Since the advent of video screens at stadiums, many sports teams have found clever ways to entertain fans in between timeouts with short videos and games. Most notorious of these is the “Kiss Cam”. The idea behind it is to spot a couple with the roaming camera and stay with them while the pressure of being on a live television screen hovering above thousands of people almost always gets a kiss out of the pair.
The appearance of the words “Kiss Cam” results in the crowd loudly cheering to encouragement for the onscreen couple to get it on. During the 2014-15 NBA season, a New York Knicks game at Madison Square Garden put their Kiss Cam\into action. The target woman, realizing she was onscreen, eagerly tried to get the attention of her date, who was on her right side and appeared engrossed with his mobile phone instead of his girlfriend.
After being rebuffed, the girl responded by passionately kissing the man on her left, the date becoming extremely confused. While the crowd erupted in laughter, criticism later came from social media and other comments sections when the video was posted online.
The main complaint was that the event was staged for the benefit of the crowd and not the spontaneous happening that appeared to take place. Some people claimed that the large amount of available actors in the New York City area made it easy for the Knicks to make this happen, but regardless of whether it was true, more than 24 million people viewed the video online.