NEW YORK — It’s a rock concert and country music show mixed in with some circus and pyrotechnic theatrics.
Professional Bull Riders, which now falls underneath the WME/IMG umbrella following its acquisition in 2015, came to Madison Square Garden earlier this year with its Built Ford Tough Series.
SportTechie had a chance to tour with Jon Sager, PBR Senior Vice President of Information Technology, to gain a sense of some of the technical aspects of the sports property but also to understand how the operation works behind-the-scenes.
Sager, who has been with the PBR since 2011, called it a “blend between old school technology and new school technology.”
Below are some soundbites from our conversation along with photos from Madison Square Garden.
On the evolution of PBR Live, the property’s Internet show…
It started out by taking the arena feed and broadcasting it on PBR.com. It’s now moved to two full-time production guys and some on-air screen talent. They’re producing and cutting a completely different show than television and the arena. They’ll take a lot of the same cameras in the arena, but they’ll cut to some backstage things, they’ll do different advertising. This operation requires bandwidth at each venue. We put it in our technical riders with each venue for how much Internet we need depending on where we’re broadcasting. We send some pre-shows to Facebook Live or highlights to Snappy TV. That could be anywhere from 10 to 30, 40 megabytes per second we need.
On incorporating more automation/technology with the bulls themselves…
How do you sort the bulls? How are they penned together? Which stock contractor owns this one versus that one and what trucks are they coming in on? I can automate that to 95 percent, but that’s on the roadmap for us. The same thing with choosing the bulls that come here. Cody Lambert is one of our founders and Livestock Director.
He picks all of the bulls that come here and contacts their owners. He writes them down and has all of his notes. I can give him a “drag and drop” to sort all of these bulls and make it easier for scoring. Those are all things on our radar to make the behind-the-scenes things easier.
On the hardware for the PBR’s current scoring system…
We have 10-12 servers, a redundancy for everything. … A lot of times it’s live television, and so we have to make sure that we can fail over pretty quickly. We’ll typically have the clock and some scoring to a single server. We have a database front end, so if we have to set up a show for the following day or add bulls, change any scores, we can do it from that interface.
On the PBR’s old scoring system…
Before that we had an scoring system where you had to more or less, it worked just for this show, you had to freeze it on the database server back in (Pueblo, Colo., headquarters for PBR), copy it down here, run the show, copy it back up. It’s dynamic.
It’s old school. We rewrote it. Our code name for this scoring is Borg, like from Star Trek. Borg is an enemy that takes you into their culture and assimilates you whether you want to or not. It seemed appropriate for bull riding.
On wearables being potentially placed on riders and/or bulls…
We’ve discussed it. From a media standpoint, you could look at a rider and say, “Oh, he’s agitated. His heart rate is moving so fast.” It’s more for TV I think. But then you can also look at it from a rider’s bodily senses. We could also see when a rider is agitated, how much aggression he has.
PBR is now embarking on a test project to revolutionize the sport’s scoring system by using IoT technology, sensors and data analytics. We are placing data sensors on the bucking bulls, to gather and transmit movement data. The goal is to calculate how each bull bucks — speed, spin, thrust, height, direction change and so on — so that the hardest bull to ride registers the highest score. PBR scoring has been done by human judges, and for the first time, we will quantify and qualify the bulls’ moves with objective IoT data.
