Burnley FC and Rezzil announce first-ever VR matchday broadcast experience.
Burnley FC’s pre-season match against Lazio FC, on Aug. 9, will be broadcast in virtual reality (VR) through the Premier League Player app. Live player data will be streamed and recreated on the virtual pitch. This is a first for the Premier League and, it seems, for professional football as well. It is not a first for professional sports, however. That honor, as far as we can tell, goes to the National Hockey League (NHL) and the Xtadium app, which together so broadcast this year’s Stanley Cup final, on June 4.
The catch is that the app works only on Meta’s Quest headset. That would cap the audience for VR matches through the app at 20 to 25 million – the common estimate of Quest sales so far. Of course, not everyone who owns the headset is interested in football.
Burnley partners with Rezzil a company for “coginitive sports trainers”
Meta doesn’t break down sales by product, but during its latest earnings call with investors CFO Susan Li said the following: “Within our Reality Labs segment, Q2 revenue was $370 million, up 5% year-over-year due to increased sales of AI glasses, partially offset by lower Quest sales [emphasis ours].”
Anyhow, to make this VR stream possible Burnley has struck a deal with Rezzil, a software company in the UK that has developed a “cognitive sports trainer” and has deals with Manchester City, Liverpool, Adidas, Juventus, the Las Vegas Raiders, the NBA, Redbull and others. There will be no subscription or paywall for the match. VR spectators will get a “virtual seat inside Turf Moor with a full panoramic pitch view.”
