NBC Thinks Connected Gloves and "Bullet Time" Can Make Boxing Cool

New submitter Lashdots writes with this excerpt from a piece at Fast Company about what may be the future of boxing, at least from the perspective of television audiences. "Right now, millennials turn boxing on and they're like, 'Who's winning? I don't get this,'" said Anthony Bailey. The chief technology officer of NBC's Premier Boxing Champions was watching a pair of fighters spar—each wearing sensor-equipped boxing gloves—in preparation for this weekend's fight, the first to be broadcast on NBC's primetime slot (8:30 pm EST) in 30 years. "These guys are real athletes. It's not just two guys going out in the ring trying to beat the crap out of each other. It's two guys that actually have strategy. They're actually thinking."

In a makeshift television studio here last month, Bailey, a team of engineers, and some of boxing's heaviest hitters were working to make that thinking a little more visible—in HD, with video-game-like graphics and Matrix-like camera angles. It's one part of an ambitious multimillion-dollar effort by NBC and some of boxing's biggest names to gain an edge against popular competitors like mixed martial arts, and to draw in younger, more casual audiences who may never have thought about watching before.

Comments

As one who has followed MMA since the end of the 9

[blind biker]

I must say that your statements are pure BS. Fighting in MMA causes just as much if not more brain injury, as (pure) boxing.
Right now, almost every veteran MMA fighter suffers from symptoms of brain injury. Here's a partial list:
Jens Pulver
Gabriel Gonzaga
Mirko Filipovic
Frank Trigg
Chuck Liddell
Mark Munoz
Antonio Silva
Wanderlei Silva
Alistair Overeem
Phil Baroni
Gary Goodridge
Andrei Arlovski
Josh Koscheck
Cheick Kongo

and the list goes on. And it doesn't even include the journeymen that get punched in the head for a $300 payout on regional circuits, as a matter of fact for their whole careers.