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, the BBC and NBC produced about 100 hours of coverage of 360º video content for VR experiences.
The goal of total immersion is inextricable from the project of creating mediated sports experiences. Sports media professionals are constantly trying to find ways of making the content they produce around sports more compelling, engaging, and immersive. Yet it is also one of the greatest challenges for technologists to achieve. While it would seem that every stage in the history of screen technology leads viewers to claim that the experience is lifelike, it is only when a new stage in the development occurs that the inadequacy of previous versions is exposed, along with how far they were from simulating reality. There is still a gap between what people experience in the physical world and what digital platforms can deliver, but the gap is getting narrower.
Philosophically, immersion into an alternate reality is an appealing goal for users, since the prospect invites us to consider, and subsequently experience, what it is like to inhabit another person’s life—to live as if one is somebody else. In this sense, it challenges our existential presumptions about our lives and allows us to experience the sensory and corporeality of another person, something which otherwise may be impossible. The 2014 Oculus Rift gender experiments are a nice example here. Two participants—a man and a woman—have their physical bodies mapped onto each other, to create a sense of what it might be like to exist within the other’s body. To work, this telepresence system relies on the user’s cooperation with the other participant’s movements. They have to work together, to become a unit, in order to experience what it is like to be the other. Together, they create what the project calls “embodied narratives,” an experience of being another, through a machine:
I am no longer Aaron Souppouris. I am a woman. I am a stranger. I stare down at the mask I hold in my hands, struggling to comprehend how those hands, which are clearly not mine, are allowing me to feel its curves and cracks. As I glance at the mirror in front of me, my new lip piercing glimmers under the harsh fluorescent lights. This is not a fever dream, not a hallucination, not even a video game. This is The Machine To be Another. (Souppouris 2014)
In some respects, all forms of storytelling strive for this kind of otherly experience; the most accomplished stories provide detailed, intimate, and compelling descriptions of what it is like to be someone else, to live their lives, and to be taken outside of ourselves. The challenge for architects of virtual reality is to heighten the sense of realism that digital worlds promise and to allow the user to understand other worlds and other people as they are, rather than how they feel lived through the device they are wearing. The ideal virtual-reality system is one in which the medium is imperceptible and in which it prevents us from knowing that we are within a simulation.
Yet the project of virtual reality requires us to acknowledge that our sensory capacities may also need modification in order for them to deliver the kind of immersive experience we seek. In sports, this is especially true. After all, the speed and the complexity of the movements in sports are often too great for the human eye to appreciate in full without using some form of mediating technology. As a result, sports media have developed a number of techniques to compensate for our sensory or cognitive inadequacies as spectators. The use of slow-motion replay—a technological act of remembering what matters most—is a classic example from sport. This act of repeating critical moment in a competition performs two kinds of act for the viewer. First, it helps them see more clearly what took place but, more crucially, it informs the viewer what is important within a game. In so doing, the decision to replay something creates a hierarchy of what elements of the competition matter most—often moments that are considered to be pivotal in the overall result, such as goal scoring or injuries.1
An early example of more digitally-driven augmentations was the FoxTrax ice hockey puck, which was introduced by the Fox television network in 1996. The technology involved inserting a circuit board and a battery into the puck so that on television it would appear to produce a glowing trail. That innovation failed to capture the imagination of seasoned viewers, who felt that the computer-generated imagery interfered with their viewing experience. Newer hockey viewers may have gained more value from it. In any case, the FoxTrax puck was abandoned. This is a good reminder of the fragility of technologically immersive experiences developed in isolation from other narrative considerations. The experience of viewing ice hockey on television may have already been encoded for viewers to such an extent that altering its parameters would disrupt what they enjoyed about it—not simply ice hockey, but televised ice hockey. It is also a reminder that new kinds of sports media experience may give rise to completely new kinds of mediated spectator experiences. The naive view of sport’s digital future is that technology will be steadily integrated into traditional sports. A more reasonable view is that existing sports will evolve and completely new sports will develop as a result of new technological possibilities.
