NEW YORK — The slow motion video on-demand mobile technology from neo 360 is coming soon. For sports fans, that means the ability to swipe on a mobile device to change the speed of a highlight.
“I like to say, ‘Grandma has an iPhone, right? So you can’t even surprise her with technology anymore,” neo 360 CEO and co-founder David Borish said at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. “So when we show people the controls that we’ve created, everyone’s surprised because they’ve never seen it before.”
So neo 360 ran a test for FOX Sports in November at the Minnesota Vikings-Arizona Cardinals, and Borish called it a success when it came to building an encoder that could get a video clip to a mobile app for slow-motion purposes in about a minute.
“Super slow motion is one of the reasons that viewing sports on television is more than engaging. Being able to control these high frame rate clips at your own pace and direction is certainly a relevant and compelling companion,” Mike Davies, Senior Vice President, and Technical and Field Operations at FOX Sports, said in a statement.
neo 360 is now in discussions with FOX Sports and other sports networks in the U.S. and Europe on integrating the patent-pending technology into their existing apps. Since slow-motion clips could be engaging on social media and the technology currently works best with short form content, the company is exploring potential partnerships with social networks as well, according to Borish.
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neo 360’s technology encodes high frame rate video delivered by the broadcast truck, and the challenge from FOX Sports was to build an encoder that could live on the broadcast truck not interrupt workflow. With a drag-and-drop feature that runs any high-speed video into the encoder, it automatically processes the video in seconds then sends it to a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to be delivered to the mobile app.
Borish said he thinks it’ll be a matter of months before viewers will be able to control high-speed video with their mobile devices. Users can demo the neo 360 technology by going here for iPhone and here for Android. The video can also be controlled using a virtual reality headset.