At the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas, new technologies are being tested and production teams are reimagining how basketball might be covered next season and in the years to come.
The NBA is working alongside ESPN during the two-week offseason tournament to experiment with new cameras, sensors and second-screen experiences. Steve Hellmuth, the NBA’s executive vice president of operations and technology, says the league has created a “test bed” of innovation with the event and is encouraging creativity and failure.
“We can try things, suffer the chaos of failure,” he says. “Normally with game broadcasts you’re up against the wall. It has to work. It has to get done. You have one game, one shot. Four quarters and you’re out. But here at the Summer League we redefine the way that we work together and how we do things based on the fact that we can fall flat on our faces, pick ourselves up, and try again.”
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ESPN has a similar view, although it must still weigh its commitment to advertisers and viewers (the network is airing and/or streaming all 83 Summer League games across its suite of properties). Tim Corrigan, senior coordinating producer for NBA on ESPN, said the tournament has enabled the NBA rights holder to test new cameras and flight patterns, while experimenting with supplemental experiences on the ESPN app. This week, for example, ESPN tested out new aerial shots with Spidercam, a rival to the Skycam used in NBA broadcasts last season. The Spidercam has slightly more mobility and agility in terms of its ability to get closer to the court. Next year, the NBA hopes to expand the use of aerial cameras, according to Hellmuth.
“We’ve really brought that along under ESPN’s direction and it’s going to get even more wide use next year,” Hellmuth says. “The camera is going to fly more over the court during play, be able to come down for the huddles, do walk-ins/walk-offs, and give fans the feeling of being closer to the field of play.”
Some experiments, such as those being done with aerial cameras, seem to be a shoo-in for next season. Others, however, might not make it out of the Summer League. One such example is a lap camera, which the league tested during one game by having a cameraman capture footage from a courtside seat. The viewpoint was meant to mimic the way people now capture games on their smartphones, but Hellmuth said it would require the purchase of three premium seats because the fans to the cameraman’s immediate left and right often blocked the shots.
“It’s a shot we’ve seen repeatedly on social media so we wanted to look at it and see what it looked like for us with a broadcast-quality camera,” Hellmuth says. “The answer was that it was OK. It worked for certain shots, only as a replay, and didn’t work as a live camera.”
Meanwhile, ESPN has spent significant effort building out new second-screen experiences. During the July 6 game between the Toronto Raptors and Golden State Warriors, ESPN worked a lively group chat among colorful NBA personalities into the broadcast. During the July 7 game between the Chicago Bulls and Cleveland Cavaliers, it hosted pop-up factoids, statistics and historical references on the screen to enhance the presentation. During the July 8 game between the Washington Wizards and Brooklyn Nets, it positioned cameras ten rows up to use as the primary game cameras to give viewers a courtside experience that was further supplemented by an array of courtside cameras and microphones.
“We’re all here and all the teams are here,” Corrigan says. “You get to test it in a real basketball situation with real basketball players.”
ESPN is also testing a new sponsorship model that would limit the amount of traditional 30-spot commercials. Borrowing from podcast models, it’s experimenting with hosting sponsored content using ESPN talent. During one game, it brought in Daily Wager host Doug Kezirian and Preston Johnson, who lives in Vegas, to chat about sports betting and Sin City. (The Summer League is being sponsored by MGM Resorts, the NBA’s official gaming partner.)
“The teams, the league, everybody is trying to take the flow of the game and tighten it up a little bit,” says Corrigan. “These can be opportunities to experience different types of content and tighten up the game.”
In particular, Hellmuth has his eyes on the Noah Basketball sensors that capture game data from the hoops. The sensors measure the arc of a shot and how far to the left or right a ball is from the center of the basket. Noah is used by several NBA and NCAA teams to train, but with the sensors being used at the Summer League, Hellmuth is imagining how the data might enhance broadcasts.
“I’m taking all that data and trying to create an animated shot chart with a 3-D effect,” he says. “The shot chart has been this dull Xs and Os thing forever.”
The Noah sensors might even be able to improve the speed of the game. Hellmuth is looking to see whether they might be able to inform the 24-second clock operator when the ball has touched the rim.
Perhaps, one day, the NBA might even be able to automate that process.
“We always lose a little time there because it takes a human a while to see the ball clear the net and hit stop,” Hellmuth says. “A machine could do it much more accurately, which would be better for the sport.”
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