MLB Eases Video Restrictions

Posted by Silissa Kenney in INTERNET, VIDEO on 06-11-11    No Comments

After years of rigidly refusing to allow anyone to embed video clips, Major League Baseball is changing its game plan.

It seems the department once responsible for scouring the Web for rebel embedders and sending cease and desist notices will have to find something else to do.  Or maybe they’ll just have less to do. The new liberal attitude does not extend to the most recent clips. So the only place to see highlights from yesterday’s game is still on the MLB site. But it’s a start. And it’s about time.

It’s a new day—or rather it has been a new day for years. Maybe MLB is finally catching on to the concept that having more eyes view your content is good for the brand. It’s free advertising. You want people to see your content even if it wasn’t their intention to do so at that moment.

I watch a video clip of the Giant’s Aubrey Huff hit three homers in a game; I remember I haven’t been to a game in a while and buy tickets. And I also included a link to MLB’s website in this post, so they still have traffic driven to their site. Fans get easy access to the videos they want to see, MLB gets more fans who hopefully spend more money. See? Win-win. And that doesn’t happen every day.

No Fantasy Football? The Sky Is Falling, The Sky Is Falling!

Posted by Seth in BUSINESS, INTERNET on 06-01-11    No Comments

For months now I’ve been zoning out every time I hear another breathless story about how the sky is going to fall if there’s no NFL season.

What are the networks going to do? What are all the team and stadium employees going to do? What are fans going to do on Sunday afternoons? What about all that crime Ray Lewis says is going to happen because there’s no football?

The sky is falling … I must run and tell the king!

I’ve put no stock in any of this discussion, because there’s going to be an NFL season. Really. There just will be. And all that breath you’re wasting now, clucking about how the sky will fall? You’ll never be able to get it back.

But a story I saw a few days ago gave me reason to rethink my position here — a little bit, anyway.

It seems the uncertainty being caused by the lockout is starting to impact fantasy football. As the Washington Post reported, ESPN has decided to scrap its annual fantasy football preview magazine, and they probably won’t be the only ones. The mags usually start hitting the shelves right around this time of year. But since there’s been no free agency, it’s impossible to put together a preview magazine. You have no way of knowing where players are going to be once this thing gets settled.

The next thing that’s going to happen if there’s no resolution soon is that the websites that offer fantasy football games are going to start to take a hit, because people may be reluctant to register their leagues. Now, a lot of people play fantasy football for free, but there are sites that offer fee-based league management tools. Serious fantasy players often opt for these sites because they allow for more customization than the free sites.

But even the free sites will be impacted. There’s a lot of advertising on those sites that helps to keep them free. No NFL, no fantasy leagues. No fantasy leagues, no ads. No ads, no money.

It goes even further than that. Some people turn their fantasy draft into an event, either holding it at a restaurant or — believe it or not — as part of a weekend retreat. I know a guy who is in a league that does a “draft weekend.”

No NFL, no fantasy leagues. No fantasy leagues, no fantasy league draft packages at your favorite sports bar and no weekend in Vegas to re-enact the Hangover and pick your fantasy team. And no money.

Cue the breathless clucking:

The sky is falling, the sky is falling … I must run and tell the king!

Anaheim Takes Bite Out Of Bookies

Posted by Jonathan in INTERNET on 05-13-11    No Comments

Man, it is getting hard out there for a ticket pimp.

Indianapolis-based Digonex Technologies, said on May 11 that the Anaheim Ducks will be the next professional team to use the company’s dynamic ticketing tool to charge as much as the Ducks possibly can for each ticket the team sells.

And in the process, they’ll push those pesky online aftermarket operations like StubHub out of business.

Here is official corporate quote from the company press releases.

“When the price is right everyone wins,” said Jan Eglen, CEO of Digonex. “True dynamic pricing, as we do it, can increase profitability and ticket sales, while maintaining positive fan experiences. We are sure our technology can help the Ducks offer ticket prices that are market driven and both consumer and seller friendly.”

Translation: We are so effin tired of watching you stupid fans dumping our expensive tickets on the aftermarket that we really needed to step in a figure out a way to keep the damn prices up.