In the same way that television audiences and radio audiences have different sensibilities, a virtual-reality audience is likely to have their own way of wanting to experience content. This is crucial for the sports media industry to take on board, particularly since discussions about transforming media experiences often become embroiled in anxieties about how to accommodate established media audiences, while also innovating. It doesn’t make sense to create a radical new form of viewing, while losing the interests of an established audience. Moreover, traditional media audiences wouldn’t necessarily shift their viewing experience into virtual reality. After all, even though 3D television has been in use for some years, neither audiences nor filmmakers have moved seamlessly into the 3D viewing experience. It may turn out that wearing augmented-reality goggles for the duration of a game is also a fad that fails to catch on as a mainstream experience. This is why it is also important to bear in mind that technological shift should be accompanied by cultural and behavioral adaptations in order for some transformation in spectators’ experiences to take place.
In strictly non-technological, narrative terms, sports commentary is among the most important examples of how greater immersion for spectators is created. Other language-based elements may include pre-match analyses and post-match summaries. The common ground between the technological and the cultural aspects of augmenting sports spectating is language, specifically the creation of new kinds of language through which one makes sense of something. This can be achieved in numerous ways through sports media. For instance, the BBC’s sending its news anchor Huw Edwards to the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Games alerted the audience that there was something more than just sports history being made. Edwards’ role in that moment gave greater historical and political gravitas to the ceremony, lending weight to the importance of the moment.
The history of technological transformations to mediated sport reveals how the spectator’s experience tends toward total immersion rather than increased passivity. Audiences want to feel closer to the center of the sports action. Ultimately that means understanding how it feels and what it takes to perform as an extraordinary athlete. One step toward cultivating this insight is to operate as co-producer of the performance through interacting with media content. This is a further reason why traditional sports can learn from what is happening in e-sport. Indeed, Borowy and Jin (2013) describe the digital gamer as a participant in an experience economy that had been growing since the 1960s and which was apparent within the rise of gaming culture. These characteristics are particularly fitting to describe what takes place in fantasy sport (Hutchins, Rowe, and Ruddock 2009), another vastly expanded format of participation in sports (Lee, Seo, and Green 2013).
More broadly, the goal of sports media resonates with these aspirations to bring spectators closer to the action and help them understand it in its entirety. This is not to say that the spectators are always becoming more active during their experiences. After all, a spectator may not want to—or be able to—run alongside his or her favorite runner—which would presumably be the pinnacle of such achievements. Yet this alignment of spectator and athlete describes how spectators are becoming more integral to the production of sports events and, as a result, are an important component of how sports are being remade through new media. The nature of this relationship is dynamic, unfixed, and persistently unknowable, as the future of immersive experiences and technology is unknowable. We don’t yet know what audiences 50 years from now will consider to be a rewarding experience or what it entails to be close to the performers.
The experience of total immersion is best imagined as a continuum on which narrative and technological elements come together to remake the experiences of sports spectators and on which perceptions of being present and fully immersed shift over time. For that reason, I am cautious to not present a given future of sports based on some present-day technological interface. Even today’s emerging virtual-reality systems do not reveal much about what future sports spectators’ experiences could look like. Similarly, today’s assumptions about what would constitute a perfect simulation are inadequate reference points, since our perception of the simulation is limited to present-day cognitive and sensory functions and limits.
In part, our inability to imagine the future—and the broader problem of futurology—is due to the fact that so many aspects of that experience are technologically determined and technology operates within complex systems. Imagine a virtual-reality experience of golf. Virtual reality has been utilized for some years to help players improve their golf swings. From the most primitive to the most recent examples of golf simulators, camera and sensor devices are used to monitor the swing. The player is physically performing the same movement she would perform on a golf course. Once the ball has been struck, the simulator uses a screen in front of the player to show where the ball would have gone on a particular course, had it been struck in this manner. Broadly speaking, this technology was not developed for the spectator experience, but it could be. Imagine further that, as a spectator in a remote location, you could watch the player take the swing and then, once the ball is struck, your point of view switches to the ball itself, not observing the ball as it flies, but observing it from its position in the air. The ball itself becomes our eyeball and we fly with it. Add to this the use of haptic feedback, whereby spectators actually experience the sensation of the ball in flight. Together, these elements create a novel form of audience participation, which attests to the idea that our imagination of what constitutes a perfect simulation is fluid. Taking this example further, imagine that, as the ball comes back down to earth, the spectator becomes virtually separated from it, adopting an observer or third-person viewpoint, or continues on its path and feel the bumps and lumps of the fairway as the ball journeys toward the hole.
