ESPN Edge Conference Spotlights Future Fan Experiences via AR and More

Accenture, Microsoft, and Verizon play big part in innovation efforts

ESPN last week held its annual ESPN Edge conference, an opportunity for the company to shine a spotlight on its own next-generation content creation efforts as well as the efforts of key partners like Microsoft, Accenture, and Verizon. And as usual there were plenty of discussions that were great food for thought with respect to the future of not only ESPN but sports content creation in general.

(l-to-r) ESPN’s Mark Walker, Kevin Lopes, and Michelle Steel discussed recent ESPN innovations at the ESPN Edge conference in New York City.

Kevin Lopes, ESPN, VP, sports business development and innovation, sits at an intersection of technology and dollars that is key to ensuring ESPN fans are served in a meaningful and engaging way. And the ESPN Edge efforts ensures tight bonds with key technology innovators.

“ESPN Edge is about powering the future of sports media innovation through best-in-class partnerships,” he says. “We also support business development and try to raise revenue. But in innovation, we have the ability to pick our partners and be selective on who we’re going to allow to innovate with us, and we only have three partners as we are very intentional.”

Mark Walker, ESPN, VP of ESPN Bet, Business Development and Sports Innovation, says ultimately the goal is serving fans anywhere, anytime. And ESPN showed during the conference there are more ways than ever to do that, and the future will see those ways grow exponentially as things like AR, sports betting, data analytics, and player tracking evolve.

“We have innovation in business processes and deal making and production workflows,” says Walker. “It’s not always something that is bright and shiny. A lot of this stuff happens in unexpected quarters, in unexpected ways, and expresses itself in virtually everything that we do. Technology is the enabler, but it’s all in service of the fan and the fan experience.”

The animated telecasts are one example of the ESPN technical philosophy in action. The Disney show “Big City Green” and the Disney movie franchise “Toy Story” both were front and center in the past 12 months and Lopes says the efforts go back to work ESPN did with Canon around volumetric capture of NBA games. That system involved 100-plus cameras capturing data and then pushing all of that data through an Unreal graphics engine. The output was a graphical representation of the court, players, and the ball that allowed virtual cameras to show viewers any angle of coverage.

Kevin Lopes says ESPN is leveraging the intellectual property of Disney to create new ways to engage with fans.

“When you render it in that video game environment, the rules of video games apply,” says Lopes. “You can put a point of view camera literally in infinite locations in that volumetric data capture area. We produced a six camera shoot and brought ESPN’s drone camera operators and flew six cameras and produced the game.  And that really set us out on a path of how we can leverage technology like the player tracking technology that the various leagues are ideating on. And that brought us to what ultimately became the NHL Big City Greens and world-class people that sit in Bristol brought this to life.”

Key, says Lopes, is having access to Disney intellectual property. With the success of Big City Greens behind them ESPN tackled Toy Story for an NFL game.

At the core of those efforts is an ESPN philosophy to do more and continue to leverage technology and partners to create new experiences and create new workflows that are leaner and pragmatic.

“We need to figure out how to continue to grow while leaning into technology to really help us accelerate that growth path,” he says. “For the last few years, we’ve worked on numerous projects that lean on automation technology with our partners. We worked with Accenture and Microsoft to help automate close captioning and we were able to really automate a vast majority of our digital content and captions.”

Lopes says ESPN also leaned in with WSC Sports to send over hundreds of feeds and then have highlights automatically clipped and delivered to the ESPN app.

“The folks that we have can spend a little bit less time editing the highlight and more time trying to think about how they can best deploy that asset for maximum penetration.”

ESPN has also worked with Verizon on gamification and testing new ways to connect with fans.

“Verizon developed games for us, like these addictive short games where you can literally take your phone and use augmented reality and throw AR in your living room,” he says. The Drop AR Mini Games feature two experiences, Puck Pong and Puck Pursuit, and are designed to complement ESPN’s digital show “The Drop,” where fans can enjoy hosts Arda Öcal and Greg Wyshynski discussing upcoming NHL matchups on ESPN+ and ESPN’s YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook pages

ESPN and Verizon worked together to create the ESPN Puck Pursuit mobile AR game.

“You can play these fun games where you’re trying to get a hockey puck into a goal or throw hockey puck into different pockets,” says Lopes. “We are leaning into that technology to see and test what we ultimately want to do with our own access points in the future.”

Walker says analytics is also playing a larger and larger part of ESPN storytelling efforts.

“I’m proud of what we’ve done around NFL draft day predictor which we’ve used on three NFL Drafts,” he says. “It’s a stunningly accurate tool that basically tells you who’s going to go where and when. And now they’ve evolved the tool to give everybody the chance to be the expert and it is tremendously engaging with what fans want. And we also have an Allstate College Football playoff predictor with an upgraded model this year, so we are ready and prepared for the College Football Playoff expansion. That playoff predictor really lays the groundwork to self-generated content that generates conversation and discussion, both for our talent and our audience.”

That technology is also playing a role in women’s sports programming (ESPN currently delivers 33,000 hours of women’s sports programming each year).

Mark Walker says innovation is a constant throughout the ESPN organization.

“We’ve launched a new version of the WNBA basketball power index, and It went 55% against the spread this season, 55% against the spread and it had the ACEs winning from the inception of the season,” says Walker. “We’re also making a big investment in women’s college basketball with BPI which will be available for the first time this season.”

One still developing technology that Lopes is keeping an eye on is augmented reality and the potential, at some point, to deliver it in a device that is a heads-up display.

“Eventually the compute can be done in your pocket on a smartphone or in a box in your living room and your glasses can be like the Tony Stark glasses in The Avengers,” he says. “You can do things like run against a ghost image of your last run or see top tracer on every one of your golf shots…or the wind so you can club up. Augmented reality, being present in the physical world is something that really fascinates me for society, but it also fascinates me on what we can do in sport.”

For example, he says talent in the booth wearing that technology could see speed of an NFL player or how many points an NBA player has scored via a bubble over their head as they roam the court.

“There are really endless possibilities about how augmented reality can supplement how we watch and use sport.”

Adds Walker: “The key to innovation and in ideation, frankly, is listening. And that’s a tool that we really try to develop within ESPN Edge; not just listening to our partners leadership, but really listening to all corners of the company. Because great ideas come from so many different places. There’s a poster in the office in Bristol and it says, Discuss, Debate, Decide, Align. And that’s an invitation to take on a lot of opinion, to take on a lot of conversation. Sometimes people have vastly different ideas about the same thing. But then you get to the important part which is decide and we all line up behind that and we all go after it. And it is that mechanism that I think empowers the culture of ESPN.