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Turner Sports to provide viewer options during Final Four broadcasts

November 21, 2013 by

turner

The NCAA’s Final Four is one of the most watched sporting events of the year, and for that matter talked about as fans and non fans start early by entering pools of all sorts to predict the winner of the month long tournament..

As the teams get eliminated and it charges down to the finals fans become polarized as to who they want to win based on teams’ reputations, pool results and a host of other issues. Now fans can watch broadcasts that are designed for each team in the Final Four thanks to Turner Sports, the network that will be broadcasting the games.

Sports Business Daily is reporting that the two will take an innovative approach to broadcasting the games at next years’ tournament. There will be the traditional national broadcast that will be seen on TBS. TNT and truTV will then carry the exact same game but with a twist.

Each channel will have a team-centric approach with announcers and camera angles designed to highlight one team. The differentiation does not stop there as the halftime shows will also be different, although pregame and post games shows will be the same.

The Final Four next year will be seen only on cable for the first time and the networks are hoping that they can avoid the tradition viewership drop when a formerly over the air broadcast moves to cable with this move. The championship game will be broadcast on CBS and so will obviously not have dual perspectives.

Filed Under: Basketball, CBS Sports, Live Sports Video Consumption, NCAA Hoops, NCAA.com, TBS, TNT, truTV, Turner Sports Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Facebook seeks to expands sports reach with Sportstream relationship

November 21, 2013 by

sportss

Facebook is working to make vague sporting references a thing of the past. OK not all of them but its recent partnership with Sportstream should help shed some light on many of the references that can be found in peoples’ posts.

The relationship will enable Facebook to better compete against rivals such as Twitter where there is a huge amount of sports chatter, something that Facebook would like to gain a much larger share of going forward.

Sportstream already has the ability to parse through the publicly available data on sports from sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter as well as following all of the games, league news and other relevant information such as athletes’ social media accounts to present a picture of what is going on in sports.

Now Facebook will be opening the kimono and providing information that it culls from posts in its Keyword Insights API which aggregates what users are posting privately about as well as to what they are posting publicly via its Public Feed API.

While plenty of leagues and teams have Facebook pages, they are not usually one of the primary stops for fans to converse with each other. The deal with Sportstream will help Facebook track what fans are talking about and viewing, and help it present that information in context.

The deal represents a major step forward for Sportstream, which started out delivering apps for consumers that was in many ways a glorified football chat room. From there it morphed into a broader based sports app that followed multiple sports and provided filterable Twitter and other social media feeds.

It has a number of products but it is its Sportsbase solution, that enables teams to create custom social media products that enables customers to create custom team pages that track what is being said on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as well as what representing what is happening on the field.

The company has been seeing a growing interest in its analytical capabilities and has some impressive clients including the UCLA Bruins, Oregon Ducks, and the Miami Hurricanes.

There are other players in the field of collecting, collating and presenting social media with TigerLogic and its Postano platform offering very similar capabilities. However it appears to be primarily focused on providing that information to individual teams, but that can change.

Filed Under: Android, Apps, Facebook, Instagram, Sports Social Media, Sports Social Media Data, Twitter Tagged With: , , , ,

MLB, NFL team up to battle Aereo

November 19, 2013 by

aereo

Live-TV startup Aereo has been taking on television broadcasters and winning but now faces an assault by two of America’s largest sports leagues, the NFL and MLB as they seek to prevent it from showing their broadcasts.

The two leagues are seeking to piggyback with an amicus brief to a petition filed by broadcasters that asks the United States Supreme Court to rule on the legality of Aereo’s broadcasting of local over the air signals.

In case you are unfamiliar with Aereo, it is a startup that makes a combination DVR/antenna that captures over the air broadcasts and allows customers to its $8 a month service to view the programming on Internet connected devices.

It started out in New York City last year and then moved to Boston and Atlanta, surviving legal challenges along the way. It has now accelerated its expansion efforts and recently moved into Utah, Chicago, Miami, Houston and Dallas this year.

Apparently this is terrible news to the sports leagues, as well as with NBC, Fox, ABC and CBS, the broadcasters that filed the initial suit. The broadcasters have claimed that Aereo is violating their copyrights and must pay retransmission fees.

The sports leagues have piled on claiming that if they lose exclusive retransmission licensing rights it will make over the air broadcasting less attractive and that they would be forced to go to paid cable networks. According to a piece in Variety the amount that the league collects is about $100 million for those rights.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out on a number of levels. Cable has been losing viewership as a generation of ‘cable cutters’ has emerged and they use Netflix and other online programs, get over the air antennas or do without.

Also the sports should keep boxing in mind. A once popular over the air sport it moved its premium events to pay per view cable, and helped kill the sport. While basic cable is not the same as PPV the example is one to remember.

The trend to get over the air broadcast, either from a service such as Aereo or by using a proxy, often illegal, appears to have accelerated the movement of quality content to basic cable where it is much more difficult to rebroadcast. Will sports follow this trend?

Filed Under: ABC, Android, Apple, Apps, Baseball, CBS Sports, Fox Sports, Lawsuit, Live sports via mobile, Live Sports Video Consumption, Major League Baseball, NFL Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Friday Grab Bag: MLB + MTV, Braves on the move

November 15, 2013 by

The Braves are leaving Atlanta, in all but name, to move to nearby Cobb County and a brand new stadium, one that the bill will primarily be paid for by taxpayers in a county that has budget problems.

