NFL Ultra Toss

The idea came from two places. HQ Trivia had shown that a single live event could hold a massive audience all playing at once. And Andrew remembered a bit from Minnesota Twins games as a kid: during the seventh-inning stretch, one fan got picked from the stands to throw a baseball into the bed of a truck parked on the field. Land it, win the truck.

Ultra Toss combined the two. Take a real stadium contest he had seen firsthand and make it massive multiplayer, so every fan in the building could play at once instead of one person pulled from the crowd. Juncture Media won the open challenge on that concept, then built it for Super Bowl LIV.

Two reasons drove the asynchronous design. First, real-time networking at 40,000 or more simultaneous connections would have caused serious problems. An asynchronous architecture solved the real-time networking headaches a system that size would otherwise hit.

Second, the toss physics had to be genuinely accurate, a real contest of skill rather than a rushed approximation. Being asynchronous gave the system room to compute a mathematically sound physics result first, then render and serve the outcome, instead of racing a live clock. Local edge servers deployed inside the stadium made that asynchronous experience feel almost real-time to the tens of thousands playing at once.

The four spectator angles, Global, POV, Top, and Winner's POV, were not a separate feature. Every player's toss was already rendered as an individual high-resolution video rather than simulated live on their phone. That choice let the team add post-processing and polish that would have been impossible to guarantee across tens of thousands of different devices.

Once the system was rendering a unique video for every one of 40,000-plus players, serving several camera angles from each result was a natural, low-cost extension of infrastructure that already existed. More angles would have been easy to add.