NBA’s Adam Silver discusses how technology, augmented reality will impact fans’ view of the game

Adam Silver recently shared some of his thoughts of the future for the NBA. He sat down with CBS Sports to discuss this.

The question Silver poses is, can the NBA live game experience get even better? As fans of the great game, we never want to see it plateau out or even worse, go down the way we saw it deteriorate after Michael Jordan retired. The NBA has been at a high as far as popularity and access. When it comes to making it better do we think of tweaking some rules to make it even more enjoyable like boosting scoring (check that off for this season) or do make it more accessible for more fans to watch the game live? According to Silver, the direction of augmented and virtual reality is the next step, to incorporate into the live experience this technology to make fans more aware of real time stats as they want to consume them.

Enabling the fans to see things via their smartphones such things like shooting percentages across the court based on where the player is, or seeing what might be going through a player’s mind as they know their favor-ability to shoot from one spot compared to another. But therein lies the disconnect — it also sounds like the bigger discussion that Silver is getting into is allowing more fans to experience front row seats even if they are not among the privileged wealthy class.

He says:

“Even people who aren’t huge basketball fans recognize that the court side seat at an NBA, WNBA game, great college game, is one of the best seats in all of sports. Even if you’re a hardcore football fan or whatever. What we set out to do is we said, ‘alright, first of all, only about 1 percent of our fans globally even get to go to a game in person. And then take the tiny percent, the Jack Nicholsons of the world, who actually sit in those seats, coutside. And then the challenge became, how can we replicate that experience?’”

Do these augmented reality changes bring about this kind of experience? Because this is a snapshot of what is to come.