The NBA and Turner Sports have added a new virtual reality subscription package to its NBA League Pass live game out-of-market service, which tips off Tuesday (Oct. 17), the company announced Monday.

The new, season-long virtual reality subscription package – developed by NBA Digital and NextVR -- will be available across the Samsung Gear VR, Google Daydream and Windows Mixed Reality platforms. In all, the $49.99 VR service can be accessed across 19 platforms including television, broadband, tablets and mobile phones and connected devices.

Related: NBA Digital, NextVR Strike Multiyear Partnership

In addition to the $199.99 price tag for the traditional NBA League Pass package, NBA Digital will offer a $249.99 premium package that features continuous in-arena coverage during live game breaks.

The new packages will join other NBA League Pass premium packages including NBA Team Pass ($119.99) and single game ($6.99). NBA Digital will also bring back NBA Mobile View, which offers zoomed-in, tighter shot of the action that is optimized for the smaller screen size of mobile devices.

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NextVR, a startup that focuses on live sports and entertainment, said it has expanded to Daydream, Google’s new virtual reality platform that is powered by select Android smartphones.

NextVR, which also supports the Samsung Gear VR and expects to add more platform to the mix later this year, also announced that it is also offering on-demand games and highlights from the NBA in VR internationally (excluding China).

RELATED: Virtual Reality Tackles College Football

That builds on a multiyear partnership between NBA and NextVR in which NextVR has been broadcasting one live NBA game per week along with on-demand content to U.S. consumers.

RELATED: Fox Sports, NextVR Strike Five-Year Pact

New on-demand VOD features from the NBA and NextVR include “Best Dunks” and “Best Plays.”

Last year, NextVR raised an $80 million Series B round that is being used to fund global expansion efforts.

NBA Digital and NextVR have struck a multi-year partnership that includes a commitment to stream at least one live NBA League Pass game per week in virtual reality format during the 2016/2017 season, starting with the Oct. 27 matchup between the Sacramento Kings and the San Antonio Spurs at the Golden 1 center.

RELATED: Fox Sports, NextVR Strike Five-Year Pact

The full VR schedule will be announced later this month, but the first VR game, the inaugural game at the new venue, will be offered for free, as part of the NBA  League Pass free trial period.  The VR broadcasts will feature dedicated announcers, multiple unmanned camera angles and “optimized graphics,” they said, noting that game breaks will be filled with in-venue entertainment, behind-the-scenes footage from the arena and VR-specific commentary.

RELATED: Virtual Reality Tackles College Football

Future VR productions will be available as part of the NBA League Pass subscription package.

Financial terms were not announced, but the deal also makes NextVR the “Official LEAGUE PASS VR Partner of the NBA.” 

The first game will be supported in the format on the Oculus-powered Samsung Gear VR, with more VR headset options to become available later in the season.

NextVR connected with Turner Sports on a VR production for last year’s season opener between the Golden State Warriors and New Orleans Pelicans at Oracle Arena. 

Founded in 2009, NextVR recently landed an $80 million “B” round of funding.

NextVR is teaming with Notre Dame to deliver “several virtual reality features” from Saturday’s college football game between the Fighting Irish and Stanford, slated for a 7:30 p.m. ET kickoff on NBC.

They said multiple NextVR cameras will be placed around the field to offer viewers a variety of angles and vantage points. NextVR will release a number of “highlight packages” throughout the game in the VR format, concluding each quarter with audio commentary from University of Notre Dame alumnus, Heisman Trophy winner and Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee Tim Brown and NBC announcers.

NextVR will also be on hand to produce some exclusive content from Brown and behind-the-scenes content in VR including tailgating scenes, the Notre Dame player walk to Notre Dame Stadium and other pre-game festivities. Those features will be available on-demand in mid-November, NextVR said.

RELATED: Fox Sports, NextVR Strike Five-Year Pact

The VR experience from the game will be offered for free via the NextVR app for the Samsung Gear VR platform.

NAB 2016: NextVR Rolls VR Production Truck

“We are pleased to be working with NextVR, in conjunction with our long time media partner NBC Sports, to pilot new fan experiences that bring them closer to the action,” said Dan Skendzel, Senior Associate Athletics Director for Media and Branding, in statement. 

NextVR, a startup that specializes in live-action virtual reality broadcast technologies and systems, recently raised an $80 million Series B round that will be used to fund  global expansion efforts.

Fox Sports and NextVR said they will team to offer the opening match of the 2016/2017 Bundesliga season live in virtual reality.

