My SBJ colleague Joe Lemire dives into the tech overhaul that Fox NFL Kickoff brought to one of its pregame stages. We’re talking the addition of 54 million LED lights here.
Read more of his breakdown below. — Ethan Joyce
In today’s edition of Power Up:
- Fox NFL Kickoff gets new high-tech studio
- Model Health raises $1M pre-seed, led by APEX Capital
- Student Athlete Score scoops up Auburn
Fox NFL Kickoff gets new high-tech studio for 2025 season
Fox NFL Kickoff will have a new, high-tech studio for its pregame show on Sundays this season. The network’s Stage B, which debuted with the launch of FS1 in 2013, received a major overhaul during the summer to incorporate more than 54 million LED lights and double the real estate of Stage A’s LED volume walls, an interactive and responsive backdrop to the set.
The set will air its first live programming with Colin Cowherd’s show later today before making its Fox NFL Kickoff debut on Sunday -- the 11am ET opener to the flagship pregame show, Fox NFL Sunday. The revamped Stage B will also host some college football, postseason MLB and FIFA men’s World Cup coverage as well.
“We really see the benefits of LED and what you can do to tell stories and enhance a show and change things regularly,” said Zac Fields, Fox Sports SVP/Graphic Tech & Innovation. “We realized one of the big things coming off of Stage A was, as grand as our LED volume was, if you want people to be able to move around and show more relationship shots, it really needed to be bigger. So this one, this LED volume, is twice the size, which gives it a whole other dimension into doing a show.”
Fields said there are 36 rendering engines powering the LED volume walls, with the crew using Pixotope software on Unreal Engine. The graphics create the sense of extended reality, with augmented reality graphics able to be superimposed on the screen as well.
“Those engines display the graphics and work in concert with the cameras that are calibrated so that whatever perspective the camera sees, the walls react to essentially create that illusion that that’s where you are,” Fields said.
The Fox NFL Kickoff talent -- Charissa Thompson, Charles Woodson, Julian Edelman and Cowherd -- used to have to walk to a new part of the stage for a different setting, but now the set “moves to them,” Fields noted. The Stage B set was redesigned by New Zealand firm Architecture van Brandenburg, which also led work on Stage A.
“One of the core approaches was to make sure that, not only is there this grand space, but there’s a lot of depth, and everything is I wouldn’t say modular, but the set itself has the ability to come alive,” he added. “So you might see walls move. You might see pieces of the set that actually turn into graphics, almost like kinetic architecture, and that’s one thing that we’re looking forward to that’s quite different.”
Model Health raises $1M pre-seed, led by APEX Capital
Movement tracking startup Model Health, whose software leans on advanced computer vision and provides professional-level tracking capabilities through smartphone tech, has announced a pre-seed round of more than $1 million.
The round was led by APEX Capital, an athlete-led venture firm that features stars like Real Madrid’s Trent Alexander-Arnold as well as Formula 1 drivers Lando Norris and Carlos Sainz. Other participants in the round were Syndicate One, LeanSquare, imec.istart (an accelerator program), and an angel investor pool of physical therapists, tech entrepreneurs, and an undisclosed European football player.
Model Health was founded in Belgium and maintains headquarters there and in the U.S. The company, which has three full-time employees and launched late last year, seeks to expand throughout the U.S. by targeting a client base of sports clinics and professional organizations. The pre-seed round will go toward that mission and to further develop the Model Health product. The company has established both European and U.S. clients, which include Decathlon.
SAS continues SEC expansion with Auburn addition
Student Athlete Score, an NIL athlete valuation platform, has signed Auburn University as its latest client. It’s the second school from the Southeastern Conference to announce its connection to the startup in as many weeks.
Auburn athletics will fold SAS’s platform, which evaluates athletes’ social media values and provides connections to brands, into their NIL efforts. SAS intelligence will also be utilized by Playfly Sports, the school’s multimedia rights holder, to bolster its campaign development for the school and its corporate sponsors.
Last week, SAS signed with JMI Sports to support Kentucky. The two SEC schools join a growing SAS client list that also includes Michigan, USC and Wisconsin.
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