The one thing Vision Pro is great at is basically guaranteed to fail

When Apple launched Vision Pro, reviewers were conflicted. Most acknowledged the very high standard of the headset’s technology, while wondering if there was a convincing use case. What are we supposed to do with this thing that justifies the enormous price tag? What’s the killer app?

Even after the launch of the second-gen model, those questions remain. But one possible solution lies in the world of sports. With traditional broadcast technology, watching sports on TV is a pale 2D imitation of attending the event in person; even 3D TVs struggle to properly immerse you in the crowd and the atmosphere. The kind of immersion enabled by Vision Pro would, quite literally, be a game changer.

Sadly, there remain many barriers in the way of this becoming a mainstream reality, as one startup appears to have discovered.

In a detailed article, AppleInsider this week recounts the strange tale of OneEightyDegrees, a small firm seeking investment and media coverage of its Be There platform. This was designed to capture immersive video at sports events using specialist cameras located in or near the stands, and broadcast this live to VR users–initially Vision Pro, with other platforms to be added later.

That sounds like a good plan, but it doesn’t seem to have worked out. OneEightyDegrees stopped responding to AppleInsider’s emails, and the site is now unsure whether it was a legitimate startup which simply didn’t manage to secure the funding it needed, or if the whole thing was just a fishing expedition “in an attempt to secure a one-in-a-million chance at funding and to become a real service.” Either way, I wouldn’t expect to hear much more about OneEightyDegrees or Be There.

The sports conundrum

There’s a wider point here, because this odd case study demonstrates the near-impossibility of any small company breaking into the live broadcast of VR sports video. As AppleInsider explains, OneEightyDegrees never stood a chance. The startup would have had to pay licensing fees to leagues and franchises, likely running into the tens or even hundreds of millions, obtain broadcast-grade cameras and other equipment and gear, then manage bandwidth-hungry data streams to viewers.

And after all that expense, OneEightyDegrees would have run into the worst problem of all: the audience isn’t guaranteed, and will be very small at first, partly because hardly anyone can afford a Vision Pro and partly because the idea of watching a multi-hour sports event using a weighty headset is unappealing. The money you’d have to pump into the project simply wouldn’t be justified by the money you could draw out at the other end, which essentially rules the idea out as feasible for a startup. Or for any company that wants to actually make a profit.

The only way this could work, in other words, is for a company to take it on as an initially loss-making enterprise that pays out in the long run. Create it in the knowledge that it won’t turn a profit, and hope that the existence of high-quality live sports broadcasts on Vision Pro will convince more people to buy one, thereby making the service commercially viable. Although we’d still need Apple to make a lighter version of the headset, and the bad news is that this project is believed to have been scrapped.

Apple itself has dipped its toes into sports broadcasting on Vision Pro, but to a very limited extent: a few basketball games and a slam dunk contest, none of them live. Where it has much wider experience is traditional sports broadcasting, from soccer and F1 to Friday Night Baseball, so the company clearly has the coffers to stomach those franchise fees; the question is whether it would be willing to commit to the much greater costs and difficulties of broadcasting in VR on a wider basis.

Perhaps it will do so for the sake of Vision Pro’s success. But I’m not convinced. Apple has plenty of money, but that doesn’t mean it’s willing to throw a chunk of it at a losing venture. And as the case of OneEightyDegrees demonstrates, there’s little profit to be had right now from broadcasting sports to Vision Pro users.