Sports broadcasters have not yet imagined this kind of spectator experience; at present it is an unknowable audience experience, perhaps combining elements of traditional viewing and aspects that are more comparable to a fairground ride. Yet it is technically not so hard to imagine—each dimple in the golf ball could be the lens of a tiny camera, and stabilizing technology could stitch together what they capture, creating a 360º spherical perspective, so spectators can move their viewpoints in whatever direction they choose as the ball flies. Yet we do not yet know whether this kind of spectator experience would appeal to golf fans. Furthermore, we don’t know what kinds of sensibilities future golf spectators will have, given the wider context of media change that surrounds their lives. Imagine further that the ball’s flight in the air could be affected by some kind of haptic interface controlled by an additional player. The “flight specialist” role could be an entirely new role in sports whereby we try to test the physical capacities of a player to steer a ball in flight using their own bodies.
We do not know whether the richest experience will always rely on some creative camera operator to have the skills necessary to achieve the most compelling perspective, or whether audiences will be the best people to decide the camera angle of their spectator experience. However, we do know that, in addition to creating an experience that provides a first-person view of the athlete, virtual realities create additional experiences. They do not just aim to re-create a conventional experience; they aim to extend it. In so doing, VR provides a wider range of experiences than can be achieved by just thinking about the athlete’s perspective. This is a richer interpretation of total immersion than is typically offered, since it considers the athlete as only one viewpoint in a wider range of actors and props that make up a sports spectator’s encounter. Moreover, approaching sport spectatorship from the perspective of relationships between space, people, and objects invites us to consider further how sports might be changed by altering the physical spaces in which competitions are held.
One of the most transformative ways in which digital technology is affecting the experiences of sports spectators is through the use of augmented reality. Augmented reality is still in early development within sports spectatorship but already has distinguished itself from virtual reality. Though a lot of the discussion so far has focused on virtual reality (i.e., creating simulated experiences of the physical world, either by using computer-generated images or by using camera simulations), augmented reality is distinct in that it involves adding layers of digital content to a physical-world camera perspective so as to enhance the content in some way. One early digital application that is delivering augmented-reality experiences is WordLens, which performs live translation of text seen through the camera of a mobile device.2 The user points the device at some text and the app begins to automatically translate that text from one language to another. This effect is shown as a replacement within the camera’s frame for the language that was there previously. The user’s view then appears as if the physical world has the translated text written in the new language, rather than its actual form, since it also adopts the typography and colors of the physical-world text. Leaving aside the debate about whether the world is ultimately better off with live translation, rather than being populated by people who spend time learning a language, the example illustrates how augmented reality creates content that is additional to the real world and thus creates new experiences.
Applications of augmented reality are still sparse in sports, but some early examples suggest how far this technology may take the sport spectator experience in the future. For example, when pointing a mobile device camera at a basketball player, it could be possible to track his shirt color and his number, which would then cause additional information about the player to be displayed. Such information might include biographical details, playing statistics, and other kinds of information typically offered by a broadcaster during a game. These additional layers of information—and perhaps even interaction between spectators—will have huge monetary value, but will also change what spectators do when watching live.
Sports organizations need to ascertain how to adjust to these new realities. Though it may be tempting for traditionalists to retreat to the idea that just watching the sport should be enough stimulation, the reality is that, already, spectators are not just watching the games. What happens in front of the spectator in physical space is competing with a range of other information and notifications that come to them through their devices, which will divert attention. For those spectators, sports organizations will need to consider how they can ensure they provide content during the game that can ensure attention is focused on them, even if the audience is not looking at the sport itself. The challenge for sports is to re-claim their dominance in the attention economy of live events, and the best way to achieve that is to become part of the mobile experience. The data insights alone into fan behavior and trends will be possible to monetize to allow sports organizations to deliver more value for sponsors.
