As Stephen Curry and LeBron James are the two lighting up the court and receiving much of the attention in the NBA Finals, it is their team owners – Peter Guber of the Golden State Warriors and Dan Gilbert of the Cleveland Cavaliers – who are quietly winning off the hardwood.
Oracle Arena, the current home of the Warriors in Oakland, California, is considered to boast one of the best crowd atmospheres in all of sports. Fans cheer for each Draymond Green dunk and roar for every Curry three-pointer. But the capacity limits less than 20,000 to see their beloved players live, leaving the unlucky millions of others to watch the game on television. And for those who are stuck outside of the Bay Area, they’re out of luck, too.
Guber wants to change that.
The 73-year-old believe believes fans should not be limited to their one camera view on their 40-or so-inch television. He wants all fans, spanning from Oakland to New York to Beijing and everywhere in between to experience the game as the fans in the arena.
He has invested millions of dollars in NextVR, a virtual reality startup. Equipped with just a smartphone and a portable headset, Guber plans to enable fans from their living rooms to feel like they are courtside at a game.
The game is shot through a 3-D camera, placed right by the court. The users, from their suites in the arena to their flats in London, put on the headsets, place their smartphones into the opening sockets and boom – 60,000 frames per second are sent to their phones. The headgears then convert it into virtual reality, allowing users to navigate across the entire court and providing them with a better view than any television – or any seat at the arena, for that matter – could ever match.
“You can’t think of VR just as a technology, you have to think about the benefit it renders,” Guber told Fortune. “VR actualizes the experience of an NBA game or a concert or an awards show for an audience that is quite different than a live mediated television broadcast. It allows the distant audience participant to actually be engaged in a unique way with the experience without physically being at the stadium or arena.”
But it isn’t just Guber who is betting on tech. Dan Gilbert, worth an estimated $5 billion, founded Bizdom, a tech incubator to assist startups and potential technological advancements to get off the ground floor. Located in Gilbert’s hometown of Detroit, Michigan, Bizdom also serves to assist the city’s struggling economy by providing jobs, while also giving hope to the ill-fated Detroit.
Some of the apps created within the incubator, such as GreenLancer, Cribspot and Chalkfly, have already raised millions of dollars in funding and contain thousands of users. Gilbert is providing a platform to encourage outside-the-box thinking while giving young people nationwide the realistic ability to reach and exceed expectations.
Aside from Guber and Gilbert, tech seems to be a growing trend among NBA owners. Mark Cuban, the outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks, made his billions in the earlier days of the Internet, selling Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion to Yahoo! right before the dot com crash, according to The Wall Street Journal. He is also featured on ABC’s popular Shark Tank as one of the investors. Most recently, he launched CyberDust, an app intended to rival text messaging, which deletes messages 24 seconds after being read.
And then there is Paul Allen of the Portland Trail Blazers and Steve Ballmer of the Los Angeles Clippers, who both helped turn Microsoft into the dominant force that it is today. The former co-founded the company with Bill Gates and is credited for coming up with the name, “Microsoft.” Ballmer was Microsoft’s chief executive officer for 14 years, increasing the company’s revenue during his tenure and even providing entertainment with his energetic attitude.
Although the space is still relatively small, the success of those in tech is beginning to leak into sport at a higher rate. If this is a tendency that continues – and all signs are pointing in the right direction – sports will be better off.