When New England Patriots fans in Gillette Stadium want information on their favorite team, Fred Kirsch is responsible for making sure they’re connected.
Kirsch, the Patriot’s VP of content, oversees all of the Patriots’ media content, from a print newspaper to its website and three mobile applications. Wireless has been a cornerstone of the team’s content strategy, and the Patriots operate their own in-stadium Wi-Fi network that was expanded and upgraded this year.
“You have to go where the people are and give them the content where they want to consume it,” Kirsch said. “And it’s just apparent that mobile is the way to go.”
NFL teams have to be cognizant of the comparison between the stadium experience and the home experience, Kirsch said – and the home experience has gotten awfully good.
“It’s arguably better to stay at home than go and have to deal with traffic, lines, pricing and all that,” Kirsch said. “We’re working all the time to make the game experience second to none, and part of that is making sure our fans have connectivity when they expect connectivity.”
Wireless carriers have installed their own systems at Gillette Stadium, Kirsch said, but even those couldn’t fully handle the network demands – although one of the carriers with a network there, Verizon Wireless, upgraded to LTE this year. Kirsch said the team knew if they wanted to offer unique mobile content, they needed to put in Wi-Fi.
One of the team’s three applications, Patriots Game Day Live, has so far only been accessible to the 6,000 members of the Patriots’ two clubs. Launched three seasons ago, the app and Wi-Fi service have only been available to club members and with the expansion of the team’s Wi-Fi network, can now be offered to the entire fan base within Gillette Stadium.
The Patriots aren’t the only team to focus on mobile as part of the stadium experience. The Arizona Cardinals’ University of Phoenix stadium also has a distributed antenna system, and several companies, including AT&T and DAS and Wi-Fi enabler Cellular Specialties, bragged ahead of last Sunday’s Super Bowl that they were beefing up wireless networks in New Orleans and around the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in order to handle the usage demands of hundreds of thousands of football fans.
And those usage statistics can be staggering. AT&T released some figures from in-stadium data usage during the Super Bowl – admittedly an enormous, once-a-year event – showing that its customers alone made more than 73,000 mobile calls during the game. Total data usage by AT&T customers during the Super Bowl was 388 gigabytes – a more than 80% increase in total data traffic compared to last year’s game in Indianapolis. The operator said it was the highest volume of data AT&T has ever carried on its in-stadium mobility network during a championship game.
Kirsch says he thinks mobile has exciting future possibilities that would enhance the stadium experience. He says he would like to see individual players wirelessly hooked up so that fans can choose a player and listen to his live feed during the game, similar to NASCAR fans’ ability to tune in to pit crews and drivers during a race (something, he adds, the League would have to approve). In-seat ordering systems could allow patrons to place food or drink orders, pay from their seats, and pick them up at an express line – which requires less manpower than having runners deliver concessions to seats scattered around the entire stadium.
The Wi-Fi system has also allowed the Patriots to expand points of sale anywhere within the stadium, because it can handle secure financial transactions for fans purchasing food or souvenirs.
