Live From NBA All-Star 2024: How LED Courts Can Change Marketing, Coaching, and the Fan Experience

The new floor is able to interface with third-party graphics systems

NBA All-Star activities Friday and Saturday will make use of an LED court from ASB Glass Floor. SVG had a chance to chat with Jan Weber, head of sales, ASB Glass Floor, to learn more about the technology and what it could mean to the future of in-venue sponsorships and the fan experience.

ASB Glass Floor’s Jan Weber expects the new LED court to improve not only marketing and sales but also coaching and player performance.

Let’s start with the technology. What is involved?
We are using LED panels with a 4.8-mm pixel pitch that are embedded in the substructure of the floor, which needs to have a certain amount of give and shock absorption. The LED panels are then covered with the glass surface, which has a surface treatment to provide the right amount of give and slip so that there is no compromise for the athletes.

For the NBA All-Star Weekend, the screen will have around 24 million pixels over the area of the court.

How do you play back content?
We can tie into whatever graphic system is desired, and we also have a media server. Our standard package provides our clients with a media server, an operating software, and the ability to interface with third-party technology and visuals.

For example, you can create an opening ceremony, halftime show, or elements for timeouts and then drag and drop the content designed for those events. Then you can run it whenever you want.

How do you make the floor have a give that is similar to a regular court? How did that development take place?
It took a while to get there. We are now at the higher end of certain criteria, and the shock absorption is within 65% of the best values you can get for a sports floor. We needed to make sure it’s healthy for the players and their joints and did a lot of testing.

Have you looked at other sports like tennis or volleyball?
Yes. This is designed for indoor sports, and volleyball in Germany was one of the first events that we did as an official event. In tennis, the ATP has taken a look at it as it’s a fast surface suitable for tennis.

Some events — US Open tennis, for instance — have a lot of real estate around the court. Could someone use this to turn the area around the playing surface into LED while keeping the original surface of play?
Yes, you can do that — although, if you do it around the playing surface, you probably wouldn’t need this type of sophisticated surface because this is designed to be the playing surface.

Since you do sales, how does this open up new sponsorship and monetization opportunities?
We can create new inventory that just wasn’t there to be marketed and sold. Until now, you were restricted to painting something on the floor or putting a sticker on the floor. With this floor, you can create completely new sponsorship opportunities because it’s a canvas on which something can be placed anywhere.

What about uses for coaching?
Yes, we also want this to become a tool for coaching. Everything that you will see during the standard contests, like player tracking, is also a placeholder entering the world of coaching. Imagine a coach with his iPad designing plays and then swiping the play onto this floor. And the players get immediate feedback letting them know they were standing in the wrong spot.

Now we can connect the analytics and data and have players learn more quickly. A coach can take data for how an upcoming opponent has run the fast break for the past five games and feed it into the floor, and the team can [stand on the defensive end] and see the speed with which the players will come at them and where the ball was passed. That’s just one example of its use in coaching.