RFID CASE STUDY People love sports statistics and the more the better. Responding to this customer demand, the NFL increased the quality and quant |

Zebra was well known for its manufacturing and selling, marking, tracking, and printing technologies such as thermal barcode label and receipt printers, RFID smart label printer/encoders, and card and kiosk printers.  As it moved into IoT and M2M applications, Zebra launched its MotionWorks Sports Solution, which powers the NFL IoT initiative.  Zebra was able to develop RFID tags that blink up to 85 times per second to track motion of athletes in subseconds.  Then it had to find a customer for the product—so it turned to the biggest fish in the pond—the NFL.  Zebra trialed the tags by equipping more than 2,000 players, 18 NFL stadiums and officials, markers, and pylons.  Over the course of the season, more than 1.7 billion sets of XY player coordinates were measured, transmitted, and stored during the games.  Every stadium was connected to a command station in San Jose, California, that controls when the data are collected, where they are sent, and stores them in the cloud.