INTERNET


CBSSports March Madness On Demand: Now With Bigger Boss Button

Posted by Jonathan in INTERNET on 03-01-10    No Comments


Like the United States Hockey Team running out of gas in overtime, March Madness On Demand this year is shaping up like last year’s March Madness On Demand. CBSSports released details about about what we can expect for its online media player for this year’s NCAA Men’s Div. 1 Tournament. And it all had a Ground Hog Day sort of feel. Just one big doover:  All the games will be available in HD and standard def. There will specialized video content and lots ‘o stats.

About the only real upgrade will be the “Boss” button which will be “new and improved.” Of course, from a tech perspective, a Boss button is the dumbest thing ever; this is a computer network. Your boss is perfectly capable of  seeing exactly where and what you do on a work computer. But CBSSports is giving fans the illusion of privacy … which is all you can expect these days, right?




Lost In Olympic Translation: Bumming On Google’s Olympic Street View

Posted by Jonathan in INTERNET on 02-25-10    No Comments


Here’s a high tech way to get in touch with an Olympic bummer. Spend some time on Google Street View up at the Vancouver Olympics.

A couple of weeks back, Google got some interesting buzz on a hilarious new riff on its Street View product: The Street View Snowmobile. The thing takes the traditional Street View technology and mounts it on the back of a snow machine. Google Snow Mobile 1, or whatever it is called, then beavers  around the Olympic venue capturing the look and feel of the mountain, the venues and the town.

And initially, what’s not to love? Heck, you’re up at Whistler, hanging at the Oly Village; getting a sense of the Sliding Center. And for sure as part of the larger Olympics package Google Maps has put together — which is pretty darn impressive — it shows what a branded sports event can be like on Google. Google Maps at the Superbowl anybody?

But there’s a problem. There’s no sports on Maps.

When I actually started using the system, Olympics or not, I got  the same Google Maps feeling. Yes, you’re seeing something, but you’re not sure what or where. And it takes a long time to crawl around all this terrain; Vancouver is big. Who has the patience to look at every virtual nook and cranny.  And forget trying to track  events as part of the larger Web or TV experience, Google Street View is just not fast enough to be part of a relevant game experience, at least on TV.

And to be honest, once the cool factor was gone, the woman’s downhill slope looked like a thousand other ski slopes. And Canada Hockey Place looked, like well, a building. And the images were from any old day. At any old time. And worse,  I wasn’t even planning on getting there. Robbed of the personal interest I might have in finding my way, all Google Street View did was remind me I was 3,000 miles from the event. That pushed me away, not drew me in.

In many ways, Google Street View has created a strange new entity. The Anti-Olympics. And who wants to spend time at something like that?




Friends, Meet The Fantasy BBall Stat Weapon Of Choice: CBSSports.com Power Hitter Selector

Posted by Jonathan in INTERNET on 02-24-10    No Comments


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Looks like the folks over at CBSSports.com are gettin’ their Google on: The online sports service announced today what appears to be the fantasy baseball analysis tool Larry and Sergei would be proud to use: Their 2010 projected Power Hitter Selector. I could not get the code to work in this darn blog post, so you will need to link over and test it out. But do click over and take a look.

This bad bay estimates the coming season performance for hitting and other offensive stats in an easy to read, easy to manipulate interface. That means everybody can be their own private Peter Gammons: Taking a hard look at how what kind of output they can expect from major leaguers. And there are some real gems here. Take, Ryan Braun for example. His 37 projected home runs and what seems like a very productive 18 stolen bases make me think about signing him. If you look at strikeouts, Ryan can be a bit swing happy. He is expected to wiff a ridiculous 151 times. That will kill you come crunch time. Much more productive, I am thinking is Carlos Lee. He’ll get just 25 home runs; but will only strikes out 54 times. Considering he will probably be pretty cheap come draft time, that is some real productivity.

Now for sure, these are just guesses. Don’t fall in love with the exact numbers. The games will still need to be played, but in terms of relative values, and easy to read comparisons, This is a pretty darn interesting model. I will be using it for sure.




Tiger Woods: The Sports Tech Story of the Century?

Posted by Jonathan in INTERNET, MOBILE, TELEVISION on 02-23-10    No Comments


Get over it, Tiger cheating on the missus is the story of our times.

