NBA in VR • Transforming the Fan Experience
Immersing fans in the action with NBA in VR.
You’re sitting courtside at an NBA game with your best friends, enjoying commentary from an NBA world champion. Your friends, who live across the country, didn’t fly in to see it with you—because you’re all experiencing the game live in VR with a Meta Quest headset. Today’s sports fans want to feel close to the action while engaging with their favorite games, so we partnered with Meta to immerse audiences within 56 NBA games across 3 seasons, offering a social and interactive viewing experience that goes well beyond traditional broadcasting.
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Going beyond broadcast possibilities with software-defined production.
With a 180° courtside view captured in 5K and fluid 60 frames per second, we delivered a lifelike experience to fans. But building such an environment required going beyond the limitations of traditional broadcasting. With advances in technology from Meta, AWS and NVIDIA, we built a cloud-based, software-defined production workstream that significantly reduced the amount of equipment, personnel and cost normally required to broadcast a game. Compared to the 54 camera angles at the NBA 2020 Finals, we only needed five cameras and three people on the ground supported by a remote crew.
A social experience between friends and fan favorites.
Once in the game, audiences could do more than merely watch. Within Meta’s socially focused venue, viewers could engage with friends and fellow fans—and even familiar athletes. Each game featured live commentary from guests like NBA champion Richard Jefferson and WNBA champion Renee Montgomery, making each game feel like a conversation. In addition to the immersive VR experience, the broadcast pipeline is built to allow for content distribution across a wide range of formats and channels. Gen Z fans consume more highlights (50%) than live (35%), validating the appetite for this moment-based approach to content delivery.
This quality was outstanding in stunning 5K resolution. For comparison, the “majority of game feeds” on the NBA redesigned global app are in 1080p and you may find 720p for some broadcasts as well. The difference is massive.
Evolving the future of media and entertainment, now.
NBA in VR was designed to reflect fans’ desire for authentic, interactive experiences—adding a revolutionary new layer to watching sports from home. By leveraging the combined expertise of Meta and Monks, we were able to create a groundbreaking VR broadcasting capability for NBA games that pushed the boundaries of traditional broadcasting and paved the way for the future of media and entertainment. Together, we delivered a lifelike and immersive experience to fans to connect with each other and their favorite athletes.
