The Ballpark Stadium of the Future

thejrwr writes to mention a CNN article about the ballpark stadium of the future. The new Cisco stadium for the Oakland A's will be a paragon of the company's technologies, with cellphones carrying personal data used for advertising and identification purposes. "Cisco, which makes the routers, switches and other devices used to link networks and direct traffic on the Internet, is trying to shed its image as solely a maker of networking infrastructure gear. The company also hopes to capitalize on products and services that utilize the network. One example is TelePresence, a technology similar to video conferencing that Cisco introduced last month that aims to deliver a three-dimensional feeling that the participants are all in the same room."

Technology advances...

Ad technology that is.

The best part is you cannot leave the stadium until you buy at least $100 worth of advertised product, but you get to do it with your cellphone! Yay, how cool! Go Cisco!

People really still drag themselves to a stadium through all that traffic when HDTV exists?

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Re:Technology advances...

People really still drag themselves to a stadium through all that traffic when HDTV exists?

Yes, social interaction, atmosphere, making friends etc.

It's not just about the game, there's more to it than that.

Re:Technology advances...

Yes, social interaction, atmosphere, making friends etc.

Not to mention, being able to look at any part of the field you want, not the very small section the director wants you to look at, or a closeup of some celebrity in the crowd, or some commercials, or an irrelevent replay from ten minutes ago, or some talking heads, or any other crap that gets in the way which is avoided by actually going to the game.

You can have the biggest resolution TVs in the world, it still won't count for anything until they invent a technology which allows you to see the entire field, all the time, completely uninterrupted. And no announcers.

Good for Cisco

But it seems like the users of the ball park are going to need a lot of specialized gear to fully utilize the park... Will it degrade gracefully?

Waste of taxpayer money

Look, I have nothing against sports, or sports fans. If they want to go cheer whomever they want, that is fine. Just pay for the building yourself, don't use my tax dollars. Case in point - my hometown Seattle. Apparently nobody liked it because it wasn't new enough or old enough. (the problem with the ceiling tiles was fixable for less than a half billion dollars) So, they tore down the Kingdome to make room for two half-billion dollar buildings. (I heard that there was still three years left on the bonds for the Kingdome - the county hadn't finished paying the mortgage!)

One of those buildings is perhaps used 14 days out of the year. In it, the second richest man in the world pays 50 odd men multiple million dollars a year a piece to play a child's game. As a tax payer and potential fan, I have to pay a lot of money to see the inside of a resource that I pay for.

I don't buy the "increased tax revenue" bit- people would spend their money in other ways. It isn't like I can tell my friends, "hey let's go down to the stadium and play football on the grass". This is a pure taxpayer takeaway, and it sickens me how city after city falls for it. If they want to conduct a business, they should have to pay for the facility just like any other business.

You what ???

So, lets get this straight. The local government pays for team stadia in the US? That's insane. In the UK not only is it private money, often the teams will have to bribe the local council with roads, housing etc. to be allowed to build in the first place.

Sounds like someone is missing a trick

terminology change

pitch: ping
home run: tracert
out: ttl expired

you say...

Or they could just make the game more exciting....

I haven't watched baseball in a while(I'm from Pittsburgh, so maybe that explains why :P) but on a recent trip to Japan I was in Hiroshima and heard that you just HAVE to see a Hiroshima Carp game. So I plunked down the 2000 yen to get a pretty good seat on a bench(there are security guards there whose job it is to find people seats) and was amazed at just how much fun baseball really could be. From the cheers to the fast pace of the game(9 innings only took 2 hours and some change IIRC) it was an environment I had never seen in the US. It was organized chaos.

Granted, the players in the US are probably better than the Japanese players, but damn the Japanese games are much more fun to watch.

The design makes no sense

Look at the picture in the article. There are stands in the middle of outfield and they look like they block the football field too. The baseball/football field stadium makes for a bad seating arrangement.

Tickets

if your ticket was on your cellphone, you would never lose your ticket. BUT. if your cellphone is stolen, there goes your game, if not the whole series. And what if you wanted to sell your tickets or give them to a friend. would my friend have to take my cell phone?

Advertising Overload

Ad technology that is.
I agree although it probly won't be as obvious to an average person as it is to us that loath advertisments.

People really still drag themselves to a stadium through all that traffic when HDTV exists?
You can easily make it to Wrigly Field by way of "The L." Location is everything in bussiness.
  From the article:and pay to show them on the Jumbotron.
For the /.er's who aren't baseball fans thats the equvilent of paying someone to boost your XBox Live score. If you want to get on the Jumboscreen you bring kids, a funny sign, paint your face, and just be a good fan. Paying does occur already for marriage proposels, but special occasions are different than some rich drunk slob who's just going to kiss a clients ass.