The transformations augmented reality will bring to physical spaces are considerable. That is why it is especially interesting to think about how a sports arena might look in a future in which augmented reality is pervasive. After all, one might presume that perfect simulations or heightened realities lead to a diminishing need for physical spaces. Yet there are reasons to be suspicious of this imagined virtual future. Indeed, to declare the end of physical space in the face of perfect simulations is what chapter 2 considers to be shortsighted, since this presumes that one can distinguish easily between physical and virtual worlds. This is not at all clear. Although some new sports may emerge that are less dependent on physical arenas, and although some traditional sports may adapt to a similar diminishing need, there is also reason to conclude that the physical spaces in which sports take place will be adapted as a result of these augmented-reality experiences, not that they will become redundant.
In a world of heightened simulations, the physical arena can reinvent itself, perhaps becoming a high-tech hub within which the most compelling augmented and virtual experiences are made available for spectators to enjoy. These new cathedrals of digital utopias would concentrate the playful experimentation with advanced technology in a way that is impossible to achieve within more domestic settings, such as living rooms. This is not because the experience of a spectator in a living room will be free from such technology; rather, it is because the cutting edge of delivering new experiences through digital may only be offered within highly specialized venues. Again, I am mindful of the shifting places in which technology has relocated physical activity—from Straub’s treadmill to Nintendo’s Wii. The spaces we occupy to enjoy leisure activity change significantly as a result of technological capacities that enable new experiences to emerge. Maintaining the arena experience may also have an important economic role—the importance of ticket sales is one reason for why it will continue to have a function as a communal space.
Yet the complexity of these developments requires further investigation. Recall my mention of the Atlanta Falcons’ billion-dollar stadium in chapter 2, where I discussed how “impact seating” would heighten spectators’ experiences. It is not difficult to imagine how home-based technology could also create haptic experiences, although the physical proximity of the spectator to the action may be the underlying rationale for providing it within a stadium—spectators can be very far away from the playing field. Nevertheless, a chair similar to the D-Box chairs I mentioned in chapter 2, linked to a digital television, could allow a similar haptic experience—when a touchdown was scored, a home viewer’s seat could vibrate to heighten the sensory experience.
The overlaying of technological experiences onto live events is not without precedent. For instance, it is common for live spectators to wear headphones while watching a game so as to listen to radio commentary. Indeed, sports have been transmedia experiences for some time already, where user communities help shape and refine the particular medium platform at any given point in history. Fans decide what kind of technology will enrich their encounter and adopt it accordingly, rather than it being designed by sports producers.
Yet each approach to designing additional experiences has implications for how sports arenas become gateways to non-live audiences, and augmented reality may also complicate certain aspects of this. For instance, the International Olympic Committee’s policy of having “clean” venues, with no logos or branding other than the Olympic rings present within the field of play, may be compromised by the increased use of screen-based experiences. After all, if the spectator spends part of his or her time at a sports event watching a mobile device rather than the competition, then controlling what happens within that screen becomes even more crucial for the federation or for holders of television rights. For instance, a third party might develop an app that provides an augmented experience based on what is seen through the camera on the playing field, completely bypassing the rights privileges associated with the sports economies that produce the event. GPS jacking, in which a developer populates a physical GPS location with content unrelated to the owner of that space, is a case in point. In a classic example outside of sport, the artist collective ManifestAR used GPS as a way of invading gallery spaces and turning them over to the public to populate with art work, albeit through an AR (augmented reality) app.
Today sports authorities do little to prevent audiences from utilizing a range of mediating technologies through their mobile devices within venues. However, in June 2016 Apple was granted a patent for camera-blocking technology, which could be used to prohibit filming at music concerts. Yet sports may not go down this route. If anything, sports are increasingly trying to figure out ways to allow audiences to create and experience more within the live context. The question for sports producers is how to do this without jeopardizing the other stakeholder interests that operate around the arena, such as the broadcast rights holder privileges. Yet for the official sponsors and media providers it is a different story altogether; distributing their content via mobile devices is already becoming an important means by which they connect with audiences.
