The champions of Italy, the Turin based club which has produced many greats in the field of football is now landing its feet in the field of virtual reality by launching its first ever virtual reality application.
Juventus launched the application on Thursday, 12th October for its fans. It had four episodes on the go for the fans to experience an on-pitch scenes of the match day, behind the scenes of the training sessions and a chance to view its Serie A championship celebration of the last season.
“The potential [for VR] is enormous for a club like Juventus, where 80 percent of our 50 million followers on digital platforms live outside Italy. Not all of these people are able to travel here for matches, so with this virtual reality app, we are breaking down geographical barriers in order to bring them closer to the club without having to physically be here.” said the Juventus’ co-chief revenue officer and marketing head, Federico Palomba.
The virtual reality app is the most recent endeavor of Juventus into the digitized world. There has been a rise in demand from the fans of Juventus for a live-stream service internationally. For this reason Juventus Pass, an on-demand video platform, surfaced exclusively for international fans. A docuseries produced by Netflix has been announced to premier the following year.
This Juventus app is now available on Oculus devices. It will soon be made available on Cardboard by Google. In the mean time the club has decided to make more episodes and to release them for the fans.
Palomba also said, “Juventus VR is also a crucial way of appealing to a younger demographic of fans, who enjoy interacting with their team increasingly in a digital context. These days, watching matches on TV is not enough to grow your fan base and clubs have to keep thinking outside of the box.”
Juventus goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon and team forwards Paulo Dybala and Juan Cuadrado are the few players directly associated with the making of the VR app.
There may be some discrepancies with the VR app like not being able to zoom in and capture the finer details of the match, still it will provide an insight of the happenings within the team to the fans out there. As Palomba said and I quote, “As a fan, it doesn’t get any better than celebrating silverware with the players on the pitch and in the changing rooms.”
