A new type of light show is making noise at college stadiums across the country. Unlike traditional shows, these pregame festivities work through smartphones and are helping boost in-arena mobile fan engagement across college sports.
CUE Audio’s data-over-audio transmission technology has triggered shows at basketball and football games hosted by big-time college programs such as Purdue, Clemson, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Iowa State. Since Jameson Rader founded the company in 2017, it has supplied light shows across 681 events spanning 81 different partners. About a year ago, CUE received investment from Glenn Picquet, who also holds a minority stake in the Texas Rangers.
In 2015, Rader was working as an econometrician for an amateur hockey team based in Omaha, Neb., when he read an article online about flashing wristbands that were given out to fans at a Coldplay concert to create crowd-sourced visuals. But, according to NME, the price of the wristbands ended up being far too steep for the band. Since practically everyone attending a sporting event or concert already owns a smartphone, Rader thought a cost-effective alternative could be using the flashlights already integrated into those devices.
Rader knew traditional connections are often comprised at sporting events attended by thousands of people. So he set out to develop a transmission method that embeds data into the sound itself.
“Wi-Fi, cell service, and Bluetooth are waves on the electromagnetic spectrum,” Rader explains. “They are similar to visible light, also an electromagnetic wave. On the other hand, CUE operates by encoding data into sound waves. You could say that the waves are the same, but what they are traveling through—the medium—is different.
“As an analogy, if you have a piece of data, say a code word, and you want to broadcast it to your friend, you could write the word down on a piece of paper and hand it to them … or you could whisper it. The first instance uses light to transmit the code word and the second uses sound. In the same way, comparing Bluetooth and CUE is like comparing light and sound,” he added.
Data-over-audio is not a new concept, but CUE is the first company to utilize the technology to create light shows at sporting events. CUE transmits data through ultrasonic sound waves that are inaudible to the human ear at frequency ranges between 18 and 20 kHz. The high-pitched sound can still be picked up by a microphone built-into any regular smartphone. No internet connection is required, though the device must have an app installed and the signaling device must be less than about 500 feet away to work.
“One of the major selling points is there’s no added hardware for our technology,” Rader said. “It works on just about every speaker out there, even a $10 speaker you could pick up at Walmart.
“Our software is available as a library for other companies to use. They just download our [software development kit] and they could drop into their project and integrate with four lines of code to start using this technology within their own applications.”
CUE has integrated with the official team apps of about 20 to 30 colleges in the U.S. For the synchronized light shows to work, fans must open their team app when the light show is set to begin. From there, a university simply plays CUE’s audio file to trigger the synchronized light show.
“Once you integrate a light show into [a team’s app], we’ve seen downloads increase by as much as 1,000 percent and typically in the range of 400 to 500 percent,” Rader claims. “If you were to look at the top 100 sports apps on Google Play, I think CUE would be involved in 10 to 20 right now.”
The company doesn’t collect any user data from its integration into smartphones. “We’re not in the business of collecting data. We’re in the business of getting people to participate. If you throw something like that up as a barrier, you see participation go down,” Rader said.
The increase in fan engagement driven by the innovative fan-driven light show experience has caught the attention of sponsors.
“Coca-Cola is one of our main sponsors. So in a lot of colleges, Coca-Cola will sponsors the light show. We’ll use the display to show a Coca-Cola logo during the show. That way [Cue Audio’s platform] becomes more affordable to the college.”
In addition to light shows, CUE has used its data-over-audio technology to trigger synchronized selfie photos and synchronized trivia games at live sporting events. But Rader realizes his small team of about 10 staff can’t possibly explore all the potential uses of data-over-audio transmission.
“There are so many possibilities to where we recognize that we can’t possibly pursue them all. So that’s why our technology is available for license,” Rader said. “Anyone who has a cool idea has the ability to pursue that idea using CUE’s technology.”