Corporate Dollars

First of all, I'd like to point people to: http://www.fieldofschemes.com/ [fieldofschemes.com] which details how sports teams use public money. Although the editorial is certainly against stadiums, the numbers are about the best you can find.

Since I've been following the A's stadium on the site mentioned above for over a year, I can tell you that it is by no means a done deal. Among other things, there aren't enough police to regulate games, and who's to pay for the increase necessary for that is absent in the current deal.

Why we should all hate baseball

The A's are a perfect example of why we all should stop watching baseball. First they threaten to leave Oakland, so the city dumps money into them on the condition that they sell last minute tickets at a price Oakland residents can actually afford. Then a year or so later they complain they need more money and that selling tickets people can actually buy is cutting into their profits and they also want more money to pay off more players because the MLB doesn't have salary caps on players or teams. So Fremont opens their checkbooks and buys the team, and Cisco comes along and to create a new field that will insure nobody from Oakland or Fremont will ever afford a ticket. In a couple years the A's will just pull this crap all over again.

I'm not a football fan, but the NFL has price caps on teams and players. The teams tend to care more about where they play and the fans follow with them even if the team is doing terrible. The A's don't have a lot of people forking out money because nobody can be proud of a team that keeps threating to leave in order to grab more money. In the same city of Oakland you can go see a packed Raiders game in the middle of one of the worst Raiders seasons in the teams history. If you're coming through the Oakland Airport you'll see a huge line of Raiders fans after the game flying home. Even when they don't live here anymore they still love the team and will pay plane fare and ticket fair to see a loosing team.

We should just start boycotting baseball entirely, there is nothing there to respect anymore.

Lies

Oh come on....... everyone knows that the future of sports stadiums is...... cube shaped! [ironicsans.com]

So how much is all this going to cost?

Give me a ballpark figure.

That's not the future...

...but its in the same ballpark

Yum

I'm probably tired, but my first thought was that in the ballpark stadium of the future, hot dogs will be made of Soylent Green.

Cell phones...

Presumably they'll have normal paper or smartcard tickets as well. Not everyone has a cell phone in 2006 - I highly doubt everyone will in 2011. And what about people who lost their phone a week before the game and are waiting on a new one? Let's not turn possession of a cell phone into a "living license..."

-b.

Big Bother

Just goes to show you that big bother is going to find very odd ways to sell things to people

Looks like it was an easy sell

The mayor is quoted as saying:

"It's fabulous -- the technology is something else. It went over my head. It only takes about 10 seconds to go beyond me when you're talking about technology. I can't say I understand it all, but it's going to be quite a ballpark."

He didn't understand it so the default answer was sure go ahead. What an irresponsible idiot. He committed to spending a bazillion tax dollars (and likely forcing people to spend another bazillion) in order to let Cisco and others abuse his citizens' privacy and turn the "game" into a three-hour commercial.

Gross.

Dumbest. Ideas. Ever.

It seems like the SSDD. Targeted advertising? Come on, this has been a pipe dream for years. Targeted advertising is about as useful as it is desirable -- which is to say, not very. Sure, it works for Google... because people are actively seeking something. Nobody goes to the ballpark to find out about a new car.

Tickets on a cellphone? This is obviously change for change's sake. Two peices of paper are just fine as it. You can put them in your shirt pocket, give one to a friend, or sell them when you can't make a game. Why in the hell would I want to tie that to my cellphone? Even if it worked exactly as intended, it would be less functional than the existing solution. There's a reason e-books haven't caught on.

Paying to show your face on the big screen? This has got to be the worst idea ever. Any and all excitement related to seeing yourself on the large display is directly related to the serendipity of the event (aside from those morons who propose at baseball games). People who don't want to pay will resent it, it will be abused by morons, and it's not like it couldn't be done just fine with existing technology. Call or log in up to a week in advance, give your seat number and CC#, and congratulations! You're on TV.

Watching instant replays? Everybody who wants this feature carries a small TV. If you're going to go digital with this, how about streaming the entire game in HD to the internet at large. I bet far more people would be interested in that than there are people who want to watch laptops in the stadium.

In short, adding a few new features that nobody wants and changing a perfectly working process would make this the Windows Vista of stadiums.

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Stadium of the Future Demonstration Video

Watch the video of John Chambers demonstrate the converged IP network along with

• HD Telepresence videoconferencing
• e-commerce
• ballpark security
• Digital signage

http://www.stadiumofthefuture.com/ [stadiumofthefuture.com]

Mod parent up!

That's beautiful. Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have the new Zero Wing:

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Of course, I have never When I stood for. How about it? Give the AC wordbot a hand.

Re:Spooky

It's called the holodeck; did you even watch Star Trek?

Re:Spooky

Product placement like in Eureka doesn't really bother me that much. It gives them a little bit more money and it's not like they're saying the name of the product repeatedly. The only thing that bothers me is that someone like Samantha Carter would use a Dell.