TELEVISION


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.




Tiger Woods’ High-Tech Apology: The King Of The Sport Starts His Comeback

Posted by Jonathan in TELEVISION on 02-19-10    No Comments


Get ready for King Tiger.

Sure, Woods is a lying dope. And his high-tech mea culpa was a non- story. Like we care whether his wife hit him or not. But there’s no longer any question that this man is the dominant sports persona alive.

And as he navigates his way back from his fall from grace, expect him to be a bigger and more powerful sports figure than ever.

For all the drama and stupid jokes, the fact remains Tiger is now on media steroids. All this man needs do to attract a world-wide audience is stand in front of a cheap blue curtain and speak. The standing media tech infrastructure does the rest. There really is no need for the PGA, or CBS, or ESPN.

And that means when this man comes back to golf — which should be in the next few weeks — it will be a whole new game. Not only will the event be the most watched golf game ever, it might be the most watched broadcast ever — with a true worldwide following. Tiger will come back to the game with the tacit understanding that he really is bigger than the game.

Tiger Woods is now the  perfect media storm.




We Have A Web Olympic Sports Star: Stephen Colbert

Posted by Jonathan in TELEVISION on 02-18-10    No Comments


The Web makes strange sports stars. With the Internet now pretty much an also-ran for the 2010 Olympic Games, it’s fascinating to see which competitors are finding a home online: About the biggest star right now is none other than Stephen Colbert. The late night comedian has turned into about the only reason to stop in at NBCOlympics.com. Check out this clip with Bob Costas. But where Colbert really shines is elsewhere on the Web. Here is a clip of his early calling out of the Canadian Olympic efforts. I love his challenging Shani Davis to a skate. And Steven doing curling is tremendous. As bizarre as it sounds, when it comes to Olympics sports stars online, who is really bigger? That would be nobody.




Mid Atlantic DirecTV Users Frozen Out Of Olympics … And Everything Else For That Matter

Posted by Jonathan in GENERAL, TELEVISION on 02-17-10    No Comments


DirecTV freezes out in Mid Atlantic

DirecTV freezes out in Mid Atlantic

If what we are hearing from Mid Atlantic sports fans we know, opting for DirecTV for the Sunday Ticket may not have been such a good idea. What’s the issue?  Satellite reception during snow storms not only sucks during the storm, but it sucks for as long as there’s snow. And considering Snowmaggedon has been going on for three weeks now, our stringer outside of  Baltimire has been out of TV service for nearly a month. Missing the SuperBowl, the NBA All Star Game, The Daytona 500 and the first three days of The Olympics. In fact, he is just getting his service back today, just in time to catch women’s curling. The poor guy is losing his mind.

What happens is the white stuff gets into the parabolic dish that aims the satellite signal at the receptor. That’s the big long thing sticking out above. So whatever reception there is, is crap, if one gets reception at all. Here’ a first hand quote of our friend in Bmore.

People who thought they could rely on (DirecTV) are screwed. And if you have an emergency — like 4 feet of snow — and you need to know what’s going on in your community, you can’t rely on getting TV reception. Radio is king, man.

The bottom line for fans is, if your are thinking of going with DirecTV or Dish, be sure you can get up to the dish to clean the thing. Or consider going with cable.