Sports leagues are turning to technology to bring fans closer to the game, even if they’re physically distant.

Facebook is exploring how better to mimic the National Basketball Association’s courtside seat in virtual reality. Major League Baseball is enhancing its stats to prepare more augmented reality offerings.  

The National Hockey League and Major League Soccer are both working on upgrading their VR and AR offerings, too.

But it’s not clear whether consumers are ready to to convert to a market that, before the pandemic, researchers estimated could help grow the global economy by $1.5 trillion.

“It’s still missing a couple of things to be successful,” said Nicolas Avila, who is chief technology officer at information technology and services company Globant.

To keep fans engaged during the pandemic, sports leagues used more digital offerings, like virtual courtside seats and partnered with social media companies like Snapchat and Facebook to create AR experiences.

The experiences helped keep fans engaged, but sports clubs eventually want to make money from those experiences, especially VR, which totally immerses viewers in a 360-degree computer-generated scene.

Avila estimates that’s years away. He noted that devices supporting high-bandwidth 5G connectivity, which is necessary for high-definition mobile VR experiences, are just coming to market. Also, VR experiences are meant to emulate the real world, and today’s devices can’t meet those expectations.

“We’re still in the experimentation phase,” Avila said. “But just like out of the blue we had a rise in gaming experiences...the same thing will happen with VR.”

Although Facebook recently launched a new generation of Oculus VR devices and is discussing adding more VR NBA games next season, the company said better camera lenses would be required to truly replicate the courtside seat experience. 

Rob Shaw, Facebook’s head of Global Sports Media and League Partnerships, said the company is “still at the early stage of figuring out how we can create this better experience of sitting in that front row seat.”

Shaw said Facebook isn’t close to monetizing the VR offering and will make that a “priority once we feel good about what that experience is and having enough people walk through the virtual doors to experience it.”

Facebook wants to make its VR courtside games financially sustainable for the NBA, so they see it as an incremental revenue opportunity.

“We do believe that it’s a premium experience that’s afforded to the masses,” Shaw said. “There’s got to be ways that brands are going to want to activate in those types of experiences, and there may be a willingness to pay subscriptions as a result of that.”

At the same time, fans are still attending live games even in a pandemic, showing there will be demand for live events post Covid-19. It will be hard for VR to compete.

“We haven’t caught up with the alternative of an improved experience,” Avila added. “As long as you’re competing with going to watch a game that you can go watch – it’s never going to be the same.”

The better of the realities