By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — How do you keep football fans as regular visitors to stadiums when the television coverage of every play is so good?
For the Giants and the Jets, the answer, perhaps surprisingly, is more and better video than people can get at home. This season, the New Meadowlands Stadium will offer fans free smart-phone applications that they can glance at to see video replays, updated statistics and live video from other games — and that will work only inside a stadium.
Over the next few years, stadium officials say, the applications will provide fans with statistics on the speed of players and the ball, and fantasy games that will allow them to pick players and compete against other fans.
A real-life game no longer seems to be enough.
In recent years, television coverage of the National Football League has become so rich and detailed that teams and stadiums have no choice but to respond with their own technology plays. Last spring the league’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, said the experience for fans in stadiums needed to be elevated to compete with television broadcasts, to keep fans engaged — and to keep them buying tickets — in a challenging economic climate.
To do that, stadium officials here have taken steps few other N.F.L. stadiums have. About $100 million has been spent on the stadium’s technology, and a former television production executive was hired to oversee the fan experience to offer more than fans can get sitting at home on their couches in front of their high-definition television sets.
“It’s become an arms race,” said Peter Brickman, the former television production executive who was hired as the chief technology officer for the New Meadowlands Stadium last year to channel his knowledge about television into the experience in the stadium.
Mr. Brickman, who worked for the N.F.L. for several years enhancing its television productions, pioneered the popular “Red Zone” alerts that tell fans watching games on “NFL Sunday Ticket” on DirecTV about other games in which a team is about to score.
It is unclear how the smart-phone applications will change the atmosphere of games. Fans praised Cowboys Stadium, which opened in Arlington, Tex., last year, for its twin video boards that are suspended over the field and stretch nearly from one 20-yard line to the other so that fans can watch the action live both on the field and on a big screen.
The four video screens at the New Meadowlands Stadium are smaller, but officials say the stadium’s innovations go further than at Cowboys Stadium or any other in the country.
“I think I’m not like most people who want someone blabbering in their ear and constant stats and information,” said Jeff Laible, 63, a football and baseball fan from Manhattan who attended a game at Giants Stadium. “I just want the ambience, to watch the players and feel the crowd. I would much rather have the feel of the game brought into the home, not the other way around.”
But Matthew Stone, 32, a San Francisco 49ers season-ticket holder from Oakdale, Calif., said there were many times in recent years when he wished he had been in front of a television when he was at a game.
“You want to know about injuries or fights on the field or hear from one of your favorite commentators,” Mr. Stone said. “It’s great to be at the game, but you miss things. I think an application is a great idea.”
For those fans who do not have smart phones, 2,200 televisions with 48,000 square feet of screens have been installed in and around the stadium, the most of any N.F.L. stadium. The applications and stadium video screens will access video feeds that can be used only in the stadium because of the N.F.L.’s television agreements. If the fan leaves, the application will no longer work and will direct fans to the teams’ Web sites, which will offer less.
Mr. Brickman said he thought 7,000 to 10,000 fans would use the application in the first season at the stadium. To accommodate them, 500 wireless antennas have been installed in the stadium.
“We want to keep things leading edge but not bleeding edge,” Mr. Brickman said, adding that different parts of the application would be slowly rolled out during the stadium’s first season. A few other N.F.L. stadiums hope to introduce some of the technology this season, too.
“The worst thing for me is a Steve Jobs moment,” he said, referring to a news conference in June at which Mr. Jobs could not use the Internet on an iPhone because the wireless network was overloaded.
The introduction of the smart-phone applications comes as teams confront an increasingly difficult environment to attract fans to stadiums. The images of N.F.L. players blocking and tackling on high-definition television have become increasingly life-like at the same time that the price of attending a game in person is higher than ever.
The Jets and the Giants have attached personal seat licenses for a majority of the seats — fees from $1,000 to $20,000 that fans must pay before they are allowed to buy their tickets, which cost $90 to $700 a game.
The Giants have sold nearly all their personal seat licenses, and the Jets have cut the prices of theirs but have still not sold them all.
Across the N.F.L., attendance is down a little more than 3 percent from its height in 2007, but television ratings have continued to climb. The average regular-season N.F.L. game was seen by 16.6 million viewers last season — the most since 1990 — and by two million more viewers than in the 2008 season, according to figures from Nielsen.
The technology behind the applications, which is powered by Cisco and Verizon, has other benefits. The applications will alert fans to which concession stands have the shortest lines and provide traffic updates.
Security officials will have special bracelets that parents can have placed on their children. In the event that a child is lost, the stadium’s video security system can immediately locate the child on a television screen.
“Teams shouldn’t have an imbalance in the television experience and the stadium experience,” said Vince Gennaro, who is a marketing consultant to several sports teams and teaches sports management at Columbia University’s School of Continuing Education. “Once you raise the bar on one, you have to raise the bar on the other. I think it’s really important now that high definition and DirecTV have innovated, that teams compete essentially with themselves and bring that experience to the seat.”
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