Obviously, this sort of dynamic pricing system is long overdue for ticketing. Web-based ticket exchanges, just like every other web-based market, do little more than destroy the value of every ticket sold. So teams are smart to protect themselves. And these sorts of dynamic pricing engines are clearly the next step for other retailers who finally are realizing that Amazon and Apple are not their partners online.

But I am not sure Digonex or tools like them are going to make much difference.  There are simply too many tickets for sale, and not enough people with money to buy them. And an endless stream of starving web developers all too happy to be paid pennies to link one with the other.

The web’s long road to oblivion has really on just begun.

Here is the company press release

More MLB Stadiums Go Wireless As Baseball Competes With Your Living Room

Posted by Alex Dalenberg in INTERNET, MOBILE, STADIUM on 04-28-11    No Comments

geekgaz.com

Wi-Fi may finally be coming to a ballpark near you.

Internet access at baseball stadiums should more than double this year with the Arizona Diamondbacks, Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves adding Wi-Fi to their stadiums.

To the best of my knowledge, only the San Francisco Giants and the Houston Astros offered fans Internet access before this year, with both stadiums adding the service way back in 2004.

This isn’t exactly a wireless explosion, but my gut tells that we’re going to see the number of these upgrades grow exponentially as owners compete with their fans’ home entertainment systems.  That means these services aren’t just offering Internet access for your tablet or smartphone, but  also offer replay, real-time stats and the ability to order food right to your seats.

Diamondbacks President Derrick Hall comes right out and says it in this article from The Arizona Republic:

“What we compete with is the quality of broadcasting now, and fans get in the habit of staying at home and being in what they consider the best seat in the house right behind the pitcher… We challenge ourselves to come up with ways that still give an advantage to the person coming in person to see that game. This new digital portal is just that. They’re going to have access to information, replays, videos, stats, etc., that nobody at home can get.”

So these ballparks are trying to one-up the multi-screen experience sports fans take advantage of when they take in a game at home. It’s a challenge more than one business model is facing: how does your brick and mortar business beat the convenience of home consumption?

If I knew the answer to that one, I wouldn’t be blogging, but this Wi-Fi thing is obviously a no-brainer. You can get Wi-Fi in every coffee shop in town so why not a major entertainment venue like a baseball stadium. By all means, these teams should give fans as much bang for their buck as possible. Teams need to create a real value proposition to keep fans in the seats.

But I’m not going to say this is even going to start to cure the lagging attendance problems it’s trying to address. Maybe we’re just not fan enough anymore, but no mobile app or online portal is going to let fans bypass finding a parking spot or upgrade their nosebleed seats to a luxury box.

Especially in the case of teams like the Diamondbacks which have struggled over the last few years, I’d think putting a winner on the field is going to do a lot more to solve attendance problems than this thing called the Internet. You don’t need in-game replay or real-time stats to tell you a team is mediocre.

As for in-game beer delivery, there’s a winner if I’ve ever heard one.

Today’s Online Baseball Ain’t Got No Game

Posted by Seth in GAMING, INTERNET on 04-21-11    No Comments

Because I didn’t grow up with a video game system, and because I have no hand-eye coordination to speak of, my favorite sports video games emphasize strategy over simulation.

I played Micro League Baseball and Old Time Baseball and Mac Pro Football, which apparently is so old and obscure at this point that a Google search failed to find any reference to it. These games used real-life players and teams and let you make all the in-game decisions.

Video gaming has come a hell of a long way since I last played any of these games, but all the game-makers seem to have done is muck up strategy-based sports games with a whole bunch of incredibly boring nonsense.

EA Sports has gone big into these games with its Play4Free offerings on Facebook. And this baseball season, Sega launched MLB Manager Online. On the surface, these seem like cool ideas, allowing you to manage teams and play sports games without needing to master all the button and stick work it takes to play console-based titles like Madden NFL or MLB 2K11

But instead of keeping the emphasis on in-game strategy and gameplay, some of these games get themselves confused with God of War. In MLB Manager Online, you start off with crumb-bum major leaguers and you have to complete tasks to earn points and then you use the points to train up your motley crew so they get better and you can earn enough points to buy better players. The actual baseball game almost seems secondary.

