By Alex Owens

Local company offers a new experience to sports fans

Picture this: You’re at a San Diego State Aztecs basketball game and one of the players makes an unbelievable play, one that shocks you with its brilliance and makes your mouth drop to the floor of the gymnasium.

Thanks to the Internet and cable sports, you might see reruns of that play thousands of times for the rest of your life; but your mouth drop reaction will only be in your memory.

Actually, now you can have a photograph of that as well, thanks to Fanpics.com, a company with offices in Mission Hills that is changing the way sports fans experience a game.

Fanpics employees have been setting up dozens of robotic cameras at arenas around the country including Viejas Arena at San Diego State and Staples Center in Los Angeles.

When something big happens in a game, such as a game-winning 3-point shot or a great hockey goal, the Fanpics cameras take photos of every seat in the entire arena.

Attendees who have downloaded the free Fanpics app before the game can log in and within seconds see their reactions and share those sports selfies to friends, family and social media.

Co-founder Marco Correia — who is also head of brand, product and strategy — said the idea was inspired by cameras installed on rides at Disneyland, SeaWorld and other major theme parks.

“Think of the key moment of Splash Mountain, but applied to sports,” he said. “Sports is full of these emotional moments that people want to capture.”

Correia credits his business partner, co-founder and CEO Will Dickinson, with the inspiration for Fanpics.

“Will grew up in England following Chelsea, a big soccer team there,” said Correia, a San Diego native now living in East Village. “He was sitting on the couch watching the team come back in a dramatic fashion and saw the cameramen pan the crowd going nuts. He realized there are not a lot of times when people hug strangers other than sports.”

The company — which has only been around for 18 months and already has a staff of 18 — did its test piloting at Viejas Arena.

“It helped that I was an Aztec alum, class of 2008,” Correia said proudly. “We set up about 10 robotic cameras inside the perimeter that can cover the entire arena in seconds.”

One Fanpics employee works at each arena contracted to use the service.

“The cameras are plugged into a system,” Correia said. “One employee presses a button every time something big happens. We usually get about 20 to 30 decent photos each game.”

Those photos can be downloaded from the Fanpics website for free — the company makes its money through sponsorship deals and ads on the app, which allow them to offer the photos at no cost to the consumer.

Getting the word out about the service, however, has presented the entrepreneurs with some challenges.

For instance, an informational video shown on the Viejas Arena “Jumbotron” at one Aztecs game this season was unclear about how Fanpics works. But Correia said the reaction he’s received from people who have signed up makes him confident in the product’s future.

“About 20 percent of people at each game download the app and check in at the game with their seat numbers,” he said. “That’s pretty high. And we know those people who check in are going back to the app to check updated photos — it only takes 30 seconds for a new photo to show up.”

Though Correia and company only have two arenas on contract so far, he believes that number could be 50 by the end of 2016.

The current focus is on arenas hosting basketball and hockey, rather than football or baseball.

“We install the cameras into an arena at our own expense,” Correia said. “If we were to set up at, say, Dallas Cowboys Stadium, which seats 100,000 people, we would need 30 cameras for only eight games a season. But we can be at Staples for 82 games a season with just 10 cameras [for basketball and hockey].

“Baseball has a lot of games, but there are [MLB enforced] rights issues,” he continued. “If you do something at one stadium, it has to be at all of them.”

For more details — including their FAQs or path to branding on their blog — visit Fanpics.com.

—Alex Owens is a San Diego-based freelance writer. He can be reached at [email protected].