But our recent discussion about sports packages and interactive content has me doing some wishful thinking. MLB Extra Innings needs to add a player tracker function, just like the one DirecTV has for the NFL Sunday Ticket package. That’s really the frustrating part — they’ve got it for Sunday Ticket, so why not for baseball?

Of course, if I weren’t so addicted to following my fantasy teams, I wouldn’t need either the player tracker or the out-of-market packages. But I am addicted. And so are a lot of other people, which makes it such a no-brainer for the cable and satellite providers to add something like this.

The Sunday Ticket player tracker works well. It lets you input up to two fantasy starting lineups worth of players, and you get an on-screen message telling you every time one of your guys did something. The only problem is that by the time the message pops up, whatever your guy did has already happened and you missed it. The great thing about a baseball player tracker is that it could prompt you when your players come to bat, so you could switch the channel and watch them.

Some of the fantasy sports Web sites, like Yahoo and CBSSports.com have similar functionality built into their live scoring mechanisms. So if you keep an eye on your computer, you’ll know when your guys are hitting. Now, I’m all for the two-screen experience, but it would be cool to be able to follow my fantasy team without having to sit on the couch with the laptop or stare into a tiny cell phone screen.

So that is the Sports Tech Nihilist’s request: Give me more stat tracker.

Now, obviously this product is mostly just PR spin, since really all the code does is create a single frequency filter to remove the sound from the broadcasts. Still, Elgato, which makes video tools for Macs and PCs, should get some credit for coming with a simple way to de-Vuvuzela a broadcast.

I’m withholding judgement until we see if the thing works. Audio filtering can be tricky. But it probably does cut  the noise out a bit. The audio filter that fits into their software links from Elgato’s Web site, although, this link is not downloading quite right at this minute. Probably getting overloaded.

I sat down and watched a 3D TV demonstration — they had some soccer footage playing on a nice big flat panel set — and all I can tell you is I thought it sucked. For right now, 3D TV is a lot of hype over nothing.

First of all, you’re sitting there with those stupid-ass goggles on, and the fact is that while the effect is noticeable and is somewhat cool, you get over it in a hurry. What I saw didn’t look like an HD picture. It seemed like it was in significantly lower resolution than the typical HD picture I get on my TV at home. I’d much rather watch a pristine HD picture in 2D than the crapfest I watched in 3D in the demo.

It’s a cool idea. We all live for the day when everyone has a holodeck in their house and can interact with characters like they do on Star Trek. But from what I saw, this 3D TV thing adds no value. And the fact that the average consumer has no idea what it’s supposed to look like doesn’t help either.

For now, it just seems like a way for the TV makers to drive up prices on their sets by a few hundred dollars. I pass.

My heavens, some actual news out of a trade show. Shocker!

Yesterday, sports powerhouse ESPN announced, at the E3 video game confab in LA, that it will enter into a two-year, exclusive deal with Microsoft to stream ESPN3 — formerly ESPN360 — over the Xbox 360 via its premium subscription service. The move answers Sony’s similar hookup with Major League Baseball that streams its live Web  service via the PlayStation 3.

Let us step back and behold the stories here:

• We see, yet again, the raw power for sports to command premium subscription dollars in the otherwise barren content wasteland that is the Web. Sports deals, even bad ones (more on that in a sec) now force the hand of even the world’s bad-ass video game box makers. I can’t wait for, say, the NFL to take its content to Apple with an iTunes deal. The fact is that as the great Web 3.0 shakeout  continues, sports will clearly not only be a survivor, it will be a winner.
• How crappy a deal is this Microsoft? I will have to double check it when I actually see the service, but from here, all Microsoft is getting is the ESPN3 streaming service that’s already available via the Web. The only plus is that it’ll be on Microsoft’s platform and not a on a competitor’s. Think about that: Microsoft is paying for the mere right to reshow ESPN content on a gaming platform. It is getting nothing unique. Whooa!
• Can Microsoft make good on its promise of adding unique interactive experiences to sports? The real shocker in sports tech is how lame Sony’s efforts have been to add content to the MLB material available on the PS3. Sure it’s cool to get games on a gaming box, but I’ve been underwhelmed at what those games are like, given that the PS3 is one of the most advanced pieces of computer hardware on the market.  Can Microsoft bring down the digital Berlin Wall that separates traditional linear sports and its interactive cousins? Or will the two domains remain as separated as ever?

However this breaks, the next 18 months on the Xbox and PS3 will be some of the most interesting in sports technology. In many ways, we are getting a critical early glimpse at what the next era in sports will actually be.

Stay tuned. Or rather stay plugged in.

And after listening to Jonathan’s take on instant replay in baseball in this week’s The Sports Circuit podcast, I can stay silent no longer.

First of all, just to clear this up, every team has a regional sports network — even my beloved, woe-begotten Pirates. They don’t all have networks that are owned by the teams, like the Yankees with YES, but every game is televised. Jonathan is correct that from team to team — or from regional sports network to regional sports network — the assets may be different. Frankly, I don’t notice that much difference from broadcast to broadcast as I watch games from across the country on MLB Extra Innings. But not everyone has a slow-mo cam for each base, etc. So I agree that if baseball is to implement instant replay, there must be a standard system that is in use by every network that televises games.

However — and this diverges from the idea of solutions — I hate instant replay. I want to like it. I like it in theory: Get the calls right. Great idea. But the irony here is that advances in technology have made me hate it.

If you’ve been watching the NBA Finals (and if you’re not, you should be — it’s Celtics vs. Lakers) you know that in both Game 2 and Game 3 there were out-of-bounds calls that were reviewed to see who the ball last touched. Both times, in my opinion, the refs got it wrong after looking at these super slow-mo, high-definition, frame-by-frame replays. And do you know why? Because when you slow something down that much and look at it one frame at a time, you can see whatever you want to see.