The Atlantic does a nice job pointing out how Atlanta may get even more and that most of the jobs that are created by the new park will be low-paying jobs that cost a lot to create. I think the citizens should take a look at how a sweetheart deal paid off for Miami residents and their new ball yard.

Android market share growing
While it seems that Apple’s iPhone is always in the news, smartphones that run on the Android operating system actually rule the smartphone world, with an 81% market share according to market research firm IDC.

Its most recent study on that market space has one very interesting fact, that Windows phones are making strong headway, but still are only 5% of the market. The leader in the Android space is no surprise, as Samsung started strong and has maintained a constant stream of upgrades.

Sports highlights in Canada
If you live in Canada, or for that matter simply read Canadian newspapers a bit more sports is coming your way. SendToNews, a digital sports video company has signed a deal with Postmedia Networks to deliver sports highlights.

The highlights can be seen on Postmedia Network’s newspaper web sites that are available for different papers in different regions of the country.

MLB and MTV
If you miss the days when MTV played all music videos and have disliked the network ever since it stopped doing so this may not be for you but the it has signed a multiyear partnership with MLB that will focus on the intersection of pop culture and baseball.

The effort will be a cross-platform one and will have MLB players as well as outside of the sport celebrities looking at the sport and modern culture. The first program expected will run on MTV2 and will be a 30-episode show that will be produced by Boston Red Sox DH David Ortiz and Pittsburgh Pirates Centerfielder Andrew McCutchen.

New Apple iPhone
Now that Apple has delivered two new lines of iPhones the rumors have started for the next generation — boy that did not take long. Leading off is that it will have a bigger screen, something that many had predicted for the latest release.

More interesting is that they may have curved screens and that Apple will continue to pack them with new sensors, with the latest able to detect levels of pressure. They are reportedly due in about 1 year, so don’t start holding your breath too soon.

Mozilla says no Firefox phones in U.S.
If you are one of the people waiting for open source software to arrive on your phone, and you live in the United States, you will have a wait ahead of you. While the software is expected to be out by mid-2014 for Sprint network devices, that does not include the USA.

An executive recently told C/net that there are currently no plans to launch in the U.S., but that the organization is in talks with carriers and handset manufacturers so that could change in the future.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Baseball, Boston Red Sox, iPhone, Major League Baseball, Microsoft, Samsung, Smartphone Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Under Armour joins sports-community race with $150M MapMyFitness buy

November 14, 2013 by

Today’s news that sports apparel giant Under Armour has bought sports community concern MapMyFitness for $150 million is just more proof that the big brands will be driving the bus in the race between sports social networks.

MapMyFitness, one of the more popular activity stat-recording and sharing site businesses, better known through its MapMyRun and MapMyRide services, will now have a deep-pocketed parent to help it compete against players like Nike and its FuelBand, Jawbone and Fitbit, and newcomers like Adidas. Then there are software-only or web-only players like Strava.com who are all angling for a part of the new, popular field of athletic and everyday biometrics.

What will be really interesting is if the biometric information from pro athletes becomes more readily available to fans — the Tour de France does an interesting job recently with showing wattage and other exertion information while cyclists are out on the road. Why not have heart rate or calorie-burning levels for marathoners, or basketball players? Recorded stats so you can compare your workouts to LeBron James? It will be interesting to see where the biometrics and social data sharing ends up, now that the big marketing dollars are taking over.

Filed Under: Apps, Cycling, Outdoor Activities, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

NFL analytic app for fans, IronRank, comes to Android

November 14, 2013 by

ironr

There has been a huge upsurge in using advanced statistical analysis in all aspects of pro sports, with baseball leading the way, but football is rapidly catching up. IronRank has developed an app that allows fans to take advantage of the current generation of analysis.

The company has developed a method of ranking players and teams based on the standard Elo rating system and then takes the numbers it gets from the analysis and assign them to each team, which in turn is used to predict the score.

The program does an analysis on the entire team but also does separate ones for both the offense and the defenses of each team as well evaluating how teams do in the red zone, passing yards, touchdowns and other related categories. For a full look at how it does its analysis look here.

If the Elo system sounds familiar that might be because it has been used for evaluating tennis players as well as chess matches and has been found to be very accurate. IronRank said that the program so far has been successful picking winners 65% of the time and as the season progresses and more statistical information become available it increases its accuracy.

The program provides predictions on each game and ranks teams based on their division as well as their offensive and defensive capabilities. It features all of the stats that a fan could wish for and also provides past game results and provides a solid overview of a team’s performance as the season progresses.

The company now has an app available for Android devices and is working on one for iPhones. It also has a web site that has been up and running for some time. You can also follow the site at Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

There has been plenty of sports betting apps that have been released over the past few years, and few have had much staying power. However what appears to be different here is that the program uses a widely recognized, and successful system and simply applied it to the NFL. It will be interesting to see how IronRank does over the next season or two.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Betting, Facebook, Google, iPhone, NFL, Sports Betting, Startup Tagged With: , , ,
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