The 54th season of Germany’s top pro soccer league kicks off August 26, with Bayern München set to take on Werder Bremen from Allianz Arena in Munich at 8:30 p.m. UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) (8:30 p.m. CET/2:30 p.m. EDT/11:30 a.m. PDT). 

Fox Sports and NextVR said the VR production will be the first in the emerging format that the Bundesliga will broadcast live to an international audience.

They said seven cameras will capture the VR action and provide pitch-level shots during the match. This VR event will feature live audio commentary by former American professional soccer player and Bundesliga player, Heath Pearce, and Fox Sports soccer commentator Mark Rogondino.

The VR coverage of the Bundesliga opening fixture will be available free in the Fox Sports portal on the NextVR platform, which is currently compatible with Samsung Gear VR headsets.

In February, Fox Sports and NextVR announced a five-year pact to collaborate on VR coverage of a range of sporting events, and followed with another VR production of the U.S. Open Championship in June. They have also teamed on VR coverage of the Daytona 500, a Premier Boxing Champions (PBC) title fight, and the Big East college basketball tournament.

NextVR, a startup that specializes in live VR broadcasts, announced an $80 “B” round in August aimed at fueling international expansion.

NextVR, a startup that specializes in live-action virtual reality broadcast technologies and systems, has raised an $80 million Series B round that, it says, will help to fund a global expansion.

The funding will also help NextVR produce a larger assortment of live entertainment, including concerts and sporting events, it said.

All investors from NextVR’s $30.5 million “A” round joined the new round (Formation Group, Time Warner Investments, Comcast Ventures, Stephen Ross’s RSE Ventures, Mandalay Entertainment CEO Peter Guber, The Madison Square Garden Co., and dick clark productions).

A group of new investors, including several based in Asia, participated in NextVR’s B round, and supplied the majority of its funding:  CITIC Guoan Information Industry Co Ltd; NetEast, CMC Holdings; SoftBank Corp.; VMS Investments Group; the Founder H Fund; China Assets (Holdings) Limited; and Spectrum 28, an early-stage fund investor based in San Francisco.

“With this new funding, we will continue to build NextVR’s virtual reality platform to meet the needs of the world’s largest fan bases around live sports and music content,” Brad Allen, NextVR executive chairman, said in a statement. “Having the support of Asia’s biggest players provides us with significant resources for creating and distributing both local and international content in China, Korea, and Japan.”

NextVR also has a five-year partnership with Fox Sports to collaborate on VR coverage of  several sporting events, and recently cut a deal with Live Nation.

NextVR was launched in 2009. 

Virtual reality company NextVR and Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM) will offer baseball fans a VR option for the July 11 Home Run Derby in San Diego, the companies announced.

The VR experience of the Home Run Derby will be available on demand immediately following the event Monday night. During the game several VR cameras will capture field-level shots, alongside an outfield camera that will capture fan reactions. MLB.com analyst Mike Petriello will provide live audio commentary.

The live Home Run Derby, the lead-up event to Tuesday's MVB All-Star Game, airs on ESPN Monday at 8 p.m.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

Taking another swing at live virtual reality production, Fox Sports (via its Fox Sports Lab unit) is teaming up with NextVR for a VR offering from this week’s U.S. Open Championship, set for June 16-19 at the Oakmont Country Club in Plum, Pa.

That VR coverage, sponsored by Lexus, will feature live streaming via special cameras stationed at holes 9, 17, and 18, with roving coverage between neighboring holes 10 and 11. The VR package will also include some on-demand fare, including players at the practice range each morning, narrated content of the course’s history, two-minute golf tips, and pre-produced features of each hole.

Fox Sports’ U.S. Open VR broadcast and associated VOD content will be available free through the NextVR portal. Samsung GearVR headset owners can access it via the NextVR app.  

This week’s VR coverage is the latest in a series from Fox Sports/FOX Sports Lab that also included specialized coverage of the Daytona 500, a Premier Boxing Champions title fight and the Big East basketball tournament. Fox Sports and NextVR also teamed on a smaller VR production during last year’s U.S. Open golf tournament.

The lastest work comes on the heels of a recently inked a five-year deal between Fox Sports and NextVR.

Fox Sports said it will offer more than 36 hours of live golf action during the tournament via Fox, FS1, and three distinct alternate live streams that add 110 hours of coverage on the Fox Sports Go app.