Maybe there’s not enough excitement in just calling pitches, deciding whether to swing away or bunt or whether to run off tackle or up the middle. Maybe gamers’ tastes have become more sophisticated over the years. All I know is I killed many an hour playing Mac Pro Football, watching little X’s and O’s — not fancy-schmancy graphics — on one of those tiny black and white screens the original MacIntosh computers had. That held my interest. But powering up players got old after about 15 minutes.

This is the same problem that doomed EA Sports’ ill-fated NFL Head Coach, which tried to do sports strategy in a console game. It was a great idea, but it didn’t take long to figure out they didn’t execute it very well. The first thing it made you do was start at the beginning of the offseason, and then you had to go to the scouting combine. The real-world scouting combine is boring as hell, so imagine how exciting it must be to work your way through a simulated one.

Maybe it’s just the nostalgia-loving side of me, but today’s strategy-based sports games will just never come close to the old-school favorites. Man, I miss my Micro League.

Sports Tech Nihilist: ‘iN Demanding’ My Baseball In HD!

Posted by Seth in INTERNET, TELEVISION on 04-07-11    1 Comment

There isn’t a day that goes by that I’m not thankful I live in the era of the 500-channel universe. But as I’m finding out this spring, not all 500-channel systems deliver the same quality of content.

After more than eight years with DirecTV, I switched over to Verizon FiOS TV last month. I’m getting more channels and better on-demand options, but the sports packages on FiOS TV are sadly lacking when it comes to carrying games in high definition.

On DirecTV, MLB Extra Innings and NHL Center Ice carried both home- and road-team feeds in HD for nearly every game. I’ve been frustrated to see that on FiOS TV, they carry no more than two baseball games per day in HD. And maybe it’s just because I’ve been spoiled by seeing everything in HD, but the image quality of the standard-def feeds is nothing short of abysmal.

HD has completely changed televised sports. Once you’ve seen games in HD, it’s nearly impossible to go back, especially in hockey, which is notoriously a sport that doesn’t translate well on TV. Carrying a hockey game in standard-def should be outlawed. Virtually all of these games are being produced in HD, but FiOS and other providers aren’t giving you the product you should be getting. Nonetheless, they charge you a premium — Extra Innings is $179 — for something that clearly is sub-standard. That subject has spawned a few threads on Verizon’s messages boards, like this one.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that this isn’t a bandwidth issue on Verizon’s part. Their fiber-optic network gives them more than enough capacity to carry all the games in HD. The problem seems to be that they can’t get a decent deal worked out with iN Demand, which provides the game feeds to Verizon and various cable companies. DirecTV does not obtain its game feeds from iN Demand. So if you have FiOS or Comcast or Cablevision or Cox or Charter, you’ll want to direct your complaints to iN Demand.

There are alternatives, of course. MLB and the NHL offer their out-of-market packages online, which costs you less money and gives you the flexibility to port the content to various devices and even your TV set. But as folks discussed on this forum, that’s not exactly a panacea. One of the messages on that thread refers to the picture on the MLB.TV online package as “pseudo-HD.” That’s an apt description. I played around with MLB.TV last summer, streaming it to my TV via my PlayStation 3. It was watchable, but there were buffering and compression issues that left me feeling the same as I do when I watch these games in standard-def on FiOS: like I’m not seeing what I should be.

Either iN Demand needs to solve whatever technological or contractual snags there are, or Verizon and the other providers need to apply pressure to set a lower price point if iN Demand isn’t going to provide the games in HD. The baseball season is only a week old, but already Seth the Sports Tech Nihilist is sick of paying a premium for an inferior product. And chances are I’m not alone.

Pickemfirst: A Browser Add-On For Fantasy Leaguers

Posted by Seth in INTERNET on 03-27-11    No Comments

Like millions of others over the last few days, I downloaded the new Firefox 4 browser. Long story short, it’s a nice upgrade, and you should check it out if you don’t use Firefox already.

