TELEVISION


NFL May Deploy Laser-Guided First Downs

Posted by John Hamlin in STADIUM, TELEVISION on 05-23-11    1 Comment


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Never again will football fans set down their beers, bite their nails and  pray as overweight men in black-and-white-striped uniforms waddle across the field, chains in tow. Not if Norman Harty has his way.

For the last 12 years, the New Mexico man has endeavored  to supplant the institution of the chain gang once and for all with — think in your best Dr. Evil voice here — a frickin’ laser.

The New Sports Technology Laser System works like any other yard-marking pole, marching down the sidelines with the ball, until someone gets a questionable first down. In that case, officials activate the system from the sidelines, which projects a green marker onto a silver screen placed behind the football. Based on that marker, the ball is spotted, the call is made and the game goes on.

The time this saves is at the center of Harty’s latest sales pitch for the NFL. He’s estimated that the NST Laser System saves 1 minute per game, which, based on the going rate for advertisements, is worth $1 million. Multiply that by about 100 games in a season, and the $6,500 to $7,000 laser-pole quickly pays for itself.

And that doesn’t even include all of the money the league could save laying off all those dudes on the chain gang. Here’s hoping the NFL adopts the laser system, uses the money to end the lockout and we actually have a 2011 football season after all.




NHL Misses Its Chance To Tap ESPN’s Marketing Might

Posted by Seth in TELEVISION on 04-20-11    No Comments


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The National Hockey League announced Tuesday that it has re-upped its U.S. television rights deal with NBC Universal. The deal is for $2 billion over the next 10 years, and will put significantly more hockey on national TV.

But the NHL blew its opportunity to get its product on ESPN, which had been bidding for the package. The Worldwide Leader must have been offering fewer dollars, so maybe the NHL made the right choice financially. But you can’t put a price on the value of the promotional machine that is ESPN.

It’s an unfortunate reality, but ESPN is not going to go out of its way to do NHL content when it doesn’t have carriage rights. Do a deal with ESPN, and all of a sudden you get ancillary NHL programming. You get a family of TV networks and websites and radio stations — and hell, even an old-school print magazine — plugging the NHL strong and steady, like an eight-month-long commercial for your product that stretches from the season opener in October through the Stanley Cup Finals in early June. And by doing that and tapping into ESPN’s massive multi-media audience, you’re likely to capture the attention of sports fans who weren’t previously paying attention to the NHL.

Case in point: Last year, during the World Cup — which ESPN carried — the ESPN/Disney-owned radio station in Pittsburgh had its local shows bring on a local expert to talk World Cup soccer. One of the hosts openly disdained soccer, and last summer folks in Pittsburgh were far more concerned about what was going to happen to the Steelers in the wake of the Ben Roethlisberger fiasco. Generally folks in Pittsburgh are far more concerned with just about anything other than soccer. But there was Paul Child of the long-defunct Major Indoor Soccer League’s longer-defunct Pittsburgh Spirit, rappin’ about “the beautiful game.”

That’s the marketing muscle of ESPN in microcosm.

ESPN released a statement saying it offered to make sure all NHL playoff games were carried across its many platforms. But the NHL wasn’t swayed.

The new deal with NBCU will put 100 regular season games a year on national TV, mostly on Versus, which is slated to be renamed/rebranded at some point in the next couple of months. That’s an increase of about 40 games. The agreement also will put all playoff games on national TV starting with the second round. That’s going to irk a lot of the regional sports networks, which currently carry most NHL playoff games through he first two rounds. It’s going to mean some lost advertising revenues for the regional sports networks. And it’s going to send fans searching through their channel guides to find the distant outposts of the NBCU family.

This strategy worked pretty well for CBS and Turner Sports, which teamed up to put every game of the NCAA basketball tournament on TV, utilizing channels like TruTV, which most basketball fans probably didn’t know they had.

Given the chance to take a leap back into the sports broadcasting mainstream, the middling NHL took a moderate step. Of course, the league has come a long way on TV. When its deal with Versus started, the channel was called Outdoor Life Network (OLN).

Way to go, NHL. You’re moin’ on up.




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

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


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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.




ESPN’s New PR Blog: Valuable Voice Or Spin Control?

Posted by Seth in INTERNET, TELEVISION on 03-09-11    No Comments


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If you give ESPN credit for nothing else, give them this: These guys know how to promote themselves. When you get down to it, that’s really the only way to look at a new venture the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader is launching later this month called ESPNFrontRow.com.

