Verizon has fully outfitted Raymond James Stadium with its fastest flavor of 5G.
Angela Lang/CNET
With under a week to go until Super Bowl, plans for how people will watch this year’s Big Game are starting to take shape. Although there are already plenty of different ways to stream the Buccaneers-Chiefs battle, Verizon is adding a few more to try and enhance the viewing experience.
The telecom giant announced on Monday that it will have five additional camera angles available to iPhone 12 users who are watching the CBS-broadcast game on their phones at home. The feed, available in what it calls the 5G SuperStadium inside the NFL iOS app, has been around throughout the season but for the Super Bowl will be exclusive to just Apple’s latest line of iPhones. You will not, however, need Verizon to access it as it will work with iPhone 12s on any carrier or even those connected to Wi-Fi.
Among the available feeds will be cameras at the 25-yard line, 50-yard line, the “skycam” view from above the field as well the regular CBS feed. Those in the stands at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa Bay with an iPhone 12, Samsung Galaxy S20 or Galaxy S21 will be able to access seven total feeds from the NFL Ticket Holder app even if they don’t have Verizon as their wireless provider.
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Verizon has been upgrading the home of the Buccaneers with 5G improvements in anticipation of the Big Game, spending $80 million to make sure the stadium and surrounding area are properly equipped for the event.
Even with only a fraction of the stadium’s capacity allowed in to watch this year’s game, Ronan Dunne, executive vice president and CEO of Verizon’s Consumer Group, tells CNET that the venue has become its “reference stadium” and an example of how it sees the “stadium of the future.”
The carrier’s fastest flavor of 5G, known as millimeter-wave, now covers each section of the seating bowl in the stadium with 5G also available in the parking lot. This should allow for “multigig” speeds where thousands of fans can watch multiple live video streams at once. “That’s going to be a feature” of the 5G-equipped stadiums of the future, Dunne says, “this ability to get more rich, streaming data.”
The carrier is also using the faster speeds and lower latency provided by this flavor of 5G to work on improvements for crowd management and security, with Dunne giving an example of guiding fans from a concession stand with a 15-minute wait to one with no line.
Verizon has spent the last couple of years upgrading stadiums and arenas around the country as part of its 5G network rollout. It announced in January that it plans to have its millimeter-wave 5G network (or what it calls “Ultra Wideband”) in all 28 NFL stadiums this year.
