NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers to stream select Games This Season Formatted for Apple vision Pro
My good friend Jake Krol at TechRadar reported earlier this week the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers will be using Apple Vision Pro to stream games in Apple’s Apple Immersive Video format for the mixed-reality headset. The streams will be available in both the NBA and Spectrum SportsNet (the Lakers’ broadcast partner) apps for visionOS early next year.
“It’s not every game, but for those that are streaming—exclusive to the $3,500 Spatial Computer—you’ll get access to views that put you right in the middle of the action,” Krol wrote of the Lakers’ plans for Vision Pro and Apple Immersive Video. “Special cameras that support the format will be set courtside and under each basket to give you perspectives that amp up the immersion. The Lakers’ games will be shot using a special version of Blackmagic Design’s URSA Cine Immersive Live camera.”
Apple and the NBA will announce which games on the schedule will be available in Apple Immersive “later this fall,” specifically sometime next month, according to Krol.
As a diehard sports fan—which includes basketball—I’m extremely excited by this news. For one thing, I do have a Vision Pro I mainly use for entertainment: watching TV shows and movies. For another, Krol’s story strikes me as lending more credence to my notion that Vision Pro can make watching sports more accessible to Blind and low vision people. Granted, this isn’t the same as sitting inside Crypto.com Arena, but by virtue of Apple Immersive, it’s damn near close. Watching live sporting events as someone with a visual disability can suck depending on one’s needs and tolerances, which is why using Apple Immersive to shoot games is so tantalizing. The whole point of Apple Immersive is to make viewers feel like they’re right there even if they’re really not; to use the format to stream sports can elicit those same feelings of… immersion. In an accessibility context, someone like me could feel like I could enjoy the action a lot more.
As Krol notes, Apple has taken a liking to using its products for capturing live sports for streaming. Jason Snell at Six Colors recently reported on iPhone 17 Pro being used to film a recent Tigers-Red Sox game from Boston’s Fenway Park for Friday Night Baseball on Apple TV+. Similarly, I wrote in April about the NBA’s Sacramento Kings using a tactile display to make games accessible to Blind and low vision fans visiting Golden1 Center.