Every time I install a new browser I play around with the add-ons for a few minutes, hoping I might find something useful, but usually I lose interest pretty quickly. But today I found one that you’re going to want to make use of if you play fantasy sports. It’s called Pickemfirst, and it’ll tell you at a glance whether players are available as free agents in your fantasy leagues. You can register for free, and it syncs up with your fantasy leagues if you play on ESPN, CBSSports.com, Yahoo and a few other sites. Once you set it up, you can access fantasy league player info from whatever web page you’re on.

Say you’re reading a story on NBA.com about a Celtics-Heat game and you need a backup center and you want to find out if Shaquille O’Neal is available in your fantasy league. With Pickmefirst and one click of the mouse, you can bring up icons on the screen, inserted into the copy  next to each player’s name that will tell you. And you can click those icons to bring up player info. So you no longer have to go back and forth between your fantasy league page and whatever other website you’re reading to see if the guy you want is a free agent. Very cool.

Pickemfirst is available as an add-on for Internet Explorer and Google Chrome as well. There’s a more advanced option that costs $10 per season, which adds a little more functionality and syncs with your teams more frequently during the day. But the free version is all you really need.

How To Win Your Office Pool: Blind Brackets

Posted by Seth in INTERNET on 03-15-11    No Comments

We all know someone who has tried to fill out an NCAA Tournament bracket based on the mascots: Would a Wildcat beat a Tiger?

Well, an indie game developer called SortaSoft has put together an awfully cool alternative to that silliness. They call it Blind Brackets, and the Wall Street Journal caught on and posted it. The idea here is that they give you general descriptions of the teams, positives and negatives, but no specifics about which team it is. For example:

Positives

• If the threes are falling, look out
• Finished well despite losing conference tournament opener
• Gets out against the 3-point shot (31 % against)
• Keeps opponents off the foul line

Negatives

• Hardly ever gets to the foul line
• Shoots a ton of threes but doesn’t make them (33.7%)
• Not much height. 6-8 is as tall as they go
• Struggles to force turnovers

It’s tough not to love this idea. Try it out and see what sort of results you end up with. And if your blind choices beat your bracket, well, now you know how to go about filling out your picks next year.

March Madness: Plenty Of Bracket Data Out There For Basketball Dummies

Posted by Seth in INTERNET on 03-13-11    No Comments

Well, the brackets have been released and March Madness is officially here. For those of us who don’t live and breathe college basketball — yours truly has not watched an entire game this season — it always gets tough filling out the bracket for the annual office pool. And I’m sure I’m not alone. I mean, really, how much does the average fan know about Memphis or Old Dominion or Gonzaga?

Fortunately there is no shortage of resources on the web. Frankly, even if you know nothing you can still make yourself pretty knowledgeable in a hurry.

First and foremost, all of the bracket games on the major sites (ESPN, Yahoo, CBSSports.com) have detailed data on the teams built into them. With a couple of clicks, you can see a side-by-side comparison of the teams as you’re filling out your bracket. There’s no doubt that this has helped a lot of basketball neophytes do pretty well. And as the guy who runs the pool in my office, it’s one of the selling points I can use to get the non-fans to play.

Another source that came to mind is a site we’ve discussed here on the blog before, Statsheet.com. Now, we rightfully trashed this operation’s potential as a replacement for real, live sports reporters. A website can’t write a story, but it can help you crunch numbers. Take a look at the data on their team pages. Here’s the one for Ohio State.

Of course, there are also services out there that want you to spend money to make money. TeamRankings.com asks you to cough up some dough to help you win your office pool. To be blunt, there’s so much data floating around out there for free, I’m not sure why anyone should pay for a service like this. What are these guys going to tell you that you can’t figure out from looking at the stats yourself?

Finally, one interesting site we found was Bracket Odds, put together by Sheldon Jacobson, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois. The point here is to predict the combination of seeds that will make it through to the later rounds of the tournament. So in case you’re uneasy picking all four No. 1 seeds to make the Final Four, you can get some guidance.

