MSG Sphere aims to change concertgoing experience
How about Internet at seats, bass at your feet?
NEW YORK – At the iconic Radio City Music Hall, a robotic voice speaks a sentence into the amphitheater:
“You are hearing my voice from a speaker that is located on the rear stage wall more than a football field away from your current location.”
The voice is not blasted at a high volume even though it comes from about 328 feet away on a speaker array in the back left corner of the Radio City stage. Yet it sounds nearly as loud and clear as if the listener was standing directly in front of it.
“Welcome to the future of audio technology,” the voice whispers.
The technology is known as beamforming audio, which sends sound directly to a location instead of blasting it over speakers spread through a venue. Developed by a German company called Holoplot, the system is one of the centerpieces for the Madison Square Garden Co.’s new 18,000-seat MSG Sphere arena, which the company announced Thursday would open in Las Vegas in 2020.
Sphere builders will break ground this year near the Sands’ Venetian and Palazzo complex.
Madison Square Garden Co. aims to transform the way audiences experience concerts and events with features that include Internet at each seat, bass pumped through the floorboards and screens that stretch across the ceiling.
Sphere is, in part, a result of the formation of MSG Ventures, a division of MSG created after the $17.7 billion sale of cable operator Cablevision.
Watching people flock to Madison Square Garden for concerts by popular electronic dance music (EDM) artists Swedish House Mafia and Deadmau5 made CEO and Executive Chairman James Dolan want to figure out why people were there.
Unlike rock or hip-hop concerts, where artists sing and perform live, at EDM events, “all of the artistry actually occurs prior to the show . ... And then the show is essentially run,” Dolan says.
“What I got from that was it wasn’t just about the performance and the lights and the music, it was about being together,” Dolan told USA TODAY after a preview of the technology being incorporated into Sphere.
No hockey or basketball here
“You will not see a hockey game, a basketball game in the Sphere,” says Dolan, who owns the New York Knicks, Rangers and Liberty sports teams. “The most sports thing you’ll ever see is a fight.”
MSG is betting big on technology to add features to the Sphere to make it stand out for entertainment and conferences.
Sphere’s exterior will be a dome that features 190,000 linear feet of LED lighting, or roughly 36 miles end-to-end, to enable it to be lit up or display images and video customized for each event that takes place.
A camera system inside the dome will even be able to broadcast out to the outer shell, allowing the event inside to be viewed by anyone outside.
A different camera system set up around the city will be able to virtually cloak the dome with real-time images and video of its surroundings, making it seemingly disappear.
Inside, 180,000 square feet, or about 4 acres, of a high-resolution screen will stretch across most of the arena’s roof, providing an immersive visual experience akin to a souped-up, 360-degree IMAX display.
Radio City Music Hall, by comparison, has roughly 35,000 square feet of ceiling space.
Beyond the dome
MSG has ambitious plans for the technology.
Though its debut in MSG Sphere may have to wait until 2020, David Dibble, CEO of the Ventures subsidiary that took a 25% stake in Holoplot, says the company hopes to bring the technology to Radio City this year for the annual Rockettes Christmas show.
Beyond Vegas, the company plans to open a Sphere venue in London while exploring ways to bring some of the technology into people’s homes, a move that would harken back to Dolan’s days in the cable business — a “home dome,” as Dibble describes it.