Introducing the Facebook Sports Stadium
newsroom.fb.com
newsroom.fb.com
Prediction here -> They will make a VR version of this sports stadium app. It will become the biggest use case for VR (outside of geek circles).
Social sports viewing is VR's 'killer app'. It is what will take VR mainstream, and I believe it's the main reason for Facebook's purchase of oculus.
Imagine a VR sports stadium where users can sit in their own lounge, with their VR headset on, next to a avatar of each of their friends, who are in their own lounges. Everyone can have the best seat in the house. The virtual capacity of the stadium is physically unbounded. The VR adds the atmosphere that watching the TV doesn't provide. It also avoids the major VR problem of how to move around in the virtual world, because you don't have to. In the VR world you are sitting in a seat, just like in the real world.
Perhaps in many years time, no one will physically attend sporting events at all.
Whenever I go to baseball games at AT&T Park in San Francisco, there's just something about the energy in the stadium, the sights of the park and surrounding area+views, the "different" (using that word loosely here) food, the cold foggy/windy night games, etc. You can get there early and try to get autographs, which not everybody is into but it's a cool benefit. You have a chance of catching foul or homerun balls.
I think using a VR version of this app would definitely be better than TV, but I wouldn't necessarily say it becomes any more of a comparatively better experience. I don't think it can quite match watching a game live and at the stadium itself.
Spoiler Alert. It didn't.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/education/mortarboard/2008/nov/11...
I'm interested to see how well this works. Seems like most of the good analysts currently post on twitter instead of facebook so that could be a limitation... but if they get a bigger audience on facebook now, that could drive them to change.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/29l7v1/match_thread...
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mobilefoot...
I suspect one of the goals of this product is to help sports fans group together, while also keeping sports-related content off the newsfeeds of non-sports-fans.
I think this could actually benefit them, as well as just being a nice feature. As it is I personally avoid Facebook entirely after some games until I catch the highlights, because I know with certainty that I will see the result on my feed.
http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/enro...
As others have said, this looks like FB trying to capture the anarchic live commenting/participation behaviour from Twitter. I've never seen anyone attempt to do anything "live" on Facebook, that was always Twitter's ballpark.
People already watch games with fb open on their phone/laptop so not too much behaviour change needed. Just a smooth way to get people to this part of the platform at the right time, ideas:
I would do this by sending a notification to users who support a team page, when their team is about to play...
This will also potentially prove to be a way to claim some of the ad dollars spent on sports advertising. There are probably more advertising dollars willing to target messaging around a game than can afford primetime slots. Imagine the effectiveness of ads with the viewership of sports while targeted with the context of a user's FB account. They might be able to draw ad dollars away from TV, or benefit from pent up demand for more advertising opportunity. It'll be interesting to see how sustained its popularity proves to be during sports games - if consistent I suspect it will be lucrative while also making users happy.
Sports is an interesting nexus of the problems that FB has chosen to focus on. Content that's social, but digital, and real-time. I've noticed that, though I can obtain most TV and movie content that I want to watch online digitally, live sports are one of the holdouts. I wonder if success at Sports Stadium might help FB get a crack at streaming them live online, down the road. (1) The advertising could be way more effective if each user is shown a targeted video ad based on the context of their FB account - cable has limited (no?) personalized advertising (2) The alternating intensity and natural breaks in sports games means users accept existing advertising, and embrace it (Super Bowl Ads).
FB must be thinking about ways to leverage FB accounts for effective targeting advertising in more contexts while also delivering compelling user value at the same time - sports seems like an interesting candidate for expanding in that way. A user wouldn't want to link their FB account to their TV for no reason, for example, but if FB can find its way into user experiences like that naturally - such as streaming and discussing sports online - then they'll be able to capitalize on their ad targeting power.
I also see a potential connection to Oculus Rift here. Imagine if you could watch the game live in 3D over Occulus Rift - an extension of Sports Stadium and perhaps a viable application for Occulus. FB must be searching for the "killer app" that makes Occulus users both want to use it en mass, and also congregate online socially. Perhaps 3D sports is just the thing. It will probably take some doing to record and play live 3D video suitable for Occulus, but if they can pull off an experience that "makes you feel like you're there", with 3D and immersive audio, too, then given folks' interest in sports I could see it going somewhere. (Watching regular 3D movies on an Occulus is not so compelling by comparison. Live action sports or broadway plays will be something else entirely.) Killer app: put on the Occulus and feel like you're in the sports stadium watching the game right from the field.