The consensus at the CTIA Day 3 sports panel discussion is that mobile is fundamentally changing how sports fans experience the game.
Andrea Kremer, chief correspondent for the NFL Network, spoke with Colin Smith, managing director of digital media at NASCAR; John Kosner, executive vice president of digital and print media at ESPN; Emmitt Smith, Pro Football Hall of Fame running back and chairman and founder of Prova; and Simon Wardle, chief strategy officer at Octagon.
With Emmitt Smith on hand, the conversation naturally steered toward football. And Kosner focused the talk even further on what second-screen experiences and creative viewing angles can do for the sports-watching experience.
“You can be in your living room but feel like you’re in the Cowboys’ stadium,” Kosner said. “Mobile is making that possible.”
ESPN builds its mobile apps with priorities on speed, elegant design and learning from usage patterns. It’s a roadmap that seems to be working for the sports TV giant as Kosner said its mobile uniques were up 50 percent annually.
Staying close to the gridiron, Emmitt Smith discussed Prova, the mobile authentification company he founded that uses NFC technology to validate and certify sports memorabilia.
To ensure fans are buying “the most legit item they can possibly receive,” Emmitt Smith said his company collects data via embedded sensors and leverages mobile to get more content about collectibles to fans.
He showed off a football with a smart tag embedded. That ball goes to a team and it used on the field and then users can pull up content and data collected by the ball to verify it was used officially and even by who.
It’s sort of like Carfax for collectibles and it’s working toward addressing a substantial problem, as Kremer pointed out that global counterfeiting will cost consumers $1.7 trillion.
Emmitt Smith said similar sensors are already finding their way into NFL players’ protective pads and the info collected—detailing things like speed and direction—will likely reach consumers via mobile.
Those same kinds of sensors are being put into health and biometric tracking wearables for athletes.
Colin Smith said NASCAR will soon begin outfitting all drivers with biometric measuring wearables in order to mitigate potential health issues for drivers like dehydration.
Putting a few sensors on drivers is just a drop in the bucket compared to all the data-gathering chips and sensors built into a NASCAR vehicle.
Colin Smith said the connected car is “future of where are sport is going” and that NASCAR is currently trying to figure out how to take that information and turn it into a consumer-facing app. One idea is to put mobile users into a “ghost car” and let them drive along with the others at Daytona. Emmitt Smith joked that the NFL could possibly put a virtual 12th man on the field.
But Wardle producing a Dale Earnhardt Jr. flip phone probably illustrated best how mobile is changing sports for players and fans and driving new levels of engagement. It showed how far things have come and Wardle said with today’s connected devices, everyone can “supplement and feed their passion” for sports.