BT has demonstrated in-progress work of a customisable multi-screen TV project which could revolutionise how football fans experience games in pubs.
Designed to use the additional screen real estate of big TVs, video walls and projectors, the intention is to create a more immersive and atmospheric viewing experience.
Publicans would have the ability to tailor live sports broadcasts for their regulars by offering up a pick of camera angles, stats and graphics which focus on crowd action at the home or, if there's a mixed crowd, the away sides of stadiums.
The as-of-yet-unnamed concept is the fruit of a joint venture called 2-Immerse, which involves a number of international partners and broadcasters including the BBC, Cisco and the CWI, the mathematics and computer science arm of the Dutch National Science Foundation (NWO). Funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme, 2-Immerse is looking at a number of ways to look at how multi-screen viewing can change and enhance typical viewing experiences - and one of those literally is ‘Football in a Pub’.
As demonstrated in our pictures and these tweets, matches would comprise the same live feed that’s broadcast nationwide in the centre of the frame, while extra graphics, stats and secondary footage provide flavour in the margins.
By ‘secondary footage’, we mean things like crowd and manager reactions from the home side,
footage which BT says makes for a more immersive and emotional experience for fans watching a game in a rammed pub - especially when someone scores.
PC Mag got to see a demo of this, using footage from last year’s Man United vs Crystal Palace FA Cup final, in action at the recent Innovation Week showcase at BT’s R&D centre in AdAstral Park, Suffolk.
It was amusing to see roughly one third of the screen given over to then-manager Alan Pardew's infamous dance - and to then see the same footage played back, only with the ancillary screen space populated with crowd reactions from the other side of the stadium.
It’s this kind of footage that you usually see when the cameras cut away to replays, but with the added bonus of you getting to see it live. It’s a nice complement to BT’s support for Dolby Atmos, which already allows for more immersive sound mixes.
Martin Trimby, principal UX designer at BT, told PC Mag that the idea is that pub owners could curate those secondary feeds in order to cater to the needs of the audience:
“...Currently, it’s the same broadcast that goes into a pub in Manchester, that’s full of Manchester United supporters as the pub in London, which would be full of Crystal Palace supporters.
“What we’re looking to do is use the [main] broadcast as the centre of the experience and then supplement it in this screen space and screens around the pub, with content that actually matches that audience.”
The 2016 FA Cup final demo was built using isolated feeds from 12 cameras; as stadiums typically feature up to 25 cameras, there’s potential for a lot of extra, otherwise unused content to see the light of day here.
So, when will you get to see something like this installed in your local? Well...
Coming when it’s done… maybe.
While no end-to-end trial of this service has taken place to date, BT currently plans to do one during the 2018 FA Cup final. This will see footage broadcast and streamed either to a separate room at Wembley, BT Sport’s Stratford studio, or an actual pub, hopefully with representatives of pub chains in attendance.
Trimby and his associate Doug Williams, principal researcher for BT research and innovation (pictured above), told PC Mag that BT has reached out to potentially interested parties to gauge early interest, as well as gain some insight into landlord’s busy schedules.
With a mobile app, landlords would be able to customise feeds on the go, picking from a default ‘home’ side and changing things up as and when the clientele demanded it.
Williams said that options would be along the lines of “‘Is it England, Wales, or neutral?’” rather than giving landlords a plethora of video options - 12 to 25 different feeds would probably be too much choice.
“We’ve been talking to our commercial people who sell [BT Sport] to pubs and clubs and we’re trying to understand - they’re giving us insights about what it’s really like to be a landlord,” Williams said. “They don’t have much time!”
While ultimately giving publicans a degree of control over how everything looks on the day, BT’s R&I personnel also spoke of plans to automatically assign home team camera angles based on IP addresses.
As well as automatically assigning home team graphics and angles by default, this could also mean, if you were to not watch a game featuring the local side, that you’d get live score updates from the home team flashed up in real time, in a way which wouldn’t intrude on the main feed - kind of an extension of the red button service which already exists on BT Sport Ultra HD.
Williams imagines that the set-up process would involve BT Sport installers visiting the pub, and seeing where people sit. In cases of blind spots, or places where people can’t easily see the main screen, publicans could be given the option of having the same main feeds broadcast on Auxiliary TV A and B, or the same action from a different angle.
What you probably won’t see, however, is a mix of feeds showing the same action from different angles on the same screen.
“When we asked [BT Sport] for the [FA Cup] content,” Trimby said, “we wanted some interesting footage from different angles of people kicking the ball. You put them alongside each other, you’re so confused, you’re trying to work out what you’re looking at from three different angles.
“Quickly, we realised that the most interesting angles were the ones pointed away from the pitch. But until you actually assemble it, no-one had actually thought of [doing] that because you don’t watch football in this way.”
“It was immediately obvious that this was going to be too confusing,” added Williams.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, PC Mag didn’t get to see any evidence of this in action, but we can imagine it wouldn't look great.
A glance at the 2-Immerse slide above shows that there's also scope for pubs to keep the regulars keen with drinks promotions.
While that's not going to change your perception of the game (unless your team's losing horribly), but it's another example of how second screens could be used to draw in the punters.
In terms of how much bandwidth a publican would need that’s unclear; BT’s current 4k sports package requires you to take a Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) service delivering over 40Mbps. Assuming that this service does go live, we don’t expect it to be ready until quite a bit after 2018, by which time availability of superfast broadband via the Openreach network should have increased considerably.
By 2020, BT aims to have reached millions of new properties with ultrafast services, so pubs lucky enough to be passed by these will be fine.
By that time, pub owners would hope that the cost of 4k TV sets would have dropped considerably too.
"Watching the game" by Hans Dinkelberg is licensed under CC BY 2.0.