For decades, tuning into a sporting event at home involved watching a traditional broadcast on your TV. These days, however, many viewers aren’t just watching on their TV—they’ve got the game streaming right to their phones.
After more than two decades, NBC and the NBA have revived their partnership just in time to face this new challenge. In a media landscape where fans consume sports across traditional broadcasts, streaming platforms, and mobile devices, the question is no longer about how to televise the game, but how to design an experience that cultivates the league’s next generation of stars, its culture, and fandom while honoring the nostalgia that once defined the NBA on NBC.
“Our job is to document and cover the game and really celebrate the game,” says Pierre Moossa, coordinating producer for NBC Sports. “That was what we used to do back in the time when we had the NBA on NBC.”
Celebrating the game has become more complex as sports fans’ viewing habits are increasingly fragmented. “The consumption of sports is always evolving,” Moossa says. “Whether it’s social media, digital, social, streaming, we need to meet the viewer [where they are].”
To solve this, the NBA and NBC—in concert with Peacock, NBC’s streaming platform—are launching a new mobile-first feature called Courtside Live. It’s designed to function alongside traditional broadcast and gives Peacock viewers an unprecedented degree of production control by allowing them to swipe between multiple camera angles in real time, creating a more intimate experience of games.
The Design Challenge
In recent years mobile has become increasingly important to the fan experience. “I always held my phone horizontally,” Moossa says. “People now hold their phone vertically to watch videos.”
This behavioral change started influencing Peacock’s overall strategy back in 2024, when it launched its Can’t Miss Highlights feature, which brought vertical video to the Peacock app for the first time.
“Vertical video laid the foundation and helped inform us as we were coming up with Courtside Live,” says Jim Denney, NBCU’s chief product officer, describing a process of experimentation in the lead-up to launching the product.
According to Denney, after NBC confirmed its new partnership agreement with the NBA, a cross-functional team got to work brainstorming ideas for a next-gen fan viewing experience. “ It’s really sitting down and starting from the fan and working backwards,” he says.
“One of the ideas that came up was what if we could actually create the experience of being courtside—what would that feel like?” says John Jelley, SVP of product and user experience for Peacock and global streaming at NBCUniversal. “When you go to a game, you are looking around, you are seeing the coaches, here’s the athletes coming on, here’s the teams lined up. What if we could actually create the experience a fan [has] live but as part of the Peacock product experience?”
The product team presented the idea of a feature that allowed fans to flip through different camera views during a live matchup, both on their phone and TV. Denney says viewers who use multiple devices to watch NBA content tend to be more engaged, noting, “We wanted a cross-section of things that we would do [well] both on TV and on mobile devices.”
A major learning that came from the 2024 Paris Olympics broadcast is that there are two types of fans: casual and avid. In addition to providing a quality main broadcast, NBC and Peacock want to appeal to both audience segments by offering new ways to experience the action. They also found that fans who choose to watch events in multiple views simultaneously prefer to stay in that view. Courtside Live builds on that insight by re-creating the multi-view experience for mobile devices.
“If you think about your mobile experience, you are swiping up and down through vertical videos, and moving between different apps,” Jelley says. “What we see in that behavior is that fans want the option to [say] ‘Oh, I’m watching the game, there’s something great happening, I wonder if I could understand a bit more about that player or maybe catch up on some moment that happened earlier or see how the celebrities in the stands are reacting.’” He says making the right videos easily accessible to viewers created a net-new experience.
“We thought there was a real opportunity to do something completely new with Courtside, which was to bring that to everyone’s phones and everyone’s TVs through multi-view in a way that really hadn’t ever been done before,” Jelley explains.
Designing Courtside Live
The team began testing Courtside Live during NBA Summer League games at Golden State in July 2025 and quickly realized a big hurdle to clear involved translating horizontally captured video into a vertical format that could live on mobile phones.
“One of the things you have to do with Courtside Live and any vertical video is often you are shooting a scene with a TV camera, which is a 16-by-9 horizontal feed,” Denney says. “One of the concepts that we had was following [an individual] player [on the court], my understanding is the production team actually had a camera taped off [at] two edges so that the cameraman could actually keep somebody in view.”
