ACTIVATIONS, BLOGS & VIDEOS
VERIZON 5G | Branded Content/Blog Post
February 2, 2020
A GAME-CHANGING SUPER BOWL
As the nation counts down the hours to tonight’s Super Bowl LIV, much continues to be made of the Hard Rock Stadium’s age, with one reporter calling the oldest stadium to host the game since 2013, “a bastion to the old NFL.” Truth is, the 33-year-old venue symbolizes the League’s long-standing commitment to the NEW. And thanks to the NFL’s decade-long partnership with Verizon 5G, it’s poised to help usher in a new era of innovation in sports and entertainment.
The house that the Miami Dolphins’ one-time owner, Joe Robbie, built was dreamed up in 1976, the year the old Orange Bowl hosted Super Bowl X. Incited by the City’s plans to quadruple the rent, Robbie pledged to give the people of Miami a state-of-the-art stadium unique in every way. Unveiled in 1987, Joe Robbie Stadium was the nation’s first privately-financed multipurpose arena—with a wider-than-usual field and retractable, lower-level seats designed to accommodate both baseball and soccer games.
2006 saw the installation of the two largest video boards in professional sports at the time. And a $400M modernization in 2015 included four more HD videoboards and a state-of-the-art canopy that protected 90% of fans from the elements—prompting Dolphins CEO, Tom Garfinkel to call their home, “a best-in-class, global entertainment destination, [offering] as good an experience as any in the NFL.”
On Sunday, the stadium will become a testing ground for what “best-in-class” can really mean. It’s one of the League’s sixteen 5G test stadiums. And Verizon has transformed it with miles of fiber, more than 1,500 antennas (many under the seats), and a massive dome with IMAX screens and stadium seating outfitted with individual 5G devices. Fans inside the dome will be the first to play the winning games in Verizon’s “NFL Gaming Challenge,” including Juncture Media’s “NFL Ultra Toss” (pictured, top right). In it, players positioned in an NFL stadium attempt to throw footballs into a truck parked on the 50-yard line—and the fact that everyone in the dome will be playing against each other hints at 5G’s possibilities.
Players saw some of those possibilities in 2018, when 5G-enabled first-person goggles and helmet-mounted cameras allowed two NFL players to run plays and catch footballs in a virtual reality environment—their naked-eye accuracy only possible with Verizon 5G.
40 years ago, the irascible yet forward-thinking Joe Robbie put his team up as collateral, risking everything to see his vision through. That embracing of all things new and next-generation is as much a part of the NFL as the game itself. And as the League ends its 100th season and launches into a two-year innovation partnership with Verizon 5G, the two will continue to realize Ultra-Wideband’s potential to revolutionize the way sports are viewed and played. Making it feel like “a whole new ball game.” At every game.
Every seat in Verizon’s dome will be outfitted with its own 5G device.