Based on a Media Bistro report it almost sounds like the site will serve as an ombudsman, except the Poynter Institute now officially fills that role for ESPN. Sheldon Spencer, who is a former editor at ESPN.com, will post on the site three times a week, and will be joined by ESPN executives.

In all likelihood it will be less about discussing the ins and outs of decision-making in ESPN’s news operation and more about giving people an inside-baseball look what goes on in Bristol. In other words, it’s just another avenue they’ll use to promote ESPN content and personalities. In fact, according to Media Bistro, it’s going to be run by the public relations department, which will be an interesting intersection between what is news and what is spin.

But balancing the news/spin thing has always been ESPN’s great strength. The brand does a fabulous job of managing the conversation about sports. Look at how these guys do it: Your buddy hears Mike and Mike on the morning radio show going off on the latest bumbling by the Miami Heat’s “Big Three” — most likely joined by opinions from one of ESPN’s in-house ex-jocks or ex-coaches or reporters. Then your buddy sees those same experts on ESPN.com, and then again at night on SportsCenter. By the next day, your buddy is sitting with you at lunch regurgitating that same message that’s been reinforced across multiple platforms. It’s brilliant.

Sometimes it’s brilliantly effective — even useful for the average fan. But in some cases it actually hurts the company. Bristol no question stubbed its toe with the LeBron James “Decision” last year. The company fanned the flames of James’ free agency to drive buzz and ratings for its televised event, and was roundly criticized for it by fans and media types.

The interesting thing will be seeing where ESPNFrontRow fits here. Gut instinct says it’s meant to control the message that is spun out into the blogosphere. There’s a lost generation of  25-and-younger non-media consumers who get their “information” from their online “friends.” In this environment, being able to keep a watch on thousands of sports sites becomes important for a place like ESPN. If ESPNFrontRow takes on a critical voice as part of this Web 2.0 spin control, it’ll be worth reading. I love the idea of getting an inside look at ESPN’s decision-making process, as opposed to the Poynter Institute’s stuffy view from the sideline.

But if it’s just another way of advancing ESPN’s canned message du jour, the web’s ultra-sensitive BS meter will fire, and ESPN will lose the audience it is trying to serve.




Sony Hedges 3D Bet, Purchases Tech Firm Hawk-Eye Innovations

Posted by Jonathan in EQUIPMENT, STADIUM, TELEVISION on 03-08-11    No Comments


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Via Hawk-Eye Innovations

Here’s an interesting piece of sports production news: Sony has gobbled up goal-line analysis firm Hawk-Eye Innovations. According to The Financial Times, Sony did not say how much it paid for the company, but the publication reported that an analyst told them the firm was worth $32 million, which sounds about right.

A couple of interesting things here:

  • It’s amazing how little real companies are worth. Considering that a complete bucket of nuts and bolts, like The Huffington Post fetches something nuts like a $350 million valuation even though it most certainly makes  less than Hawk-Eye, Sony got a hell of a deal here.
  • 3D is turning into a long bet: Sony is investing in a traditional sports infrastructure company at roughly the same time it is rolling out 3D. It was announced today that Wimbledon will be broadcast in 3D using Sony’s gear. Clearly a company of Sony’s size can both buy a small company and roll out 3D at the same time. But it is telling that basic sports technologies will have serious legs.

Either way, sports tech remains the place to be.




Our Love Affair With Hockey — Video Game Style

Posted by Seth in GAMING, TELEVISION on 02-21-11    No Comments


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It was Hockey Day in America on Sunday — a celebration of the game at all levels. Unfortunately, we think Hockey Video Game Day in America might catch more people’s attention.

We don’t mean that as any sort of slam against hockey. On the contrary, I’m an unabashed fan — an NHL Center Ice subscriber, an avid fantasy hockey league player. But there’s no denying that the NHL is phenomenally enjoyable in its video game form, yet it has trouble translating that into a mass audience on TV or general interest among sports fans.

I listen to a lot of national sports talk radio. They don’t get into the NHL. Even when something controversial happens — like the Long Island Massacre between the Penguins and Islanders — you don’t hear the national talk shows get into it. The NHL is the only one of the big four pro leagues in North America that doesn’t have a deal with ESPN. Hence ESPN’s myriad talking heads talk precious little hockey.

