The Nashville Sounds, a Triple-A affiliate of the Oakland Athletics, missed out on a slot in Minor League Baseball’s Pacific Coast League championships this fall. But the team is now looking to score with a system by which fans could use their smartphones to easily access information regarding players and baseball fun facts, as well as special food and drink deals from stadium vendors.
During four late-season games, the Sounds tested a proof-of-concept (PoC) network of 28 Bluetooth beacons installed across Nashville’s 10,000-seat First Tennessee Park, where the team plays, along with a smartphone app, provided by Bkon, a Nashville-based company that, in addition to selling Bluetooth beacons (dubbed bkons), developed all of the content, as well as a smartphone app on its beacon-management platform, known as PHY.net.
The application was built on the Eddystone-URL protocol (also known as the Physical Web protocol), which is part of Eddystone, an open-source Bluetooth beacon platform developed by Google. Eddystone enables a beacon to transmit a URL via a Bluetooth connection that causes information related to that URL to appear in the receiving smartphone’s compatible browser (these include Chrome, Opera and BeaconSage), or through Google’s Nearby application, which is available on devices with Android 4.4+ and Google Play Services 9.2.55+. This direct-to-URL approach to interacting with connected devices is referred to as The Physical Web.
As far as Bkon knows, this was the first time a large-scale Physical Web beacon network, offering what the company calls “a dynamic and engaging range of promotions, content and incentives,” has been deployed within a sports stadium.
The key difference between the Physical Web protocol and conventional beacon protocols, such as iBeacon, is that the former allows an end user’s phone to pull the information from the internet (via a browser), whereas the latter pushes information to the end user through an application. However, says Bkon CEO Richard Graves, some of Bkon’s clients still want to offer a smartphone application so that users receive push notifications rather than having to check a Physical Web browser or Android’s Nearby app for updates. (Nearby does push a message to users the first time a Physical Web beacon is detected, but the user must thereafter check her Nearby for updates.)
Bkon offers a software development kit (SDK) that enables its customers to have apps created for Physical Web beacons. For the Sounds PoC, Bkon created a smartphone app called Sounds Gameday. “Those who are used to using an app could access the Sounds Gameday app, but [all of the same content] was also available through Chrome iOS.”
The SDK is built on PHY.net, Bkon’s end-to-end Physical Web platform, and can be deployed on any Eddystone-URL-formatted beacon. Using the SDK, Bkon’s clients can assign beacons a public URL for consumers who use Physical Web browsers such as Chrome. Any user can access that URL from a compatible browser on his iOS or Android phone, as long as he is within range of the Physical Web beacon transmitting the public URL. But for app users, each beacon transmits a private URL that is only accessible via the app. Bkon enables the company or brand that commissioned the app to manage these private URLs through the PHY.net platform via a dashboard, schedule or application programming interface (API).
The Sounds already had a smartphone app, called Inside The Park, and Graves says Bkon could have used its SDK to make that existing app compatible with the Physical Web and Bkon’s PHY.net beacon-management platform. But developing the Gameday app was far simpler and faster, he explains, so before the PoC began, the Sounds removed its Inside The Park app from the iTunes and Google Play stores, in order to help fans avoid any confusion when looking to download the team app. (The team may make its Inside The Park app available again in the future, depending on how it decides to move forward with Bkon’s technology.)
During the PoC, what a fan saw displayed on her phone depended on whether she was using the Gameday app or a browser. Those using the app would see a rotating series of digital cards with player images and statistics—including those of the player at bat, as well as the current pitcher. Clicking on player cards would link the user, whether he was accessing it through Gameday or a browser or Nearby, to that player’s full profile on the MLB website.
Fans using the app also saw a card that let them select food and drink—such as nachos or a beer—from a list of items, and then click to a map showing the location of the nearest vendors selling those items.
In addition, the Sounds utilized the beacons to collect fan data, by offering both Gameday app users, as well as those who checked Nearby or a browser for updates, a chance to win free food or drink if they texted, emailed or tweeted a message to the team.
For both Gameday users and those checking Nearby or a browser, some of the content they saw depended on which of the 28 Bkon beacons was nearest to their seat. The Sounds tested out the use of special offers to fans based on proximity to beacons mounted closest to a vendor’s location within the stadium.
During the PoC, roughly 77 percent of the interactions come through the Sounds Gameday app running on iOS devices (the app is currently available only for iOS), while the rest were browser-based interactions, mostly on Android devices. Graves declines to reveal exactly how many of the 26,196 attendees during the PoC downloaded the Gameday app, but said that throughout the four-game trail, the number of Gameday downloads matched the number of times the Inside The Park app had been downloaded during the course of the prior 36 games.
Erik Carlson, Bkon’s CMO, says the Sounds collected far more contact information from fans who offered up their phone numbers or email addresses in response to incentives—entry into contests to win free tickets or food or drinks, promoted in Gameday or accessed via Nearby or browsers—than they have in the past. Previously, Sounds employees inside the park have approached fans and asked them to sign up for those types of contests.
Conventional phone apps provide companies that deploy beacons a means of directly connecting with customers, but as consumers’ phones begin to fill up with branded apps, their interest in downloading additional apps can begin to wane. This is why Bkon is bullish on the Physical Web and its enablement of browser-based content delivery based on proximity to beacons. While neither Graves nor Carlson think branded apps are going to disappear, the Physical Web provides an alternative that they believe many consumers will begin moving toward.
As for Bkon’s business model, Graves says his firm sells beacons and then offers its PHY.net beacon and content-management platform under a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. “We have free accounts, for beacons that power up to a half million phone interactions per month,” he states. To put that in context, the Sounds’ four-game PoC generated 65,000 interactions.
Changing the content that a Physical Web transmits is accomplished by updating the content of the URL to which it points, thereby making it possible to manage thousands of those beacons simultaneously. As part of its SaaS platform, Bkon also provides its customers with metrics, showing the types of browsers used to access data, as well as the number of users who access that information via an app.
Bryan Mayhood, the Nashville Sounds’ VP of sales, says the organization was pleased with the PoC and that his goal was to find new, creative ways to reach out to fans. He is not convinced that fans who eschew the app and opt for checking for content on a browser, or through Nearby, would get as much value from the experience in the long term. “I think most people are used to using apps,” he says, “and telling fans to ‘go enable Google Chrome’ is a hard sell.”
Mayhood cannot say whether the Sounds will continue using the Bkon network of beacons and its Gameday app next year. “We only [ran the test] for a four-game period,” he notes, “and we have 70-some games each season, so we’d like to see more tests of the technology over a longer period of time to see if we can keep fans engaged throughout the season.”