Schools aiming to improve fan amenities (ESPN)

[Harry]

Coming soon to a college football stadium near you: interactive phone apps, live pregame locker room footage, concession stands filled with food from local eateries.

And plenty of Wi-Fi.

With college football fans choosing the HDTV home experience more and more over going to games, schools everywhere are stepping up the fan experience to lure them back to the stadiums.

“We want to make sure that the fan experience in the stadium is better than the experience at home on your couch,” Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith said. “That is a significant challenge. Obviously television does a great job. So you’re competing against that a little bit, and competing against a lot of other things as well.”

The national epidemic of declining attendance, most troublingly among students, has spurred athletic departments across the country to get creative in improving their football stadium fan amenities, while also investing heavily in the most obvious of solutions.

“If you take a photo of fans in any stands, a high percentage of them will have their heads down on their phones or iPads or whatever,” Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez said. “To keep fans in the stands, you have to keep up with the technology, so they can continue to use those things in the stadium.”

Read more: http://espn.go.com/blog/big12/post/_/id/85809/schools-aiming-to-improve-fan-amenities

[Harry]

What gets me is our stadium is named after an internet services company and yet my internet experience in there has been terrible... definitely something that needs to change.

[Greenrex]

Beer.

[VideoEagle]

Beer.

Enough beer and I can live without Internet!

[cdizzle86]

What gets me is our stadium is named after an internet services company and yet my internet experience in there has been terrible... definitely something that needs to change.

I work for a mobile app developer in Austin and have been trying to reach out to our athletic dept. about creating a mobile app for NT athletics. Attendance is becoming a big concern not only for our university, but for power 5 schools as well. Pac 12 is about to release an app for every one of the affiliated school to help engage fans at stadiums. CUSA and North Texas should be jumping on this bandwagon as well.

[Ben Gooding]

Average attendance record was broke this year at North Texas. Granted averaging low to mid 20's is nothing to hang your hat on. I think with more success the avg attendance will see another rise.

I think the kickoff times are affecting attendance myself. The up & comings don't want to sit in the heat for 3 1/2 hours for those 2pm kickoffs.

[eagle2014]

There will be beer.

[UNTFan23]

What gets me is our stadium is named after an internet services company and yet my internet experience in there has been terrible... definitely something that needs to change.

If you were getting your internet via a WiFi access point then your beef might be with Apogee. Chances are the nearest cell tower is overwhelmed due to the number of people asking for data.