Technology and sport: The future of the NRL's consumer

The NRL has a lane to pick. They must decide whether to reward the fans in the stands or on their sofas.

It’s now at your home, on the train or at the pub. You don’t need to fork out $10 for a hotdog and pay $20 for parking or $40 for a ticket any longer. Live sport is played out on square screens.

So it is a little ironic that the NRL’s slogan for the 2016 is ‘Be There When History Happens’, accompanied by exciting moments from last year. Johnathan Thurston’s dramatic field goal to win the premiership, his missed sideline conversion and phone footage of fans going crazy in the bleachers. All great and very exciting, but let’s face reality folks.

The stadium experience is on the way out.

Last year, the NRL’s crowd dropped to their lowest record in more than ten years. Granted, a series of poor referee decisions didn’t help, but also parking, accessibility to stadiums (Melbourne not included) and the week-in, week-out product wasn’t attracting the crowds. The marquee events like Origin and Test matches continued to get people through the gates (discounted pricing for families and special deals included), but watching your rugby league team now hasn’t become a viable weekly proposition for many.

A cursory review of the NRL’s broadcast deal signed last year just screams of ensuring the trusty television viewer is well fed. Eight matches per week on Fox Sports, increased free to air coverage, a dedicated rugby league channel and now a live-streaming deal with Telstra. Talk about fattening up the fans with options.

The new ‘Central Command Centre’ also added some great transparency while video referee decisions were being made. According to Todd Greenberg, more than 20 seconds on average was shaved off from last year when it came to making decisions. With a split screen to show how the man upstairs made his call, we actually felt like we were Jared Maxwell or Matt Cecchin. It also felt like watching someone’s day in the office. There’s certainly now no room for error. Make the wrong call and everyone knows about it. Just don’t press the wrong button.

So, to remain relevant to their future consumer market, the NRL needs to continue to innovate in the hope of capturing the television audience.

The two sports leading the way in technology innovation are cricket and the NFL. Ever since Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket in the 1970s, cricket has constantly pushed the boundaries with the realization that the future is on television. Stump-cam was brilliant, followed by Hawk-eye, Snicko, Hot Spot, with more recently Spider-Cam, blokes on Segways (for the lazy camera operator), stump microphones (when politely enquiring who the television match official is) and umpire camera, just like on EA Sports ’97.

Grab a bat and some pads and you are basically on the field with England or Australia.

America’s National Football League saw the future as far back as the 1950s, when the Cleveland Browns put a radio inside a player’s helmet, and has continued to add extra levels of comfort for the discerning viewer like giant video replay screens and real-deal, high definition, camera equipment. In February, the NFL and Microsoft held a think-tank on television innovations, looking to predict how people would watch their football in the next half-century. Fans sent through ideas like virtual reality apps and multi-camera angles during games.

Reading through the articles felt like the watching The Jetsons on my iPhone – spacey.

So if the NRL have picked the technology and broadcast lane, then what are they doing well and what could they change?

Referees should have a limit of decisions they can refer to the video referee, for example three per game. With touch judges (who could have cameras too, for added in-game immediacy), spider cam, two referees, multiple camera angles and cameras on the corner posts, there shouldn’t be room to make any mistakes once you go upstairs. But referees need to have the courage – until 20 years ago – to make their call and stick to it. That will shave off lots of time.

Shot clocks for line dropouts are great, but we don’t need them for goal kicking. This is a specialised part of the game. If we put a time limit on this, then why not put a time limit on a set of six tackles? The answer: don’t be silly; it would dilute the quality. Well, telling a bloke he has thirty seconds to kick a potentially match-winning goal is just as head scratching.

Reward paid-up members with the ability to gain content and live-stream their team’s games each week. Perhaps a broadcast rights quagmire but they need value that a cap and drink bottle can’t provide.

Rugby league, and the NRL, has a decision to make: reward those in the stands or on their phones. As someone who enjoys the pleasure of watching live and in front of a television, it will be greatly interesting to see how the sport goes about investing over the next decade.