“At FOX Sports, we focus on helping partners align with the development and utility of technology, which naturally produces unique storytelling and content offerings,” said Neil Mulcahy, EVP, FOX Sports Ad Sales, Sports Management, in a statement. “We are connected across the company as we capitalize on innovative thinking, and our partners are at the center of that collaboration.”

Related: Syfy Finds a New Playground in VR

Video games remain the big content draw at this still-nascent stage of the virtual reality market, but VR’s capacity to support a small-but-growing batch of live events has enabled producers and networks to experiment with and create the kind of high-quality experiences that can help it break into the mainstream.

Today’s big challenge: To figure out how much to invest in live productions as the VR market tries to scale up, build and establish best practices and overcome such technical hurdles as bandwidth and latency.

“At a high level, I don’t think there’s ever been more interest in [live] VR as there is today,” Brad Allen, executive chairman of NextVR, a live VR specialist that recently inked a five-year deal with Fox Sports, said. “The live part, and really feeling transported to an event, that’s something really special.”

Of recent note, NextVR teamed with NBC Sports Group to produce live VR coverage of the Kentucky Derby that relied on seven specialized cameras. Five were placed trackside to capture an uninterrupted view of the race (including one adjacent to the owners’ suites), and two cameras were stationed in the paddock area to cover the horses as they headed to the starting gate.

PRIMING THE PIPELINE

Fox Sports, which has produced a handful of live VR productions over the last year with partner NextVR, including the 2015 U.S. Open golf tournament, has some bigger plans in the works for this year’s Open, set to start June 13.

In addition to having a larger presence (last year, Fox’s VR experience for event was limited to a somewhat closed audience), the plan is to “add more interactivity,” Michael Davies, senior vice president of field and technical operations at Fox Sports, said.

Fox Sports is still ironing out those details, but the plan does include an option that will allow VR users to move around the course, alongside some short-form, companion pieces.

“We believe that short-form is something that’s going to be super-important for VR and have that … sort of orbit around the live nucleus of the production,” Davies said.

Live VR isn’t the domain of sports TV giants alone. The Pennsylvania Cable Network, the statewide public-affairs channel that reaches about 3.3 million Keystone State homes, dipped its toes into the virtual waters on May 28 with a live 360-degree video feed from the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association (PIAA) Track and Field Championships.

PCN, in partnership with VR production specialist Greenfish Labs, streamed the event live via its YouTube channel using a special camera perched outside the track at Shippensburg University.

“It’s not to compete with the standard coverage,” Corianne Schrim, PCN’s digital content manager, said. “It just enhances it.”

More than 1,700 people watched the live feed, according to Joel Bechtel, PCN’s vice president of marketing and brand development.

Part of the idea was to reach a younger audience with a stream that could be viewed and manipulated on YouTube and also accessible on VR mobile headsets, Bechtel said.

“The ability to do this live is relatively new,” Bechtel said. While the track event was PCN’s first experience with VR, the network is considering something similar for the Pennsylvania Farm Show, an event that typically draws more than 500,000 people, next January.

One challenge ahead for live VR is keeping that content engine fed in a way that will keep viewers coming back.

“The fact of the matter is there’s a finite amount of content out there for VR,” Davies said. “Getting fresh content for VR is going to be difficult, but I think that’s where sports is able to come in and continually refresh the need for new and exciting content for these early adopters.”

Allen agreed. “An issue always is whether there’s enough compelling content to keep people’s interest in VR,” he said.

In addition to deals with partners like Fox Sports, NextVR will also look to keep that content pipeline primed thanks to an agreement with LiveNation, which produces more than 25,000 concerts and other live events per year (but not all in VR, of course).

FROM ‘WOW’ TO ‘WATCH’

“There’s a calendar of events for the first time [for VR], as opposed to all the one-off stuff,” Allen said. “We talk about it going from ‘wow’ to ‘watch.’ ”

Another signficant hurdle faced by live VR productions is having enough bandwidth to support the streams, which require more data than traditional 2D streams.

The good news, Davies said, is that solid connections are usually available in most professional venues, noting that the Oakmont Country Club in Oakmont, Pa., site of this year’s U.S. Open, “has gobs of bandwidth there.”

But the questions that surround potential data limitations are among the reasons why Fox Sports’s early VR productions use a 180-degree field of view. New compression schemes, Davies said, will concentrate the pixels where the viewer is looking and “generalize” them outside the viewer’s gaze.