In that instance, the production team initially used a robo-camera that wasn’t fit to capture the necessary angles. They revisited discussions with the vendor and explored options with more padding to identify the most suitable camera.
“Through that partnership with production, we found ways to make sure the users see exactly the right element,” Jelley says. “We employed some Japanese technology that allows the operators to make sure they’re delivering these live feeds [and] they can make sure they’re focused on the elements that are most interesting. . . . We’re using a variety of technologies to make sure that the user is getting the best possible experience in that vertical format.”
Another UX pain point was navigation. When Peacock users watch live sporting events on their mobile phones, they’re initially presented with the main traditional broadcast in landscape view. Below that main broadcast view, Jelley explains, users will now find a medley of game views.
The team designed the interface with one-handed use in mind, making standard interactions, like swiping through camera angles on mobile devices, intuitive.
“If you think about your phone and how you hold your phone, you have to be able to very easily navigate around this experience using just your thumb,” Jelley says. “We really thought about how we could make it easy to switch between these different angles very intuitively, and then use the picture-in-picture functionality that we know users love using on their phone.”
Jelley recognizes the paradox Peacock is balancing: While users want more choice, they don’t want to feel overwhelmed. His team’s testing focused predominantly on usability. To simplify navigation, the team used AI to design iconography that clearly communicates to viewers the different camera angles available. And to help viewers transition seamlessly between the main broadcast and alternative views without losing their place, the product team tweaked the styling of the main icon to guide viewers back to their original point of view.
“The big design constraint really was doing that on a small screen [because] you don’t have a lot of real estate,” Jelley admits. “You don’t want things to get in the way of the video, but you want to make it very easy to navigate. And I think the design we came up with really lands that well.”
Scalability and Repurposing
Courtside Live is launching in earnest during the 75th NBA All-Star Game hosted at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles. In preparation, the teams spent five days rehearsing for the three-day slate of All-Star events, including the Celebrity Game, Rising Stars, All-Star Saturday’s three-point and dunk contests, and Sunday’s new U.S.-vs.-World format.
According to Paul Benedict, the NBA’s SVP of broadcasting and content management, the action will be captured by 50-plus cameras, more than 20 super-slow-motion cameras, and a flying cable camera. To achieve crisp, cinematic storytelling, Benedict says the production centers on providing unique access typically reserved for All-Star week.
“What makes Courtside Live so special is those cameras are literally on the scores table, giving you that experience,” Moossa says. “I may never be able to sit courtside, but I can grab my phone and be able to see what that camera angle looks like.”
While these angles will be available via Peacock on mobile devices, Moossa notes that the traditional broadcast will also benefit from the Courtside Live feature. “So the ISO camera and the courtside cameras are going [to be] intertwined into the normal, traditional broadcast,” he says.
Learning through Experimentation
The NBC and Peacock teams are enthusiastic about what they’ll learn from their collaboration on this feature and its debut this weekend.
“We’ll be tracking each one of these [angles] and seeing how much people watch, how long in one view, how often do they come back,” Jelley says. “A lot of the goal of the experiences we built in mobile is about frequency, because we know that with your phone, you have it all the time. Seeing how frequently [users] come back to [the] experience is a great sign of how compelling it is and how much it becomes a part of people’s habits of watching.”
In addition to tracking each camera angle, Jelley and his team plan to track the percentage of mobile users who engage with Courtside Live, aiming to achieve a similar level of success as they did with the Can’t Miss Highlights feature.
NBC and Peacock already have an early signal of the feature’s potential because the technology is being employed for its current Winter Olympics coverage. While initially designed for the NBA, their Olympics partner applied it to hockey and figure skating, giving fans unique access to moments like the “kiss and cry” area, where skaters wait with their coaches for scores. This suggests the feature can scale beyond basketball to other live event experiences.
“You can imagine how this could apply to other events, whether that’s some of our entertainment events like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade [or] anywhere where we have lots of different angles or even some of our other other shows,” Jelley says. “This will be a conversation. If this works well, how can we extend it?”