Just look at the data video tape.

At first techno-blush, the Tiger Woods press conference seemed almost like a digital non-event. CNN.com’s International Edition did a nice job pointing out that the press conference did middling Twitter traffic and almost no Facebook buzz. The Obama Inauguration, for example, was a much bigger deal. And in fact, the conference only generated about 800K downloads of the video feed on YouTube. That’s small Web potatoes for sure.

But the cable news ratings were far higher. Nielsen numbers floating around say that FoxNews reported 2.1 million saw the conference, with ESPN, CNN, The Golf Channel, HeadlineNews and MSNBC also running the event; and totaling 4.5 million additional viewers watching — for something on the order of 6.6 million viewers in the cable universe. Or about the size of a season average middle year of The Sopranos. Maybe these potatoes are bigger than we thought.

And there was broadcast: NBC, ABC and CBS also ran the conference. For some reason, there’s no public data that I could find for how many viewers tuned in. But that’s no biggie to tease out. The news audience is well understood. So lets guesstimate that the Tiger event equaled the standing nightly news audience, which usually combines to deliver about 20 million viewers. (That’s probably low, to be honest. Event viewing is usually much higher. But you’ll see it does not matter.)

That combines for about 26 million people, net of broadcast and cable, who saw the conference — or way more than the 22 million who saw Game Six of last year’s World Series. Tiger is big sports potatoes indeed.

And this pile is only a fraction of the total audience who is aware of Tiger. Now the figures get simply mind boggling. The Google news scraper for the terms “tiger woods” for mid day Feb. 23 show a total of 12,000 plus news stories on that topic. TWELVE THOUSAND! Or roughly 12 times the size of the coverage for white hot tech stories like the Apple iPad, which out are lucky to garner 1,500 stories.

Now how many people read all those stories? Again, no hard data exists, but we can make an excellent guess. There are now 6 billion worldwide cell phone subscribers that have easy access to this digital Tiger hype information, which makes it entirely probable that the full English language speaking world, or roughly 3 billion people, had direct touch with this story. And it is also probably that these people told someone else they saw it, meaning, … everybody, everywhere on earth knows the deal with Tiger.

Name another event that comes close to this level of world wide awareness? I can’t. Can you?

And can it get any more delicious than this:  The digital revolution with all its wonders of silicon, IP packets and crystal glass has made a simple story about a golfer cheating on wife into the most well known thing ever.

Not bad, for a man standing in front a blue curtain. Talking.

You can’t make it up.




No Bode For Blum: Cable Content Walls Are Too High To Scale

Posted by Jonathan in INTERNET, TELEVISION on 02-20-10    No Comments


Blum's Optimum Fire WallIt looks like the screen on the left is as far as I — and many — cable sports fans will get as they try  to watch the Olympics online.

While the otherwise forgettable NBCOlympics.com deserves some credit for posting a full library of Olympic event footage a day or so after it airs, actually seeing the skiing, curling and hockey posted there is a much grimmer — and more frustrating — event.

NBC has struck an increasingly common online video deal: It protects its local affiliates, both cable and broadcast, by putting most of its event footage behind a registration wall. Access to the content is free, but potential Web video watchers must sign in with their local cable broadcast identity. And there’s the rub. Getting a Cablevision log-in, in my case, is the usual Web sign-on thang: Go to Cablevision.com, get a name, password and identity. The problem is, Cablevision is just not set up to process administering Web passwords. Who knows what happened: Cablevision seems to know me as “Johnotha.” And somehow there’s a junk password associated with that account that nobody can seem to change. So my log ins don’t work. There’s no customer service support to help me out.

So no replays of Bode for Blum. And now we can all see the problem with controlling access to online sports: Several media and Web players are involved.

Take the Yankees streaming game service that I plan to take this season. To do so I would again have to coordinate between the Yankees TV network, Cablevision, their designated media partner, and Verizon, which hosts my FiOS Web access. Imagine what is going to go wrong there. And look at the tough spot sports is now in online: The leagues have to limit access to their content to keep its value high. But they face a major challenge in managing that access.

Clearly, getting folks into their right online seats will be no lay up.