3 Questions for …

ADAM SILVER NBA commissioner

On Feb. 2, Apple released its Vision Pro headset into the world (priced at $3,500). CEO Tim Cook was on hand to open the doors at Apple’s Fifth Avenue flagship to welcome customers. A few hours later, THR tagged along as Cook toured the NBA league office with commissioner Adam Silver, and spoke with both about the device’s Hollywood potential.

Spatial computing seems like it opens new doors to sports and entertainment. How do you get fans invested?

Tim Cook I think it’s more immersive than ever before. I think the fan wants to be a part of the game and a part of the action, and there’s nothing like being in Vision Pro and feeling like you’re on the court. You know, it’s not that you have a courtside seat. It’s so much better than that. I think it really changes everything.

Adam Silver You often hear even from casual NBA fans that the best seat in sports is a courtside seat, which virtually no one gets to experience. One of my colleagues before said 99 percent of people experience the NBA through some form of media. But if you then said the percentage that experience it by not sitting courtside, that’s 99.9 percent. And as Tim said, this is in many ways better than sitting courtside. It can take you anywhere on the floor.

This is day one. What will it take to level up, to introduce it to people and make sure that the content, the original games, catches up to the incredible technology?

Cook It will take a lot, you know, it’ll take rethinking about production and camera locations on the courts and so forth. You will have to reengineer everything, but it’s so worth it. I’ve seen several demos of the output of different games, and it’s just mind-blowing. It’s so much different. It’s hard to go back to the 2D world after you’ve been in the 3D world. You just don’t want to do it. It’s like going from color to black and white.

Silver I was reminding Tim that I was in his office roughly seven years ago with some of my colleagues. And we were talking about the then NBA app. And Tim sort of suggested to me and my colleagues that you needed to take more control over your destiny, and I think that’s what we’re going to see here. I think what the marketplace is going to do now is cause other content creator organizations — not just the NBA — to look at the transformative nature of this and start investing.

What is being done to build out the content infrastructure? And will the NBA or other leagues view Vision Pro content as a new rights category?

Cook We were working with some people after we launched at [developer event] WWDC, but limited in the scheme of things. There were lots of developers this morning in line to get ahold of the product, because they want to do the development work. And by the same token, we started talking to a lot of creators, and everybody is blown away by the storytelling that can take place in this versus the tools of the past. And so my gut is there are going to be a lot of people running toward this, but we’ll see. Silver I’d have to imagine that anyone who’s licensing content for us is going to want to have these rights themselves, whether it’s actually

Apple or someone who’s producing content: Disney, ESPN in order to use Apple hardware. I think it’s my job to incentivize our partners to be able to look out into the future. We’re just scratching the surface here.