🌐 NFL Toy Story Telecast, Goodbye Aperture
Joey Daoud
October 05, 2023
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Welcome to another edition of VP Land. We’ve got a very immersive edition today.
In this issue…
🌏 The tech inside the MSG Sphere
🏈 NFL goes to Toy Story
📷 RIP to Apple’s Aperture
Let’s jump into it!
MAIN STAGE
The MSG Sphere by the Numbers
It’s been nearly impossible to miss on social media: the Las Vegas MSG Sphere.
We’ve seen the exterior light up for months and now we finally got a look inside with U2’s opening concert (Darren Aronofsky’s specially created immersive film Postcard From Earth premieres tomorrow. We previously covered the specially made camera they’re using to film it.)
The U2 x Las Vegas Sphere show took two years to create and will make ~$270m.
In Fall 2021, the band was approached to open the $2.3B mega-structure (with a capacity of 18k).
Willie Williams — U2’s creative director since the early 1980s — initially thought it was a “terrible… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— Trung Phan (@TrungTPhan)
4:02 PM • Oct 1, 2023
Let’s look at some of the mindblowing numbers behind the 8th wonder of the world.
Mega Structure: The MSG Sphere, standing 366ft tall x 516ft wide, is currently the world's largest spherical building. It has a seated capacity of 17,600 and a standing capacity of 20,000.
Unparalleled Visuals: The Sphere boasts the largest LED screen on Earth — both externally and internally. Its exterior offers a fully programmable 580,000 sq ft LED display. Inside, attendees are enveloped by a 160,000 sq ft screen with a staggering 16K x 16K resolution, the equivalent of 72 HD TVs or a 12k screen resolution (Noah Kadner has a write-up on the SACO custom LED tech).
Sonic Evolution: Dome venues typically suffer from audio issues. The Sphere overcomes this with a groundbreaking approach: 168,000 speakers offering spatial audio based on HOLOPLOT's X1 speaker module. Every seat is equipped with its own speaker, ensuring studio-quality sound for every audience member (CEO Roman Sick has more on this accomplishment).
Unpopular opinion but the $2.3 billion MSG Sphere is one of the coolest things the US has built in a long time.
(h/t @VegasIssues)
— Joe Pompliano (@JoePompliano)
2:19 PM • Oct 4, 2023
How much to play a video on the sphere?
The pitch deck to buy out a day on the sphere has been circulating online. The cost?
$450,000 for a day
$650,000 for the week