Augmented reality also has a role to play within the staging of sports events beyond just what happens within the arena. This is a crucial opportunity for sports producers to recognize, as a visitor to any sports event may spend only 10 percent of his or her travel time in the venue seeing the sports. Thus, finding ways to connect with audiences during the rest of their time within the event hosting location can dramatically increase the potential for generating revenue and interest. Moreover, what takes place around the sports is mostly underexploited by sports producers, though it should be thought of as a crucial element of the sport spectator’s entertainment experience. Recognition of this wider context within which sports events occur is apparent in how the Olympic Games lead city planners to think of their entire region as something of an Olympic theme park during the Games, where they are encouraged to erect all kinds of adjunct experiences, such as the staging of urban screens within Olympic live sites, in which touring sports fans and non-ticket holders can take part in the festival atmosphere.
One of the most predictable forms of digital occupation within the elite sports arena is through sponsorship and advertising. If a sports organization can find a way to monetize some aspect of the live spectator’s attention, without compromising the integrity of the experience, then this can increase the revenue around the sport. Indeed, for the Olympic Games alone, the value of the transmission for media broadcasters has grown considerably in the past twenty years, from $1.251 billion in the period 1993–1996 to $3.850 billion in the period 2009–2012 (International Olympic Committee 2014) with a forecast of $5.6 billion for 2013–2016 (IOC 2016).3 Some of the more typical ways in which this has been achieved is within the competition arena itself.4 For instance, over the years, the physical billboard within stadiums has gradually been transformed by digital technology, most interestingly through billboard-replacement technology. This innovation allows event producers to tailor the content of a billboard to a specific broadcaster territory. For example, those watching a football match on television in the United Kingdom see different in-stadium billboards than those watching it in South Korea. As Supponor (2015) describes,
Stadium billboards are marked with a special film that absorbs a certain frequency of near infrared light which is invisible to the naked eye. Optics attached to the broadcast camera instantly recognise the billboards and integrate replacement billboards into the live feed. If there are obstructions in front of the billboard, such as players, the system recognises this and masks the “real” figure moving in front with the replacement billboard image behind. It does this in real time, so viewers see an uninterrupted live feed with natural-looking perimeter billboards. Fans inside the stadium see the original billboards which appear completely normal.
The digital billboard replacement pioneered by such companies as Supponor offers even more opportunities to create targeted sponsorship packages for global audiences. Yet it also introduces a further dimension of unreality into the stadium—where billboards have become screens within screens, televisions within the television (Love 2011).
The external spaces of sports venues have also become media zones in their own right, thanks to digital technology. For example, in recent years the rise of urban LiveSites mentioned above, as places for audiences to converge and watch sports events, have created additional spaces in which people can enjoy closer proximity to live sports events. A notable example of this is an area outside the Wimbledon tennis venue where spectators can sit and watch a large screen broadcast of what is happening within the tennis courts during the Grand Slam. The area became prominent when the British player Tim Henman was enjoying success on the world circuit. It now functions as an additional, ticketed venue, the focal point of which is a large screen. Other large-scale events have also given rise to the creation of urban screens, which function as additional venues for people to gather and into which additional services are provided. At the Olympic Games these so-called LiveSites have been prominent since the 2000 Sydney Games—broadly speaking, since the technology has been available. Beyond simply delivering content to new audiences, these new spaces allow organizers an effective way of managing crowds in cases where there is expected to be high attendance. This is particularly important in the production of major events at which there is a need to manage large numbers of people.