But hockey video games — in all their incarnations over the years — have always been addictive, and have crossed lines that the real game hasn’t. It’s in pop culture. Think about those guys in Swingers. I can’t find a clip, but there’s a scene in Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins — a movie in which the entire cast is African-American — where they’re sitting around playing one of the EA Sports hockey games. For a host of cultural and lamentable socio-economic reasons, hockey attracts few black players or fans. Yet there they were playing the game.They could have used Madden NFL or an NBA game in the film — or whatever game they wanted. But they didn’t. And that goes hand in hand with Dan’s story on our recent podcast about he and his black classmates on the school bus debating which teams were the best to use in one of the old-school Sega hockey games. The games are just plain fun.

So what is it about video game hockey that works? The speed, for one thing. And, as Dan mentioned, the “cartoon” element of the game. EA Sports has made its game much more realistic over the last few years, yet it remains so fast-paced and fluid that it has mass appeal. Even with all the extra functions and moves they’ve built into it over the years, at its core it can still be played with a directional stick, a pass button and a shoot button.

The Hockey Day in America concept is an attempt to highlight the game’s roots in the U.S. The problem is, those roots aren’t too deep. During NBC’s broadcast of the Penguins-Blackhawks game on Sunday, announcer Doc Emrick cited a number that says it all: The Penguins have 10 American players on their roster. In 1970, there were seven Americans in the entire NHL. As narrow-minded and provincial as it sounds, the low number of American players in the league has hindered interest in the NHL. American fans don’t feel like they “know” these guys because they come from such different places and sometimes have names that give copy editors nightmares. NBC’s hockey broadcasts have had trouble reaching 1 percent of U.S. television households.

But on your video game console none of that matters. You can skate fast and hit hard, and if you set the difficulty low enough, Sidney Crosby can have a 100-goal season. And that never gets old.




Sports On The Web: MLB Gets It!

Posted by Seth in INTERNET, MOBILE, TELEVISION on 02-13-11    No Comments


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If you want a first-rate example of how much the web can benefit sports content, take a look at what Major League Baseball is doing with its MLB.TV package. Yes, we know it’s February and we have the brilliant March Madness On Demand coming soon. But the boys of summer are headed to spring training and we’re sick of winter, so let’s talk baseball.

The first thing you have to love about MLB.TV is that they’re making it available on a whole bunch of platforms, including the iPad, iPhone, Android phones, Roku, Boxee, PlayStation3 and certain Internet-enabled televisions from Samsung and LG.

And, yes, all of us fuddy-duddies still using computers can get our baseball that way too.

Now, if you’re an uber fuddy-duddy and you have to have your baseball, you can subscribe to the MLB Extra Innings package on cable and satellite TV. But that’ll run you around $200 for the season. You can get MLB.TV for $100 — or $120 with a few added functions. But quite frankly the $100 base version blows Extra Innings out of the water. Take a look at what you get:

  • Portable to multiple devices
  • HD quality
  • In-game highlights and stats — MLB says these will be updated “within moments” of when the action happens
  • Full game archives
  • Gameday Audio — giving you the option to listen to the radio broadcast if you don’t care for the TV announcers
  • Clickable linescore — allows you to instantly view any player’s at bat
  • Fantasy player tracker — allows you to enter your fantasy lineup and be alerted when any of your players are on deck

Spend that extra $20 and you also get home and road team broadcasts, live game DVR controls and the ability to split your screen four ways to watch up to four games at once.

Now, the one potential drawback to this baseball panacea is the image quality. Last summer, we had a chance to check out MLB.TV delivered via the PlayStation 3, and while it provided an HD picture, there were compression issues that noticeably impacted the quality. But we were also watching it on a 42-inch screen. On a computer, or iPad or mobile phone screen, it’s probably not as much of an issue.

The thing to take away from MLB.TV is that this is what the web allows for sports — not just easy distribution of content, but giving fans the chance to consume the content in any way they want. You have flexibility with MLB.TV that you simply can’t ever have with linear TV broadcasts: Go back and watch a specific at-bat, watch highlights on demand, get alerts about your fantasy players — and watch it all on pretty much any platform you want.

Play ball!




Super Bowl 45, Technology 0

Posted by Jonathan in GENERAL, INTERNET, TELEVISION on 02-07-11    No Comments


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Never mind that The Black Eyed Peas are a cover band, or that the Super Bowl XLV iPad “app” amounted to nothing more than a few maps and interactive location guides, or that NFL.com’s in-game content on Sunday night was easily bested by its content during the regular season. Never mind any of it. Why?

