Michael Guerin: How punters can now be a part of the horse racing action

Punters can follow their horses on their smart phones. Photo / Supplied

COMMENT:

An Auckland racetrack might seem an odd place to develop the future of sports broadcasting.

But the baby steps being taken at Alexandra Park in Auckland over the last month could grow into a giant which helps take you closer to your favourite sport than you imagined possible.

The Inter Dominion transtasman harness racing series is in full swing, with horses doing what horses, or for that matter plenty of human athletes, do. Running around in circles to see who is the fastest.

But there is a very different race for speed also going on — download speeds on your phone and the world of possibilities it could open up.

Auckland company BestSeat360 is trialling 360 degree cameras on the helmets of the drivers of the horses, with those pictures beamed to the phone of selected customers.

The customers can choose to watch the race from the driver's perspective but with an even more complete field of vision as they can look left, right and behind to see what the other horses and drivers are also doing with the slide of a finger.

The technology is still being fined-tuned and while it is touted as a world first there are bound to be others trialling the same tech in other areas, especially as sport craves more eyeballs and those eyeballs crave to be closer to the action.

The idea, for harness racing at least, is to make the industry attractive to the lost generation whose adrenal glands are the key to their wallets.

Watching normal racing may bore them but being able to be part of the race, average time two and a half minutes, with the long-range goal of being able to bet on the horse they feel like they are driving, might sound a bit more fun.

There is a long way to go before any of this becomes normal.

The racing industry wants in-race betting, much like punters have for all other sporting events, and interactive coverage straight to punter's phones would make that far more attractive.

Long-term end game: A group of friends betting against each other and feeling like they are in the driver's seat. Like Fortnite but with horses, and maybe betting.

Live betting on horse racing in this country will require legislative change and the Department of Internal Affairs may be helping racing with its laws and rules but if the DIA were a horse they wouldn't win many races. Their favourite A word is accuracy, not alacrity.

But racing bosses are intrigued by what they have seen of BestSeat360 and while they hone their tech they also await the 5G coverage which could make the viewer experience almost seemless.

If the harness racing experiment of putting customers in the driver's seat becomes reality the opportunities for other sports are ming-boggling.

As cameras get smaller and download speeds become faster, imagine the chance to see what Lewis Hamilton sees in real time from his helmet any time you want.

Whether that viewer experience becomes reality I have no idea.

I just spent three full minutes trying to download September by Earth, Wind and Fire into my iTunes library and I am still not sure whether my $2.39 purchase was successful so I might be the wrong person to ask.

But I know one thing. It looks and feels pretty cool.