“There are arguments that 180 [degrees] is OK for most sports, and you wouldn’t be wrong,” he said. “But the full immersive experience of being somewhere where you can look in all directions is something that we’re definitely looking forward to, as well, from a production standpoint.” NextVR has been tackling the bandwidth issue since 2009, as it was founded on a stereoscopic compression technology originally used for 3DTV that has since been applied to VR.

NextVR’s platform is able to stream VR at speeds from 4 Megabits per second to 8 Mbps, Allen said. “We’re working on getting that even lower.”

And live VR’s tech challenges aren’t just about pushing out bits. Perhaps more important is providing a VR stream with adequate latency.

“VR takes bandwidth to a whole new scale,” Loudon Blair, corporate strategy officer at Ciena, a top networking supplier, said, noting that some camera rigs could require 100 Gigabits per second of contribution bandwidth.

THE LATENCY EFFECT

But latency is also key. That’s because even small delays in routing the round-trip signal can have a major adverse effect on the VR experience, potentially causing motion sickness for the viewer.

While that’s not as much of an issue with VR content that is downloaded locally, it can be a major problem if the content is being streamed and the latency and bandwidth capabilities aren’t at optimal levels.

The trend to help solve that is moving more computing toward the edge of the network, Blair said.

“It’s an ecosystem challenge,” he said. “It’s not something that an individual company can solve.”

Fox Sports is revving up virtual reality-facing initiatives at Sunday’s Daytona 500.

The network said Toyota has hopped on board to sponsor a set of VR elements for the race in partnership with Next VR, including a “broadcast-quality” live VR feed of the Daytona 500, which gets underway Sunday at 1 p.m. ET. That broadcast will be available for free via the NextVR portal. Additionally, Samsung Gear VR owners can access it by downloading the NextVR app on any Gear VR-compatible smartphone.

RELATED: Fox Sports Goes Full Throttle To Drive Viewers To 'Daytona Day'

Fox Sports, which just announced a new, five-year deal with NextVR, said it also plans to operate VR cameras situated on the track wall inside the “robo-cage,” within a pit stall, and as part of pre-recorded features from the garage, team hauler and television broadcast truck.

Coverage also includes multiple closed-circuit VR streams from  the speedway on Friday and Saturday, and a VR kiosk manned by Fox Sports and NextVR personnel at the Toyota Fan Injector stadium entrance area.

Fox’s Lab will also capture 360-degree video from a camera embedded in the No. 78 Furniture Row Toyota team of NASCAR Sprint Cup Series driver Martin Turex Jr., which will be shared across multiple Fox Sports platforms.

“Virtual reality is the next great frontier in storytelling and we are thrilled that Toyota is working with us to bring this experience to race fans,” Eric Shanks, Fox Sports president, COO & executive producer, said in a statement.

Elsewhere on Daytona 500’s tech front, Arris said it will provide carrier-class WiFi to most popular fan locations at the speedway’s new motorsports stadium.

Daytona International Speedway, Arris said, is the first NASCAR racetrack to feature carrier-class WiFi.  Arris’s platform at DIS will use the Aptilo Service Management Platform, Benu Networks Mobile Edge Gateway, Ruckus ZoneFlex access points and virtual SmartZone WLAN controller, and Skyline Communications Dataminer  OSS platform.

RELATED:'Virtual Reality -- Ready for a Closeup' Webinar, Feb. 24, with Andrew Trickett (Merge VR) and Tony Mugavero (Littlstar), moderated by Next TV editor Jeff Baumgartner

NextVR, a company that specializes in live-action virtual reality broadcast technology, said it has inked a five-year partnership with Fox Sports to collaborate on VR coverage of a range of sporting events.

Financial terms were not announced, but the deal comes on the heels of recent VR tests Fox Sports and NextVR conducted for some of Fox’s boxing and NASCAR coverage, as well as last year’s U.S. Open golf tournament.

Fox and NextVR said the new agreement will include VR-enabled, live broadcast sporting events. Last month, they teamed on Premier Boxing Champions (PBC) matches, and will next focus on Sunday’s Daytona 500.

They said future VR programming from Fox Sports will be announced “soon,” and will be offered on the NextVR portal, which features a section dedicated to Fox Sports. Consumers with the Samsung Gear VR headset can access that content by downloading the NextVR app on any Gear VR-compatible smartphone.

While the business model for VR is still being hammered out, “we know enough about this technology to know that it’s incredibly interesting,”  Michael Davies, senior vice president of field and technical operations at Fox Sports, said in a recent interview for this week's Multichannel News VR cover story. “It’s a very compelling way to view sports.”

