At Landon Donovan’s last games, Fanpics will be watching stadium closely
When a big play appears imminent at the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer match Saturday, the finger of Marco Correia or one his colleagues will be hovering over a computer mouse.
Clicking a big green button in a program they’ve built activates 10 shoebox-sized camera units rung around the perimeter of the StubHub Center. In a span of five seconds, each Canon EOS 5D Mark III camera snaps 10 photos while rotating. Each of the 100 photos show about 200 to 300 members of the crowd.
The goal of Correia’s company, Fanpics, is to get fans to download an app of the same name, enter their seat number and view a photo cropped down to their seat and the handful of others around them. In essence, Fanpics is producing thousands of photos zoomed in on people’s reactions to about 20 major plays per game. The images can be downloaded and shared on social media.
“Those are special moments that until now are lost,” said Correia, head of brand, product and strategy at Fanpics. “Fans can put their phone away and experience it as they would, and we’ll give them a story to share.”
Fanpics, based in San Diego, started testing their photo-cropping technology at San Diego State basketball games in January. The company has been in operation at a few Galaxy games with about 11% of the crowd looking up their photos. But Fanpics is hoping the Galaxy’s final regular-season game Saturday and playoff soccer after that will entice more people to try it out, especially since it’ll be the last times they see Galaxy star Landon Donovan on the field.
The system is offered at no cost to teams or stadiums, and Correia said Fanpics is in talks with about 30 teams worldwide. The company plans to make money through a combination of selling physical prints of photos, data about fans to teams and advertising space on the app.
About 10 active professional athletes and some people who have worked in the sports industry have invested in Fanpics to the tune of the “single-digit millions,” Correia said.
By entering a stadium, fans typically agree their image and likeness can be used. Still, Fanpics would like to develop a way for fans to block their photo from showing up on the app.
The idea for Fanpics came to Will Dickinson, one of the co-founders, when he was watching an English Premier League game on TV several years ago. As he watched people in the stadium celebrate a comeback win, he wondered whether there was a way to record their unique reactions.
Fanpics can’t constantly shoot photos because the company would end up with too much data to sort through, Correia said. Trying to automate camera shutters through crowd-noise sensors, for instance, would lead to the same problem. But he doesn’t think their manual operation has led to missing big plays.
“Maybe we missed the first fraction of a second of some goals or three-pointers,” he said. “It really is a big green button on a Web browser.”
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