Replay Technologies is an Israeli virtual reality start-up that just raised $13.5 million earlier this month to advance their multi-dimensional virtual reality tech. Today, it has been announced via blog post that Intel has purchased the company for $170 million, a figure reported by the Globes, an Israeli business publication.
At the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show in early January, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said that “consumers are choosing experiences over products” and then went on to announce that Intel would be working with Replay’s “FreeD” technology by powering it with their 6G core processors.
As a recap, FreeD works by quickly converting 2D video footage into to 360-degree video replays to give fans an opportunity to see athletic events in more ways than ever before. The implementation required for such a conversion is done by placing 25 to 32 super-HD cameras around stadiums.
To date, the FreeD tech has been mainly used in sports, but certainly has broader applications. Perhaps most famously, the FreeD tech as been seen at recent NBA dunk competitions:
Overall, the acquisition makes sense for Intel as they are a computing company and were already powering the Replay tech with their chips and servers. According to the blog post where the announcement was made today, “Together, we will scale this new category for sports entertainment that we call immersive sports, which is attracting the attention of leagues, venues, broadcasters and fans. Immersive sports requires the high-performance computing Intel is known for, and it’s also data driven – fueling the continued build out of the cloud. For athletes, coaches, broadcasters and fans, the ability to capture, analyze and share data adds compelling new dimensions to the game.”
With this news, Intel has made a large splash in the sports world and has joined the long list of global technology companies to see the sports industry as a business opportunity.