A recent article in the New York Times shows just how much the landscape of professional sports is changing in response to (of all things) the iPhone and other smart phones.

Pete Putman
Insight Media Analyst

The new Meadowlands Stadium has, in addition to four huge LED video screens and 2,200 video monitors, added 500 WiFi nodes and antennas so that fans can not only access instant replays of virtually anything that happens during Giants and Jets games, they can also check in on live feeds from other games.

Fans can also keep track of player stats for fantasy leagues and get up-to-the-second reports on injuries and player substitutions. The technology behind the applications, designed and installed by Cisco and Verizon, can also alert fans to which concession stands have the shortest lines and provide traffic updates for exiting fans.

In the article, stadium management was quoted as saying that "it’s an arms race" between live viewing of sporting events and the media-rich experience fans already get at home on low-cost, big-screen 1080p HDTV sets. NFL coverage on CBS, Fox, and ESPN already provides continuous score updates, breaking news, and fantasy league impact coverage. All of this is augmented by the use of texting and smart phone access to Web content from each network.

The NFL, like many leagues, has seen a small decline in stadium attendance (-3%) since 2007. Some of that decline can be attributed to the economy. But the high cost of tickets ($90 to $700 per Giants or Jets game, plus an additional seat license fee that can reach as high as $20,000) is also a factor.

And many fans have grown weary of fighting traffic and paying exorbitant concession prices, opting instead to watch for free in the comfort of their home theater, removed from unruly fans, inclement weather, and $7-a-cup beer prices.

The move to in-stadium smart phone apps and updates is definitely a generational thing. While one 63-year old fan was quoted in the article as saying he didn’t need the constant flow of information and just wanted to enjoy the ambience and the game, a 32-year-old fan said there were many times he wished he’d been home in front of his TV instead of at the game, so he could hear about an injury, a fight, or other "color" from one of his favorite play-by-play announcers.

The Meadowlands move is just the first of many aggressive technological steps that NFL teams — and those in other sports — will be making to keep fans coming to the park and fend off the challenges of free HDTV, 3DTV, DVRs, NeTVs, and streaming.

Ticket and concession revenue are essential to the bottom line of an NFL franchise. But ticket prices aren’t coming down, and the average TV audience for NFL games in 2009-2010 was 16.6 million viewers, up by 2 million over 2008 and the highest it’s been since 1990.

Even so, there’s a limit to how much a TV network is willing to pay for the rights to carry NFL games, as ABC showed a few years back when they gave up the Monday Night Football franchise to sister network ESPN. And although the NFL carries about eight games a year on pay TV (the NFL Network), they’re not ready to go to a 100% pay TV delivery model for all games (although the college football bowl games are most of the way there now).

For now, it’s ‘bring on the apps‘ time, for the Giants’ preseason opener on August 21 versus the Pittsburgh Steelers. And you can be certain that Samsung, the official HDTV partner of the NFL and a major supplier to systems integrator Verizon, will be a major player during the 2010-2011 season with their new Galaxy 4G smart phones equipped to run those in-stadium apps. (Did you know you can see the new stadium from the roof of Samsung’s headquarters in Ridgefield Park?)

Way back in 1918, Joe Young, Sam Lewis, and Walter Donaldson wrote the classic tune How ‘Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm? (After They’ve Seen Paree), about American soldiers who traveled abroad for the first time in their lives to fight in World War I.

Maybe it’s time for an updated version with updated lyrics by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell that would go like this: How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Up in the Stands (After They’ve Seen HD?).