Creating and continually innovating the entertainment experience to keep your customers on the edge of their seats is a monumental undertaking. Can the entertainment experience go to new levels? What cool innovations and technologies is the sports industry doing to make your time watching an event/ game more enjoyable?

Today’s guest is always on the forefront of what it takes to keep customers engaged in the experience.  Steve Hellmuth has been innovating the customer experience for over 30 years from the Olympics to Major League Baseball and today the National Basketball Association with some of the most experiential ideas, innovations and technologies. This week on Killer Innovations, Steve Hellmuth joins us to discuss what he and his team are doing to make your experience with the NBA beyond expectations.

Permission to Innovate

The NBA has a great reputation for willingness with ample runway to experiment and fail in order to get that next innovative experience. NBA Leadership, players, players association, fans, and owners are the most progressive at experimentation and interactive experiences. Steve and his team continually are working special fan experience projects to give you the thrill of the game. It’s important to have permissions with every relation and level in innovation efforts and the platform to test your ideas and validate them.

At this year’s NBA Summer League Steve had his mobile unit parked in the middle of all the broadcasters to roll out some of their experiments from their innovation sandbox. This is the perfect time to interact with players, fans and management with room to experiment with innovations/ideas, fail, adjust and try again. Some of the fun experiences you will see this season have been tested at the Summer League and percolating in their innovation sandbox. A number of these ideas they have worked on for many years and just now are being deployed—sometimes innovation takes a long time to curate and requires patience.

Where is the Fan Experience Going

Innovating in this league is all about entertainment and the story. Steve teamed with Phil in the past spending a good deal of time in 3D initiatives and experimenting on the convergence looking for the focus that would give the best experience with successes and failures. So what will be the experience of the living room of the future be? Today Virtually Reality and Augmented Reality have been problematic, but it will play a part in the NBA experience as it moves towards better eye-tracking and the next generation.

Steve also wants to move faster towards no walls and pick your experience in your media room to feel like you are in the venue. Part of that will be to expand on the synchronous experiences with all information flow and devices to track what really catches your attention and is exci