Our 2013 NFL Tech Series provides a quick hit of tech insight on all 32 NFL teams up until kickoff of Week 1 of the regular season. Each feature includes the latest tech advances implemented by the organization in the effort to advance the team’s success… in a wide variety of venues. Stadium experience, fan engagement, mobile technologies, player performance and health, statistical data gathering and analysis… any and all aspects of the organization’s procedures in the effort to find success in the NFL is on the table. We’re uncovering those efforts, investigating those innovations and pondering the benefit they might provide, for the team, players and fans alike… today and looking forward.
Today’s focus is on the New York Jets and how they manage a presence at MetLife stadium for Jets fans while sharing the stadium with the New York Giants.
You know what’s awesome about writing for SportTechie? I don’t have to mention Tim Tebow in an article about the Jets. Oh, crap, I just did.
As I was doing research for this article something interesting occurred to me. If you’ve been following our #NFLTechSeries, you’ll know that most of the teams covered are playing in stadiums built within the last 5-10 years. Conversely, the Jets (and Giants) MetLife Stadium is practically brand new. According to ESPN, at a construction cost of approximately $1.6 billion, it is the most expensive stadium ever built and is the largest stadium in the NFL in terms of permanent seating capacity.
In tandem with a league priority to improve stadium technology, MetLife Stadium was supposed to be the NFL’s answer to the rising trend of fans staying at home on game day.
But just recently, Jets owner Woody Johnson acknowledged that MetLife was in need of upgrades – which poses a very real question: can the NFL truly compete with the ever-evolving in-home viewing experience when a billion dollar stadium is already in need of upgrades after two seasons? While we’ll save that debate for a future article, Bob Morgan (SportStream) and Bryan Srabian (San Francisco Giants) hope to hash this issue out at SXSW Interactive 2014 (you can vote for them here).
A Jets spokesperson recently gave us insight into some of the upgrades that Johnson may have been referencing, primarily focusing on improving connectivity, social engagement and mobile. Perhaps most interesting about our research was our sense of a “tech-first” philosophy the Jets were establishing to keep fans engaged not only on gameday, but also throughout the calendar year.
“Technology is central to the fan experience every day of the year. It allows us to engage with the fan and give them access to our team 365.”
For example, the official New York Jets app, created and maintained by YinzCam, features video-on-demand clips of press conferences, player interviews, post-game blogs and pre-game previews of the matchups. The app will also be a key tool to enhance the gameday experience for fans by providing them “with unique in-stadium features like live streaming camera angles, live NFL RedZone channel, drive charts, stats and alerts,” says a Jets spokesperson.
On gameday the team is using various technologies to communicate with fans according to their interests and preferences and encouraging them to communicate back and with one another via social media using #NYJETS.
Over the course of the season as the DAS and WiFi are being upgraded fans will notice improved wireless connectivity. To help fans make use of these upgrades the WiFi logon process has been simplified with the introduction of JetsFreeWifi throughout the stadium. According to a Jets spokesperson, this network “allows free internet access with no logon splash page to impede a fan from connecting.”
Return to Social Media Dominance
Back in the “early days” when sports franchises were still figuring out how to utilize social media, the Jets organization was a clear front-runner. Led by EVP, Matt Higgins (and social media consultant Gary Vaynerchuk), the team launched its Twitter account in May 2009 and proceeded to lead the NFL in followers for two years in a row. Higgins understood how a good social media strategy was essential to increasing a team’s fan base and maintaining overall interest.
Higgins was quoted in a September 2011 feature by ESPN’s Maria Burns Ortiz:
“While not exclusively by any stretch, I believe [social media] has been significantly responsible for how we’ve grown the fan base in the last couple of years,” Higgins said. “Our website has gone from the bottom quartile three or four years ago to now being in the top quartile in the league.”
Ortiz continued, “Identifying what’s next is part of the reason the Jets have been able to maintain an edge.”
Fast forward to September 2013…Higgins has since departed, teams must now compete with a slew of online content for sports fans, and social is changing at an ever-increasing rate. As a result, it’s clear that some of the social “edge” Ortiz describes in the Jets has wore off. In fact, SportsFanGraph, a site dedicated to social media ranking in the professional sports industry, currently ranks the Jets 13th among NFL teams.
While there’s no direct evidence of a new social media strategy forming, we did learn the team is ramping up the use of the video boards (30 x 118 foot HD display boards at each corner of the stadium, and more than 2,100 HD monitors throughout the stadium) including using them to bring fans in the stadium into the social conversation by posting tweets, Facebook posts, and Instagram photos tagged with #NYJETS throughout the game.
Of course, in-stadium social initiatives will require additional bandwidth and the Jets have a plan for that. The team is working to increase bandwidth to the internet at the stadium to a 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) pipe which will, as a team spokesperson describes, “improve the fan experience by allowing them to share their gameday experience quickly through their social networks of choice.”
According to the same Jets spokesperson, other tech upgrades for 2013 include:
-
CISCO StadiumVision system enabling the team to now, in a split second, synchronize all video monitors in MetLife Stadium, turning the building itself into a fan, celebrating plays along with the fans in the seats
-
Installation of major new public safety infrastructure upgrades
-
Working with partners to roll out unique touch points built on the latest in tech allowing them to bring fans richer and more fulfilling fan experiences at their respective activation areas at the stadium
“This is all part of an effort to give them the best gameday experience over the course of the 5-8 hours they are with us at MetLife Stadium.” Jets fans are sure to take notice when the team kicks off its first 2013 home game vs. Tampa Bay on September 8.