CUE Audio’s smartphone-powered light show will feature at the College Football Playoff National Championship between Clemson and LSU on Monday. Just before kickoff, fans in attendance at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans will be asked to open the College Football Playoff app to power the light show.
CUE has mixed high-frequency sound waves into the stadium’s pre-game hype video. The ultrasonic waves are outside of the human hearing range, but can be detected by the microphones of most smartphones. The sound will be used to relay data to the College Football Playoff app, triggering smartphones to light up to the beat of the music video.
The Superdome, which can seat up to 74,295 fans, is also home to the NFL’s New Orleans Saints. During the 2019 regular season, the Saints became the first NFL team to partner with CUE, integrating the company’s software into the official Saints app ready for the team’s home opener in September. According to CUE, there were more than 50,000 new downloads over the first few weeks of that release, and light show engagement accounted for 39% of all Saints app clicks during that first game.
“Once you integrate a light show into [a team’s app], we’ve seen downloads increase by as much as 1,000% and typically in the range of 400 to 500%,” CUE Audio CEO Jameson Rader told SportTechie last year.
The Kansas City Chiefs, Green Bay Packers, and Houston Texans also debuted CUE Audio-powered light shows at games this past season. The company markets its smartphone-powered light shows as being more engaging and more cost efficient than other crowdsourced lighting solutions like wristbands.
