On Sept. 7, when the New England Patriots kick off the NFL season against the Kansas City Chiefs at Gillette Stadium, NBC will have its cameras trained on the field. But Fancam will have its own cameras focused on the 66,000-plus spectators packing every level of the stands.
According to Fancam, the company has reached a deal with longtime Boston-based client Putnam Investments to photograph the fans in Gillette Stadium and the TD Garden, where the NBA’s Boston Celtics play home games, for the next two years.
Fancam has been photographing the fans at Gillette Stadium in high-resolution panoramic images since 2014, but it required a photographer to take the photos at the game. The seven-year-old company has since installed remote-operated cameras at AT&T Park in San Francisco; SunTrust Park in Atlanta; Minute Maid Park in Houston; and Madison Square Garden in New York City. It also recently added the hardware in the TD Garden to capture fans at Celtics games.
The cameras — the number of which depends on the configuration of the stadium — take multiple images at many different points in a game. Those shots are then put together to form one large composite 360-degree view of every fan in the stadium for a given game. The images are of such high resolution that a quick zoom allows fans who attended a certain game to easily find themselves in the crowd.
Gillette Stadium is the first in the NFL to implement the camera installation, which will allow for quicker shots — the entire stadium can be captured in less than a minute. After the images are shot, they are uploaded to a cloud system, where they are put together much in the same way that Google Maps images are put together, Fancam CEO Tinus le Roux said in a phone interview. The composite 360-degree interactive image will be available to fans before the end of the game.
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Fancam is primarily a fan- and sponsor-centric platform. “It’s the highest-resolution 360-degree content in the world, and it’s being used to create fan-centric content,” le Roux told SportTechie. “[There are] so many cameras focused on the court or the field, but no one’s really taking pictures of the fans.” Over seven years, le Roux estimates Fancam has captured 30 million fans across the world.
“Fans don’t go to eight games a season; they go to one or two,” le Roux said. “You’ve got a different crowd there, which means every week, there’s someone that cares about their own picture.”
Le Roux added that since each game is also different — the season opener presumably fuels stronger emotions in fans than a Week 7 game — fans engage more with each game and its quirks, highlights, and memories. One particular memory, the Patriots’ Super Bowl Championship parade, covers the landing page of the Patriots Fancam.
That all adds up to fan-first content that sponsors can latch onto. The math is simple: close to 70,000 fans at an average Patriots game each week for 16 weeks, plus potential playoff games, equals a lot of eyes on a sponsor’s brand or product. The Pats can leverage that engagement in sponsorship packages, and sponsors can take advantage of technologies such as facial recognition to see who’s at each game and zero in on their target market.
For sponsors and fans alike, Fancams seem to be the gift that will keep on giving. Le Roux said, “Everyone wants to be on the big screen.” With Fancam, everyone can be on screens of all sizes.