Buffalo Bills fans have plenty to cheer about this season, from Josh Allen's MVP-caliber start to a new $2.1 billion Highmark Stadium being "billed" as the latest showcase of high-tech wizardry in sports.
Flashy video boards command attention above the field. A canopy shields much of the crowd from Buffalo’s challenging weather without covering action on the field. And 32 massive speakers deliver crisp audio and bone-rattling bass into the stands, supercharging crowd energy.
The most important technology, though, is the kind fans never see. Instead of cobbling together dozens of separate networks for different systems, the team runs many of them on a single converged network. Cisco supplied the networking equipment while Nutanix provided supporting data center software.
“I really wanted to have robust infrastructure capable of supporting us into the future,” said Shaun Handley, IT infrastructure project director for the Bills, in an interview published by Network World.
“Developing something that’s going to be that single pane of glass, so I’m not jumping between multiple vendors. It just makes everything that much more efficient when we’re working, especially on a game day when we have 60,000 people in here.”
Highmark is among a growing number of football, basketball, and baseball franchises that are rethinking IT infrastructure to support technologies that improve operations, game-day connectivity, and fan experiences in new and existing stadiums.
According to Grand View Research, the global smart stadium market reached an estimated $18.09 billion in 2024 and will grow to $39.55 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of 14.4%. The research firm attributes the growth to rising demand for immersive fan experiences, 5G connectivity and internet-connected infrastructure.
That approach marks a break from how stadiums have long been wired. A single venue has historically run as many as 46 separate networks for elevators, broadcast, security, sound, video replay and more, according to Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst of ZK Research, who covers technology across sports leagues.
Maintaining that many parallel systems is expensive and traps information in data silos, Kerravala told The Forecast.
"You don't get the luxury of being able to take that data and aggregate it," he said. "If I want to really understand a fan, then I've got to be able to bring my broadcast, or my stadium camera feeds into the same data set as maybe the Wi-Fi."
How Does Connected Stadium Technology Keep Crowds Moving?
At Barclays Center, home to the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets and the WNBA’s New York Liberty, fans facing long lines at the main entrance can check a video display to see whether another gate offers a shorter wait.
Basketball fans eager to grab a hot dog and a beer or soda before tipoff may not think much about the display. But moving bodies around stadiums as efficiently as possible is a top concern for venue planners, who know long lines equate to annoyed customers and lower revenues.
“Movement of people equals revenue and customer satisfaction,” said Zack Klima, founder of WaitTime, whose software anchors crowd management at Barclays and other venues.
Klima told The Forecast his system combines cameras mounted around stadiums with analytics software powered by WaitTime’s artificial intelligence (AI) to count people, measure lines and estimate wait times without identifying individual fans. The software processes camera feeds on servers at the venue, then shares crowd counts and estimated waits with the people and systems that manage entrances, concessions and fan information, he said.
During an event, operators can then respond much like an airport employee directing passengers toward a shorter security line. They can open another entrance, shift staff or guide fans to a less crowded concourse. Afterward, they can compare events to find recurring bottlenecks. If one concession line spills into a walkway every game, the venue might change its barriers, move a counter or staff that location differently, Klima said. WaitTime also operates at the Miami Heat’s Kaseya Center, the Kansas City Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium and, on a smaller scale, Dodger Stadium, he said.
Video analytics also help keep fans safe, Kerravala said.
“If there are too many people in an area with opposing jerseys, you can pretty much predict that a fight might break out and dispatch security there,” he said.
Why Does Connectivity Matter to Fans?
Keeping people moving is only part of the job. Fans also expect the digital services on their phones to work anywhere in the building.
Once upon a time, that didn’t matter so much. Fans watched the field and looked to the scoreboard for replays and information. Now their phones serve as tickets, cameras and wallets. For teams, that shift is a blessing and a curse.
The curse is that fans notice when connectivity fails. At the old Highmark Stadium, which sits across the road from the new one, the Bills struggled to make calls or send texts, let alone post video, Handley told Network World. Teams with older venues are left to choose between retrofitting buildings designed long before Wi-Fi and weathering the ire of disgruntled fans.
The blessing is that well-funded sports franchises like the Bills, who reportedly installed roughly 1,300 Wi-Fi 7 access points in the new Highmark Stadium, can build all sorts of revenue-generating digital services on top of that connectivity to please their fans. The Bills’ old network was problematic, with calls, texts and apps struggling to meet game-day demand. Early testing of the newer Wi-Fi network reportedly showed more than 800% higher speeds and capacity.
