With FanVision on the Rise, It’s a Matter of Time before Telairity Makes It to the Superbowl

Just in case you haven’t already heard the news, Superbowl XLVI is barreling your way this coming weekend. A record-breaking number of American households are expected to tune into this year’s game in Indianapolis, mostly through television, but also an increasing number via interactive platforms such as Internet television. For those who will be attending the game physically, the visual experience will be, as yet, limited (for the most part) to their own pairs of eyes.

That wouldn’t be the case if Indianapolis came equipped with FanVision technology, like an growing number of NFL stadiums do (in addition to the University of Michigan’s Wolverine Stadium, the single largest sports stadium in the U.S.). Using FanVision’s signature 10-channel hand-held controllers, attendees have been able to personalize their experiences of football games like no previous live audiences have been able. By viewing instant replays, by monitoring game stats in real time, by tracking live commentary and more, fans can now interweave, in many stadiums, between the real, live sporting-event and its virtual broadcast without ever leaving their seats.

Telairity has played no small role in helping develop FanVision’s new live-meets-interactive technology. When you consider just how much bandwidth a high-speed, high-definition, hand-held interactive device usually takes up, and then try to picture some 50,000+ pairs of hands each using such a device in a crowded stadium, you wouldn’t be faulted for thinking that the speed and picture quality of FanVision would be something less than great.

But that hasn’t been the case. Telairity’s Series 9000 (SD) H.264/AVC encoders allow excellent speed and video quality for FanVision technology. With each of FanVision’s ten channels employing something along the lines of 750 kilobytes of space, and there being 10 MB of bandwidth space for the stadium overall, large numbers of fans can access simultaneously the same FanVision channels without any bandwidth overcrowding. Few if any companies could design encoders that winnow down a channel to a mere 750 kilobytes, but Telairity has proved itself an ingenuous exception time and again, in this instance as well as others.

What do the fans think of FanVision? The reaction across the board is overwhelmingly (maybe even sometimes explosively) positive. As a fan from St. Louis says about his FanVision console, :I love it, I won’t even go to the bathroom without it.” Or as “tailgatejoe” from Denver puts it, “For any of you wondering whether it is worth the money, the short answer is HELL YES!” Or as another Denver Broncos fan puts it in milder and perhaps more accurate language, “The picture quality and smoothness of the video were tremendous.”

FanVision got its formal start in 2010 at eleven major football venues, but with the unmatched power of Telarity’s optimal encoding technology, and with football growing bigger by the year as a sport and as an enterprise, it’s only getting started. With FanVision’s stunning high-def visual clarity, seamless interactivity and speed that can run circles around Chris Johnson, it’s only a matter of time before FanVision makes it to the Superbowl.