TSC In Print: Every Single Word Of “March Madness Disses Web” podcast

Posted by Jonathan in INTERNET on 03-09-11    No Comments

Blum and Seth breaking down the latest in March Madness on Demand from Episode 67 of the podcast.

JB:  It is March Madness on Demand season. This is the beginning of the online trifecta, this is the big first you know, online event of the year. Men’s NCA Division I Tournament, there’s going to be Seth, what, four new games this year they added? They added…

S:   Yeah, they expanded the tournament and they’ve also expanded the way it’s being covered on television.

JB:  Right.

S:   Really more so than on the web, I think.

JB:  This is exactly my point. I’m kind of thinking that they’re beginning to step away from online coverage. I wanted to say that but Seth took a break down of what’s going on here. Seth, fill us in on what the schedule is, whether the resources are and where the people can go to get the games.

S:   Well, they’ve got four networks now that are going to be televising it. It’s CBS and it’s TNT and truTV, which you know…

JB:  Is a startup service.

S:   …like seven people in the country that get it

JB:  Hey, hey, but those seven really love it (laughs).

S:   There’d better be more than seven, or they’d better hope so because they’re going to be putting NCAA tournament games on it.

JB:  And all four are going to be running the game simultaneously. You’re going to be able to watch pretty much they’re going to run different feeds on each channel essentially.

S:   Well yeah, they’re going to be staggered. That’s really the beauty of this plan, is that they’re staggering the starting time so the key thing there is that the games will end at different times. You get all these games, which seemingly every game in the NCAA tournament comes down to the wire, they’re all going to, in theory if things go properly, are going to end at different times. But you’ll be able to actually go and watch the end of that one game and then watch the end of another game. You’re going to have to figure out where the hell truTV is on your channel lineup to be able to see in the early rounds of the tournament but…

JB:  So the entire economy is going to come to a halt on Thursday and Friday. Between all this coverage, there’s not a minute of any game that you are not going to be watching.

S:   That you won’t be able to watch, that’s right. You’ll be able to theoretically watch every minute of every game. If you’ve got enough TVs.

JB:  Because see, this is my…  take on this. The Internet does not have enough momentum, enough value in the world to even support its own early round match. Because what’s clearly happening is the traffic and the ratings for these games has come to the point where no broadcaster in his right mind is going to let that audience go. So they suck it in offline and they create a TV portal for it and they run it on some deep channel on the cable network somewhere. It’s at the point now where it’s almost ancillary.

S:   Well, here’s what I think… Here’s what I think is really interesting. There’s an article that Adweek did, they broke down the numbers and really, this backs up exactly what you’re saying. The advertise… They’re working it obviously from an advertising standpoint … From an advertising standpoint, the ad revenue from March Madness on Demand, the web package is a tiny percentage, it’s less than 6 percent of what the ad take was last year for the tournament. So I think you’re probably right, there’s really no… Even though the audience is going up, 8.3 million unique visitors according to Adweek last year… which is up 11 percent over 2009. Yet you know, they’ve really made the commitment on TV more so than on the web.

JB:  So they still can’t make money from this on the web. The only model for TV sports is the New York Yankees model of you’ve got to be a cable sub. If you’re not paying for it through your cable subscription, you’ve got to pay for it through the website … And at the end of the day the idea that there’s going to be this ad sponsored universe of sports content, that’s just simply not going to happen. And if it doesn’t happen for the NCAA Men’s I Division B-ball Tournament, not going to happen for anybody essentially.

S:   I think the only reason… We’ve talked about this many times. I think the only reason you get that kind of online audience is because the games are going on in the middle of the day on Thursdays and Fridays and all of the office drones that are tethered to their desk, it gives them something to watch.

JB:  Well listen, you know … I always said and I still argue to the day, they are not cannibalistic. Web traffic and TV traffic are like a canyon and they drive usage. It’s like you know, an echo going back and forth across the Grand Canyon. They help each other.

