MSG Sphere Opens Wide
By Greg Kahn
Emerging Tech Exchange
Founder & CEO
Published on July 10, 2023
Even before I put on a hardhat last January to tour the still-incomplete MSG Sphere, I could see exactly why the $2.3 billion venue was the future of hybrid in-person and digital live entertainment.
MSG Sphere was easily one of the highlights of my CES experience. Billed as the most advanced multi-sensory performance venue for sports & entertainment, there was a lot of hype to live up to. But as the largely dazzled press coverage and social media chatter showed following MSG Sphere’s Independence Day premiere at Las Vegas’ Venetian Resort, the world is clearly ready to embrace the offering.
While it has to be seen to truly be appreciated, the specs are jaw-dropping: Sphere has an outdoor high-resolution LED screen that will encompass 580,000 square feet & surround the circular structure.
The interior of the 366-foot-tall spherical structure will have a 160,000 foot LED screen that will surround the audience. The screen, which is larger than three football fields, will be enhanced by more than 164,000 individual speakers.
The building will include 17,500 permanent seats rising five levels with a standing-room capacity of 20,000 for entertainment performances, concert residences, and sporting events such as boxing.
Even from the outside, MSG Sphere is like no other venue. The marketing potential of its all screen “exosphere” is surely going to elevate digital out of home advertising as one of the most artful immersive digital and physical mediums. For its debut on July 4, the “exosphere” morphed into a giant basketball to celebrate the NBA Summer League. But in a sign of its real-time ad and artistic value, MSG Sphere has also taken turns that resemble the moon, Earth, and a giant eye (Somehow, the unexpected sight didn’t cause any traffic accidents).
I've spoken and written a lot this past year about the convergence of physical and digital experiences. After COVID lockdowns, there was pent up demand to gather in communities at music venues, sporting events, restaurants, malls and theaters. Digital or in-person was always a false choice; it was always going to be both in order to pave the future of entertainment, sports, marketing, media, commerce and technology.
MSG Sphere ups the ante for what's possible. Of course, asking “what’s possible” is a big question. Countries from Asia to the Middle East are surely going to be unveiling their own larger-than-life hybrid digital/physical sports/entertainment/commerce complexes. Expect to see a rapid series of advances in the next year as each new venue vies to claim the “biggest” title.
Immersive Real Estate Boom?
It’s very much akin to the race to build the tallest buildings during the age of skyscrapers 100 years ago, when businesses and construction companies inspired a wave of technological advancement that changed the way we work. But MSG Sphere’s influence is bound to dwarf what the Empire State Building meant to modern life, commerce, and real estate when it first opened during the early years of the Great Depression.
Among the various aspects attracting attention about MSG Sphere, one point of discussion and conjecture is what this reinvention of live events means for real estate.
Will major and minor sports and concert stadiums and sites have to be retrofitted to match MSG Sphere? Will new, larger lots on the outskirts of cities and towns suddenly find themselves the targets of a hybrid digital/physical land rush? What's the future of real estate when it comes to sports and concert spaces, which are regarded as distressed assets?
When I visited MSG Sphere, the conversation was more internally focused on the addition of high tech cameras, lights, acoustics that ticket holders would experience in new ways. But in this new era of immersive, hybrid digital/physical entertainment, the outside is going to be a performance space as well as the inside. And that’s going to bring new meaning to the always important exclamation of “location, location, location.”
Greg Kahn
Emerging Tech Exchange
Founder & CEO