In some cases, spectators who do not have tickets for events may come to a city simply with the hope that they will gain access to a LiveSite and take part in the mega-event city celebration. Indeed, often the wait to enter one of these auxiliary spaces can take hours (Piccini 2013). These digitally mediated public spaces have become competition venues in their own right. Around the live sites, additional opportunities for event stakeholders are provided in the form of showcasing, or providing entertainment opportunities and the investments into these temporary buildings can be extensive. Effectively, they are an additional way of extending the brand of an event, albeit under slightly looser regulatory conditions. These venues go some way to enabling wider participation in the mega-event spectacle, but their history is intertwined with the sponsor pavilions at the Olympic Games, which aim to engage the public around a series of brands, which have made an economic investment in the Games and which are seeking to recover part of that through Games time exposure. At the 2004 Athens Games, the 2008 Beijing Games, and the 2012 London Games, LiveSites were also set up in other cities within the nation to extend audience engagement. For the 2004 Athens Games, the city of Thessaloniki was decorated with the host city’s branding assets—banners, and so on—and LiveSites showed sports, as also was done in Shanghai for the 2008 Beijing Games and in many cities around the United Kingdom during the 2012 London Games. In a digital age, the capacity to provide additional marketing/engagement opportunities is extended considerably through these spaces. The ironically named LiveSite (ironic because the central event is mediated, not live) is a consequence of the digitally mediated age, though its future may be yet compromised by the growing capacity to deliver the live content straight to mobile devices, rendering the physical space in need of some re-configuration. If the LiveSite at a mega-event is to have a future, it may need to have its own live content to attract audiences, relegating the principal intellectual property of the event—the sports competitions—to a secondary position.
At the 2012 London Games, an innovation in digital advertising took place within small-scale billboard technology, notably the small posters that sit alongside the escalators that go down into the London underground trains. Historically these posters were printed physical matter, but in advance of London 2012 some of them were replaced with digital screens, making the content far more dynamic. One of the most interesting aspects of this was the nearly real-time update of the screens with Olympics-related information. For example, one of the national Games sponsors was British Petroleum (BP). On its underground billboard screens, within advertisements, it would provide updates on the latest Team GB medalist the morning after a victory. Again, such interventions make it apparent how additional ways of monetizing Olympic program content is made possible by these enriched forms of digital advertising, transforming the incentive to commit advertising spend to locations that, were it not for the technology, would remain a relatively flat form of expected revenue generation. Furthermore, it also evidences the manner in which the Olympic Games can be a catalyst for innovation that can benefit a city after the Games have concluded, albeit in the form of generating revenue.
Digital innovation compels us to think about which elements of any given sport are crucial to the sport spectator experience and which aspects could benefit from digital augmentation. This does not require making every aspect of the spectator experience digitally dependent; instead it requires understanding how the spectator experience can be enriched by a digital solution. In part, this chapter’s inquiry is connected to a longer history of creating immersive experiences through mediation or performance—from theater to augmented reality. The history of mediated sport reveals how changes to the spectator experience are not equally well received or even considered to be enhancements of that experience. Furthermore, once spectator experiences become encoded, implementing a transformation to that carefully balanced experience may jeopardize their enjoyment, as the example of the FoxTrax puck suggests. Nevertheless, immersive technologies such as Oculus Rift and Google Glass reveal how the relationship between the athlete and the spectator can become even closer.
Also at the heart of the digital transformation of spectator experiences is a debate about the value of the live experience—the importance of being an eyewitness to an event. What it means to be somewhere is also disrupted by the existence of virtual worlds. Although one might imagine that televisually mediated experiences fragment and distort the realness of a sports performance, divorcing the spectator from the game’s natural spectatorial form, this raises the question as to what a real, integrated, natural, or true version of the game is, and how we would know it to be so. As Turner describes (2013, p. 89), in a world of mediated live events “the mediated ‘live’ almost becomes a ‘third order of simulacra’ replacing the original real ‘live’ event itself, simulating an almost ‘realer than real’ world in which the event is situated.” This chapter has sought to challenge such assumptions and has examined how mediated and even live first-person forms of spectating are all creative, synthetic human constructions, no single version being able to claim greater proximity to the true experience, or the way sport really is, than any another. It has examined those digital technologies that are creating interactive television programming, making it possible for spectators to adopt the role of television producer, selecting camera angles, as well as replaying formats and speeds, to suit their interests and needs.
In the future, the sports industry needs to re-imagine the sports spectator’s journey through their events, considering the different spaces in which a spectator may be engaged by the producers of their principal experience. From the moment someone buys a ticket for an event—and perhaps even before that—he or she embarks on a journey that can be enriched by digital content. Whether they are sitting in their home and seeing advertising on their television, or on their way to the event itself, these are all moments rich with the potential to engage an audience. Finding a way to do this effectively through digital technology may open up new opportunities to add value to that journey while also providing additional revenue streams for the sports community.