Super Bowl LX will be played at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California on Feb. 8
By Lauren Ohnesorge – Senior Reporter, Triangle Business Journal
Feb 5, 2026
Story Highlights
- SMT Corporation expands its Super Bowl LX broadcast team to 12 technicians and 13 cameras.
- The Durham technology firm debuts weather tracking tools using augmented reality at the game.
- SMT simultaneously supports NBC’s Olympics coverage in Italy with biometric data integration.
Super Bowl LX on Sunday will showcase a Durham company’s technology on the national stage.
For Robbie Louthan, corporate vice president of broadcast and business development at SMT Corporation, the NFL’s championship game is big business.
The company’s technology is behind the onscreen graphics fans see while watching games, from the yellow first down line to the virtual play clock and field goal distance. SMT delivers real-time data, immersive graphics and advanced visualization tools designed to further “the story” of the game, whether it’s letting viewers in on the impact of a wind gust on kickoff or cluing them in on a player’s history.
And when it’s the Super Bowl, the pressure is on.
For a typical Sunday Night Football game, SMT has five technicians supporting six enhanced cameras for NBC. For the Super Bowl — to be played at Levi’s Stadium in Santa, California, and broadcast on NBC — the team expands to 12 technicians and 13 cameras.
The bulk of the team has been in Santa Clara for two weeks going over all the “what if” scenarios with NBC, Louthan said. Dozens of additional team members off-site in California and at SMT’s Durham headquarters are also supporting the production.
“Part of what SMT and NBC prides itself on is preparation,” Louthan said.
This year, for the first time, SMT is collaborating on weather tracking tools. NBC and a company called Weather Applied Metrics have been collecting data in Levi’s Stadium, where “the wind can create an eddy, a circular effect.”
Data has been collected for every eight feet of elevation above the field. So if wind impacts a kick off, that data will be instantly available via SMT’s augmented reality weather visualization tools, which use Unreal Engine, a product developed by Cary video game maker Epic Games.
It’s all about enhancing the viewer experience, Louthan said.
But the big game Sunday is just part of SMT’s big month.
A smaller team is in Italy, supporting NBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics. There, they’ll be able to integrate biometric data for some key spectators. Imagine a figure skater breaking a record, and having the ability to “show the family’s anxiety and heart rate, their biometrics, how they react.”
It’s another way to tell the story of the moment, Louthan said.
SMT, formerly SportsMedia Technology, has 375 full-time employees, including 175 in Durham.
Read article at bizjournals.com/triangle.