“We have worked with FOX Sports for over a year to test live, virtual reality programming across several sports,” Brad Allen, executive chairman, NextVR, said in statement. “This wide-ranging agreement is proof that our technology provides an exciting and compelling option to witness great sporting events in virtual reality.”

 “It’s all about delivering something new and exciting for our viewers,” added Eric Shanks, Fox Sports president, chief operating officer and executive producer. “Virtual reality is the next great frontier in immersive experiences for fans across a wide variety of sports. It’s a rapidly changing technology, and this deal with NextVR positions us to be on the front lines for years to come.”

The opening of the National Basketball Association season featured a notable score with some assist leaders, as the league, Turner Sports and NextVR offered up the first publicly available production of a live professional sports game in virtual reality (VR).

That opening night Golden State Warriors-New Orleans Pelicans game — including the ring ceremony for the NBA champion Warriors — is notable because it highlighted both the tremendous progress that has been made in the development of VR production technologies and some ongoing challenges that still require custom-built systems.

It’s a work in progress, and progress is ongoing. During the 2013-14 season, the league worked with NextVR to capture a Warriors-Denver Nuggets game, and in the 2014-15 season, NBA Digital — a partnership between Turner Sports and the NBA — delivered highlights of the All-Star Game and State Farm All-Star Saturday nights to fans.

The NBA Digital partnership is focused on enhancing the game experience, and Turner Sports and the league wanted to use the Warriors-Pelicans matchup to recreate the experience of watching a game at courtside, Turner Sports executive vice president and general manager Matt Hong said.

“One of the interesting stats from the league is that … the vast majority of basketball fans do not have the ability to attend a game in person,” Hong said. “So this was really an attempt to give people a virtual experience of the courtside experience.”

On the consumer side, the penetration of VR technologies is still relatively small, but many viewers could access the stream on the Oculus Home app via the NextVR portal without laying out the thousands of dollars that were needed for home equipment to view early HD, 3D and more recently 4K productions.

A $99 VR ‘SEASON TICKET’

Owners of newer Samsung phones could view the content on Samsung Gear VR headsets, which currently sell for less than $200 but will drop to $99.99 when a new model hits the market later this month.

On the production side, the VR feed required a separate crew and gear, Hong said, but those additional resources were “relatively light” compared to the 20 HD cameras and mobile truck used for Turner’s regular production of the game.

For the presentation, NextVR used a mobile production flight pack for the arena with a switcher, mixer, monitors and other gear, NextVR cofounder DJ Roller said. The rigs, each of which was equipped with two Red Digital Cinema cameras, were linked by fiber to the switcher, which was supplied by For-A, and other equipment so that no camera operators were needed.

“We had four rigs, with two cameras a rig,” Roller said. “There was one at midcourt, one under the basket, one at mid-level in the arena and a fourth was a roving camera that put the audience out on the floor, as if you were standing there during the ring ceremony.”

The system is capable of switching between cameras as a director might during a regular telecast, “but for this production we wanted to recreate the live game experience,” with very lengthy shots from center court and other camera positions, Roller said.

Keeping with that approach, the feed had no ads or any of the usual graphics or play-by-play announcers. The audio focused on natural sounds, such as crowd noises and the squeak of sneakers on the floor. Regular audio was supplemented by binaural microphones, which are shaped something like human ears to help achieve an immersive sound experience, Roller said.

Unlike the early experiments with HDTV and 4K feeds, NextVR technologies, which include their own encoders and codec, required only 6 Megabits per second of data. Thus, the feeds are viewable on phones with just a 3G, 4G or WiFi connection.

A WORK IN PROGRESS

The reduced bandwidth and higher-quality stereoscopic VR feed rests on technologies that the company has been developing over a number of years. Roller noted that they had initially used “stitching technologies” that knit together different images from different cameras to create a 180- or 360-degree view.

The process of stitching the images together creates seams that then need to be laboriously blurred out, though, and that makes the systems less appealing for live production and reduces overall video quality.

To overcome those problems, NextVR has developed 23 patents that have been approved or are pending. Using a proprietary codec and a variety of metadata and spatial information, images from the camera are rendered onto what Roller compares to a matrix as it reaches the viewer without the need to stitch overlapping images together.

“It is completely different from what everyone else is doing,” he said.

While much of NextVR’s capabilities rest on custom- built technology, Roller said the company has always worked to create technology that “is practical and implementable in a broadcast environment.”

“We’ve had to build a lot of things from the ground up, but ultimately we hope that you will be able to buy these cameras and equipment off the shelf,” he said.