NFL '12
The first week of the National Football League’s preseason ended last night with a thump as the Dallas Cowboys beat the Oakland Raiders 3-0 in a game that started out like a ball of fire but quickly cooled as time passed.
I was not able to watch the game and since I do not currently use Verizon I could not stream the game over my phone, and I decided not to use the NFL’s site to get the basic about what was going on. Later a friend called and asked if I had seen the run that McFadden had early in the game. I did not and was not willing to watch SportsCenter that late in the evening to catch it.
I did wander over to the NFL’s web site and was amazed at the number of options available for mobile customers, something that seems to have expanded greatly from last year when it seemed that it was Verizon or nothing.
The main point of interest was the breadth of offerings, eight in all, not counting several additional ones that were games. I will not recount all of them here, but several are very worth of downloading on your phone or tablet.
The lead one is the NFL’s official app, NFL’12 that follows all of the games with play by play as they occur. It can be set to provide alerts for scoring and games and has the ability to chat with others while the game is being p
layed. It has full integration with another app from the NFL- NFL.Com’s Fantasy Football so that you can access your team from within this app. Pretty standard stuff but certainly a must for NFL fans.
There are two that stood out for me however. The first was Game Pass, a subscription based app. This has two features, the first being audio pass that enables you to listen to live game broadcasts. Good until Jan.4, 2013 the program also lets you listen to any game from the 2009-2011 season as well. It is currently available for $24.99 A paired down version to follow only your favorite team is also available for $22.99.
The second part is Game Rewind, which lets you watch replays of all the games. In some cases it provides coaches film views of plays as well as the broadcast version. The program is currently $39.99 or for the single team view $34.99. There is also a subscription based app called NFL Preseason Live, designed just for tablets.
Then there is the NFL Mobile from Verizon that permits live streaming video from the NFL Network. There is the already mentioned Fantasy Football Mobile that allows players of the NFL’s Fantasy Football to control their teams from mobile devices. A related app is the Fantasy Cheat Sheet, targeted at the Fantasy Football players.
Baseball has been at the forefront of pushing mobile apps, in my opinion, and I believe that the NFL has significantly closed the gap with the huge array of offerings that it now has available. I will be downloading several to see how well I like them, as well as some of the games to see how much productivity I can kill.
The Verizon NFL Mobile shows Thursday night, Sunday night and Monday Night games live, plus RedZone. You can also get games via mobile devices if you subscribe to Dish, which now includes the Sunday Ticket with all contracts.
Thanks for the review of NFL apps available for us to use and keep track of our favorite football teams. I’ll have to check them out, but I’ve been using the Dish Remote Access App to watch live and recorded games on my DVR. I saw a recording of the Broncos/Bears game on my commute to Dish and always love to see the Broncos win a game, even if it’s just the preseason. I can’t wait for the regular season to get there, but I’ll take whatever football I can get!