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Will 49ers’ Stadium Uphold Its Techie Reputation During Super Bowl 50?

The team's tech partners are confident the venue's 400 miles of fiber cable, 1,200 Wi-Fi access points, 2,400 TV monitors and 600 security cameras will pass the big game test.

(TNS) — The San Francisco 49ers hoped Levi’s Stadium would become “the address of Silicon Valley” when the team designed its $1.3 billion home field with the latest high-tech infrastructure.

But that designation must pass the ultimate test in American sports when Super Bowl 50 kicks off in front of 70,000 fans and 110 million more watching on TV.

The host 49ers and its stadium technology partners are optimistic that the venue’s 400 miles of data-carrying fiber and copper cable, 1,200 Wi-Fi access points, 2,400 TV monitors, 600 security cameras, 370 point-of-sale terminals and 49 miles of beer-carrying pipes will pass the big game test on Feb. 7.

“We’re confident that we can handle anything that the fans and the added personnel in the stadium can throw at the infrastructure,” said Jim Bartholomew, the 49ers information technology director, during a behind-the-scenes tour for reporters last week.

The Santa Clara stadium, opened in 2014, will host the NFL’s golden anniversary Super Bowl, only the second NFL championship game to be held in the Bay Area.

And Super Bowl 50, according to NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy, “will be the most technologically advanced Super Bowl in history.”

“We are excited to peek ahead at how technology will help advance the NFL on the field, in stadiums, at home and wherever fans may be for the next 50 years,” McCarthy said via e-mail.

High-tech neighbors

When the 49ers abandoned San Francisco’s ancient Candlestick Park after the 2013 season, the franchise took up residence near Silicon Valley neighbors including Intel, Cisco and Citrix.

“We’ve got startups down the road, we had this robust amount of talent and experience” in the surrounding area, said Ethan Casson, 49ers chief revenue officer. “We believed Levi’s Stadium would become the physical manifestation of that.”

That lofty expectation only puts more pressure on the stadium’s tech infrastructure to come through when the world is watching.

For fans attending the game, one basic function will be decidedly low-tech: Tickets.

While the 49ers transitioned to all-digital tickets this year (to the dismay of some season ticket holders), the NFL controls the Super Bowl and has decided to issue paper tickets instead, McCarthy said. The tickets will be printed on high-quality commemorative paper, turning them into sell-able souvenirs.

The 49ers encouraged fans to store their tickets on the official Levi’s Stadium app, from 49ers spin-off company VenueNext. But that app might not be fully activated for the Super Bowl.

The app also allows fans to order food and drinks from their seats, but Casson said that service was disabled for WrestleMania at the request of that event’s promoters. The NFL could use its own stadium app for the Super Bowl, and Casson said discussions between VenueNext and the league “literally may go up to game time.”

Football fans now come to games expecting to use mobile devices to check Facebook, tweet and take selfies. After the 2014 season, the team added more Wi-Fi access points to handle mobile traffic, partly because the Super Bowl is coming up.

There is now one Wi-Fi access point for every 100 seats, housed in small boxes below seats, and more mobile phone antenna boxes visible along the stadium’s decks.

If fans use that added capacity for livestreaming apps like Twitter’s Periscope to telecast parts or all of the game, it would amount to an end-around play on the NFL’s quest to protect its lucrative Super Bowl TV broadcast rights.

The league isn’t commenting on whether it plans to crack down on livestreaming. But the 49ers say they have technology to not only detect streams, but also to locate a stream’s origin in the stands.

That’s because of a lot of tech that the fans don’t see. For example, deep in the bowels of the stadium is a room handling every single byte of data the building produces. On game days, the data control center, outfitted by stadium technology partner Brocade Communication Systems of San Jose, handles 500 terabytes of digital data in four to five hours.

For perspective, Kelly Herrell, Brocade’s senior vice president and general manager of software networking, noted that 1 terabyte is one trillion bytes. If bytes were expressed as units of time, 1 trillion seconds would be 32,000 years.

Redundant systems

As he spoke with reporters, Bartholomew, the Niners IT director, had to shout to be heard over the noise emanating from rows of Brocade routers and switches. Every system is redundant, he said — two Internet service providers, for example — to make sure there’s “no single point of failure.”

Video is also a core behind-the-scenes technology inside the stadium: A video master control room runs everything that fans see on two giant video scoreboards, a video ribbon board along the second deck and the 2,400 TV monitors throughout the stadium.

The room is filled with about $6 million worth of video equipment, including 4K ultra-HD cameras, instant replay machines and digital video monitors that can be configured “any way we want,” said Aron Kennedy, the 49ers director of game day production and broadcast operations.

These video services are in addition to the broadcast TV feed fans see at home. During a typical game, the control room is filled with 43 employees who handle in-stadium graphics and replays, Kennedy said. “I can take 18 cameras into the replay machine and spit out six simultaneous replays,” he said.

Even with all the tech inside the stadium, 49ers executives know that most fans have one main objective when paying big bucks to attend the Super Bowl in person.

“Regardless of the building being in Silicon Valley, the numbers have shown us in our first two years that people are here to watch the game,” Casson said. “They’re there with their friends and families, it’s (about) memories. It’s moments, it’s live action happening. It was never a point where we wanted technology to replace that.”

©2015 the San Francisco Chronicle, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.