At Intuit Dome in Inglewood, Calif., the Los Angeles Clippers have built a game-night experience that assumes nearly every fan in the building is online from the moment they arrive.
Fans enter using facial authentication tied to the team's app, which also links to a digital wallet. Concession stands and team stores run on a system the Clippers call Zoom Thru. Fans walk in, grab a beer, a snack, or a jersey and walk out, with the purchase charged to their account. Similar systems run at Lumen Field in Seattle, Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, Empower Field at Mile High in Denver and Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.
Each of Intuit Dome’s 17,927 seats has power to charge a phone and a four-button controller in the armrest, modeled on an Xbox gamepad. During timeouts and halftime, fans use the buttons to play trivia, prediction games and other contests on the Halo Board, a double-sided video ring suspended above the court. Armrests built with PixMob and Dreamseat also carry LED lights and eye-safe laser pointers. As fans get knocked out of a game, their lights go dark until a single winner is left glowing. Audio sensors can pinpoint crowd noise down to an individual seat. According to the team, more than 80% of the armrest controllers had been used after the first three games in October 2024.
Kerravala sees such investment as a competitive necessity. In a market crowded with bigger draws, the Clippers needed to give fans a reason to show up beyond the team on the floor, he said. The team’s answer: enabling what they call “the hyperconnected fan,” he said.
"If you're the Clippers, the Lakers, Dodgers and Rams are always going to be ahead of you in the pecking order," Kerravala said, referring to other Los Angeles-area teams. "They want you texting people in the stadium. They want you interacting with the things in the stadium.”
The Clippers aren’t alone. In 2024, the Cleveland Browns expanded grab-and-go concessions with facial authentication across Huntington Bank Field. In San Francisco, the Giants recently added Wi-Fi 6E at Oracle Park to support checkout-free stores, in-seat food ordering and fans trying to hail a ride home after the final out, Kerravala said.
Every one of those services depends on the infrastructure underneath. Gillian Zucker, the Clippers' president of business operations, made that point in 2021 when the team tested checkout-free concessions at the Forum, the concert venue the Clippers own down the street.
"The technology that's utilized requires a great deal of back-end capital investment," she told Variety.
How Does Fan Data Shape the Stadium Experience?
Connectivity also runs in the other direction. At Georgia Tech's Bobby Dodd Stadium, fans generate useful data simply by jumping up and down.
Ed Coyle, a Georgia Tech professor of electrical and computer engineering who founded the university's Vertically Integrated Projects program, has led student teams studying stadium technology since 2001, first at Purdue University and now in Atlanta.
To gather maintenance information, one of the program’s pilot projects placed off-the-shelf but highly sensitive sensors, or accelerometers, underneath girders supporting the stadium's north stands. Low-power Texas Instruments microcontrollers collect their measurements every 1/100 of a second, run on batteries and connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi or other protocols.
The team quickly discovered that these sensors could double as “excitement meters,” with each spike in vibration marking a moment when fans stomped their feet or jumped up from their seats. Because the readings were time-stamped, students could pair them with video of each play and rank plays by crowd reaction. That helped predict which clips fans would most want to see, Coyle said. The team is now working to automate clip production and deliver those clips to phones in the stands almost as soon as a play ends.
"A lot of times when they pick which videos they think people are going to be interested in and they put their top 10 online, it's not the same ones the fans would pick," he said.
Students have trained machine learning models on game footage from 2011 through 2017 to recognize runs and passes and read yard lines so clips can be cut and labeled automatically. The sensors themselves are off-the-shelf, low-power Texas Instruments accelerometers that run on batteries and transmit wirelessly, since the girders have no power source.
Getting those clips to fans in the stands is the harder problem, Coyle said. He sees stadiums as a preview of networks everywhere: 100,000 or more phones, sensors and cameras packed into a square kilometer, alongside security, medical, concessions and media teams.
The challenge, he said, is figuring out "how to manage that, make it work and make it affordable."
The Bills answered that challenge from the ground up in Buffalo, with one converged network and a technology center built to carry it. Coyle expects every venue to face the same pressure.
"There's just so much stuff going on that you're always going to have to find more capacity," he said.
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David Rand is a business and technology reporter whose work has appeared in major publications around the world. He specializes in spotting and digging into what’s coming next–and helping executives in organizations of all sizes know what to do about it.
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