"Our main competition is the home media center. We wanted to offer a real experience that you can't have at home, but to see it with the technology that you do have at home."
- Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, while unveiling his team's new stadium design in 2006
At about $1.6 billion, London's Wembley Stadium is said to the most expensive sports arena ever built. (I saw a rugby match there, once, in 1995, though the two things that always pop into my mind at the mention of Wembley are that anxious, frizz-haired "Fraggle Rock" character of the same name, and Mick Jagger.)
Next on the most-expensive list comes the new Yankee Stadium, at $1.5 billion. I've been there, too, and I like it, even if a New York assemblyman says Bronx Bombers brass hasn't complied with requests to show that the two rounds of city-issued tax-exempt bonds - worth $1.2 billion - were sought and used on the up-and-up.
This weekend, the new, $1.15 billion home of "America's Team," the Dallas Cowboys, opens with a George Strait concert - and, like the new Yankee Stadium, it is a marvel of modern technology (see Jerry Jones quote in epigram above).
It has 10 retractable roofs, flat-screen TV monitors throughout, a 159-by-71-foot scoreboard that hangs over the 50-yard-line (see picture) and - this will sound familiar to New York baseball fans - dozens of technology-equipped luxury suites.
Football - football that counts - is still an entire summer away, and I'm sure that just like the Yanks and New York Mets, who opened their new home, Citi Field, in Flushing in April, the Cowboys will disclose the new stadium's features seep out over time, staying in the news cycle and luring potential season-ticket buyers.
If you use the New York baseball stadiums as a measuring stick, the new Cowboys Stadium has a lot to live up to.
Take the building in the Bronx. The Yankees leveraged what's called "StadiumVision" from San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco Systems Inc. - the world's largest maker of computer networking gear - to make theirs the most wired, connected and video-enabled ballpark in the game.
Anywhere fans are in the park - in a bar, waiting in line for concessions, walking through the Great Hall - they can watch live action on high-definition televisions. While the game is on, those same screens will feature sports scores, Yankees trivia, news and weather. When the game's over, those screens will provide fans with useful traffic reports and directions to the nearest exit. In an emergency, they'll display evacuation instructions.
They're also using GuestAssist, a solution from a Houston, Texas-based Web communications service, to boost safety, security and guest services. Specifically, the solution provides a text message code that will permit fans to send questions, concerns or requests via their mobile phones to Yankee Stadium's so-called "Command and Control Center." The number is be communicated to fans through Stadium signage, public address announcements and other means.
In many ways, of course, the new stadiums in New York are copying architectural plans that have found success elsewhere in baseball - open-air concourses, for example, or restaurants and bars in the outfield that offer a view down onto the game.
But some of these elements - the massive JumboTron video displays, the flat screen TVs throughout, the wireless technology - are new additions to sports arenas in the last year or so. Let's keep an ear out to see whether the Cowboys take those technologies in new directions.