When you’re watching online and you’re watching on television, you don’t turn one off for the other, you turn both of them on because that notion of that second screen in your hand is a great experience. And when I was still optimistic you know, we all dreamed about something like the iPad in our hand that would give us this kind of direct control. Now that of course when we see it and we realize there’s no money in it and the Internet is essentially this slum that can’t support anything, really—and not even sports—you realize like it’s another lost opportunity. But the idea that the web traffic kind of eats TV traffic is nonsense because we all watch, we’re consuming all the information in real time. But I agree with you, I think this is going to be a fascinating season.

S:   Everything you’ll see… You’ll see every single game on four different channels. They’ll have everything available.

JB: All right Seth, thank you so much for standing in for Dan and we’ll talk to you next week.

Episode 73: The TSC Zombies Live!

We celebrate our final show at Hothead Studios by breaking down sports video games from E3;  talkin’ through some dang sports video baseball cards and then go getting into the fallout from Derek Boogarrd’s untimely death.  Finally, what we have all been waiting for: Dan on latest on with Posada’s crazy, tweeting wife. Share this [...]

Episode 72: Dan’s Cool Rugby Shirt

Blum breaks down 42 miles on a bike with no chain. Evans reports on the Oprah/Nike summit. Dan’s got a rugby johns he would like to share. And some high tech tricks to baseball scouting. (26.8 KB, 27.10 Minutes) Share this post:ShareEmailPrintStumbleUponRedditDigg

Episode 71: The NFL For President!

Dan breaks down the body blow online poker just took from regulators. Blum talks up the new book about what the NFL has to teach capitalism. Seth hates yet another video game. And finally ESPN on your iPad. (25.3 mb, 25.4 minutes) Share this post:ShareEmailPrintStumbleUponRedditDigg

Episode 70: “Are You Ready to Rumble?”

MLB TV’s online service is legitimately cool. The Masters will be a non-event online. Tiger Woods plays with crappy equipment and Blum compares betting on Wrestlemania to trading corn futures. Share this post:ShareEmailPrintStumbleUponRedditDigg

Episode 69: “A Podcast Unlike Any Other”

The organizers of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar seek to bend nature to their will with artificial clouds. Blum gloats over the NCAA Selection Committee’s epic seeding failures. Blackberry “Super” Apps underwhelm and Dan takes a crack at the new Masters video game. Share this post:ShareEmailPrintStumbleUponRedditDigg

Episode 68: “Revenge of the Nerds”

Seth and Blum mix it up with MIT over sports data. Dan reviews EA’s Fight Night Champion (virtual boxing is better than the real thing). Amar’e Stoudemire’s goggles get explained and the guys tour some physical fitness web sites. All that, plus, the week in review. Share this post:ShareEmailPrintStumbleUponRedditDigg

Episode 67: “Follow the Bouncing Blum”

Dan’s on the injured reserve this week, so Blum’s flying solo (with an assist from Seth the Tech Nihilist). In this episode: Seth breaks down March Madness On Demand, Blum wonders what gives with the crap-tastic apps that are dominating college athletics, a look into the NFL’s financial picture, plus the week in review at [...]

Episode 66: “It’s Hockey Night Tonight!”

It’s all hockey all the time for this week’s episode. Dan and Blum look at the cross-border battle between the Winter Classic and Heritage Classic as well as the Buffalo Sabres ownership change. Dan and Seth the Tech Nihilist reminisce about the classic NHL video games. Plus, how did a trade between the Stars and [...]

Episode 65: “Take This Job and Shove It”

Blum pitches his wild-eyed plan for NFL players to use social media to circumvent ownership. Seth the Tech-Nihilist gives his report on the new MLB.Com. Dan reviews NHL ’11 (it’s awesome) and digs into some racing tech at Daytona. Share this post:ShareEmailPrintStumbleUponRedditDigg

Episode 64: “Jets Fans are Damaged Individuals”

As Blum gloats, Dan lets the Jets know they can go straight to hell. Also, the best televisions for your Super Bowl party; Dan discovers Broadcast HD; Blum shares his illicit passion for wooden baseball bats; PLUS, the best sports e-books for your e-reader. Share this post:ShareEmailPrintStumbleUponRedditDigg