Nobody cares.  This four-hour game was the the most-watched piece of television of all time.

Forget all the cutesy stuff like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the crash of the space shuttle,  the Olympics, or even 9/11. These are all just another episode of Oprah in comparison to Sunday’s game. Super Bowl XLV smoked all of ‘em, and with absolutely no help whatsoever from any new technology, save for super-slow-motion and some nice use of cameras.

I really tried to find a cool next-gen digital spin on this year’s game. But it really wasn’t there. There was nothing interesting that was Web-based or digitally enabled. And truly new tools, like 3D were nowhere near this broadcast.

The fascinating part is that from a valuation and business perspective, the Super Bowl now makes companies like Google and Facebook look like Nick at Night.

Assuming a per-commercial rate of $3 million for 30 seconds, and about 90 minutes of commercial time over the four-hour broadcast, we are talking about a half billion in sales — a number Facebook is lucky to make in a couple of months. Add last night’s game to this list and Super Bowls now account for 11 of the top 20 most-watched broadcasts in U.S television history. Now, some of these games are from years ago, so revenue calculations are tricky, since you have to discount those sales in today’s dollars. But still, we are easily talking $100 billion in total ad sales for the live game — about the same number Google has in the past 5 years.

And that is just for ad revenue. It doesn’t count ticket sales or tie-ins or shoulder programming — nothing else. That’s just what Fox charged to advertise during the game. If you factor those other numbers in, Google and Facebook are not even in the discussion. Can we just end this “Google Economy” nonsense and get on with the future?

It’s the NFL’s world, and we just live in it.




The Super Bowl Will Not Be Televised — In 3D, That Is

Posted by Dan in TELEVISION on 02-01-11    No Comments


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superbowlDespite all the hype surrounding the 3D televisions that major manufacturers are trying to get people to buy, the fact remains that people are just not buying 3D televisions in any real numbers.  This is the  big reason why Fox Sports, which is carrying Super Bowl XLV on Sunday, will not be broadcasting it in 3D.

“Unfortunately, given current levels of adoption, there is no business model that makes sense for producing a show as complex as the Super Bowl in 3D at this time. 3D requires an entirely separate production at significant expense without generating incremental revenue to offset the additional costs. We prefer to keep our focus all our energy on doing the best possible HD production possible, which this year features more than 40 cameras,” said Fox Sports.




A Techno Cure For All-Star Boredom? Unfortunately Not

Posted by Seth in TELEVISION on 01-31-11    No Comments


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Well, we’ve just been through the mid-winter all-star weekend, with the NHL and NFL both playing their games on the same day, as luck would have it. Despite efforts to spice up these events with players wearing microphones and — in the NHL’s case — a whole new format, the games fell flat, as they always do. And so will the NBA all-star game, which is coming up on Feb. 20.

There’s a simple reason for that. The NBA, NHL and NFL all-star games are stilted, sad approximations of what these sports are supposed to be. Nobody plays defense. In the Pro Bowl they make it so you can’t hit the quarterback. Actually, that’s sort of what a real NFL game is like these days. Seriously, though, the baseball all-star game is the only one worth watching because at least you’re seeing something that resembles a real game.

It’s easy to like the concept of players being miced up for games. Heck, Versus network had Carolina Hurricanes’ goaltender Cam Ward wired and carrying on a conversation with announcers Doc Emrick and Ed Olczyk while Ward was on the ice and playing. The problem is that in an informal, intensity-free setting like an all-star game, the audio you get isn’t really worth listening to. Lots of jolly joking and platitudes about how great it is to be part of the game, but nothing particularly interesting. But mic up players during a real game and you get true insight into what’s happening.

The NHL does a pretty nice job of integrating new technologies and granting access. The recent 24/7 series on HBO documenting the run-up to the Penguins-Capitals game on New Year’s Day was simply brilliant and a master stroke of marketing for the league.

But the NHL’s new all-star game format — which featured a fantasy-league-like player draft — didn’t really work. When you have East vs. West or USA vs. World, you have some idea who’s playing for what team. Sunday night, you really didn’t know who was playing with who.

Is there a way to fix these games? Nah. Not really. They are what they are. They’re fun, and they’re a chance for the leagues and networks to innovate technologically and see what works and what doesn’t. But there weren’t any great leaps forward this past weekend.