Tuesday night Kevin Garnett clearly had the ball slapped out of his hands and out of bounds by Kobe Bryant. Should have been Boston ball. But then they went and looked at it one frame at a time and managed to find a frame that shows Garnett with the tips of his fingers still touching the ball as it left his grasp. You’re talking about a fraction of a second here. And that’s ridiculous. He lost the ball because Kobe knocked it out of bounds. Boston ball. End of story. But the ref gave it to the Lakers.

These high-tech replays are at odds with the way a play unfolded in real time.

This has become rampant in football on plays involving fumbles, where they slow it down frame by frame and look to see when a guy’s knee hit the ground and whether the ball was coming loose at that point or not. How can you tell if the ball is loose when you’re looking at one frame? You can interpret one frame any way you want to. These things have to be looked at within the context of a game that happens at high speed.

The only place where I think it works in football is determining whether a receiver had both feet in bounds, because that’s not a judgment call. He either did or didn’t, and the replay can show that. In basketball, replays that show whether a shot beat the buzzer are OK. The National Hockey League doesn’t get much credit for it — heck, the NHL doesn’t get much credit for anything — but they’ve done a good job with video replay to determine whether the puck crossed the goal line. We saw an excellent example of that Wednesday night, when the overhead camera clearly showed the Chicago Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup-winning goal crossing the line, despite the fact that it happened so quickly that the on-ice officials never signaled that the puck had gone in.

But other than these specific uses, it’s tough to make a case that replay is a good thing. Ultimately, reviewing the play in the Armando Galarraga game comes down to a judgment call: When did he have the ball in his glove? That particular play was easy to see. But if you have to do frame-by-frame analysis, as if it were some terrorist video being broken down pixel by pixel in the bowels of the CIA headquarters, then the technology has overstepped its bounds.

At last week’s Society Of Information Display “Display Week 2010,” up in Seattle, most of the major panel vendors were on hand showing screens that were not only brighter, thinner and more colorful, they showed screens that bend, flex or otherwise act unstiff.

And boy, does all this bending and stretching have an impact on the future of sports.

Sure, TVs in about two years will be thinner, brighter and offer bigger display sizes for 3D sets; but the fact that these displays will be able to bend is now clearly a major trend in sports technology. I was talking to one of the companies that sells TV screens and displays to sports TV shows on cable and broadcast, and he said that several major sports show producers will be ordering flexible displays for on-set images.

Fans can also expect to see flexible displays at stadiums as well. TV screens will not be limited to the massive, stiff units that now dominate Cowboys Stadiums. Instead, live sports imagery will be able to be wrapped around columns, posted on outfield walls or otherwise retrofitted into venues.  And certainly for mega events, like The World Cup and The Olympics, the flexible display will affect how those games are perceived on-site and around the world.

To paraphrase the Dos Equis guy when it comes to sports, “Stay Flexible, My Friend.”

The game it shows that the Yankees will be going 3D sooner rather than later. I put the over under for a pure 3D YES feed for the 2011 season.

Discuss.

The move is important on many levels. Here are the top 2

1) Others will follow the NBA’s lead. The move is important if only because a major sports league is testing the direct to TV digital content waters. Where the NBA goes, so shall MLB, NFL, the NHL and others. It’s a real step.

2) TV Apps Aren’t a Pain to Make. The move also shows how dead simple it is for sports leagues to make meaningful content for Web App enabled TVs. In other words, leagues can get to customers faster with apps and not spend time kowtowing to pain in the ass Apple when it comes to getting their software on the networks, like say dealing with the Apps Store.

And keep in mind, that no matter what TV Web Apps will be a big, BIG market.  There are 500 million some odd TVs working in the United States; and slowly but surely probably about 20 percent will have internet capability over say a half decade. That is roughly 100 million TVs, about 5 times the number of iPads users there will ever be.

Sports Apps are gold.

Anyway, Tunerfish is important for sports fans because it might be tied into Comcast’s Fancast product. Plaxo, which is also mentioned here, is the failed address and contact play that Comcast bought. So if the two are related, fans can expect to be looking at some sort of social viewing thing.

Which is important now because the social sports is really coming. The iPad is the killer app in TV interfaces. And it hosts all sorts of interactivity. And some sort of social TV thing as you watch the game is clearly coming down.

And who knows, with its reach and bucks and NBC, Comcast might just be the player here.

Over the past couple of days, two interesting sports tech deals got done: Gadget maker Roku announced it will stream NBA content via its boxes. And interactive TV software maker Boxee said it struck similar deals with the NHL. Both announcements got a fair amount of media coverage, with the moves viewed mostly as sports leagues pioneering new revenue channels for their games.

But this spin missed a larger, darker trend: Sports is the leader now in new technology efforts across all media. And in many ways, the leagues are replacing the media companies that used to be their partners.

What’s makes the Boxee and Roku deals important  is that they got done at all. Both Boxee and Roku have struggled do business with traditional media cable and satellite companies. These usual-suspect firms do not like to deal with outsiders, are slow to innovate and simply don’t have much money. That Boxee and Roku found suiters at all is news. But that they got not one, but two, sports leagues to take them seriously shows just how far off  the innovation ball most traditional media firms have become. It’s no accident that Disney is not experimenting with alternative delivery of ESPN on Boxee.

Unless the major media firms step up and decide they want to be real media companies, and not just marketing fronts looking to discount their way to cheap product, I cannot see any reason why an NFL, NBA, NHL or MLB will want to, or have to, deal with them.

Particularly for new media, the leagues are cutting their own path to innovation. And the leagues will be the big winners.