MLB.TV available in time for Spring Training

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Every season one of the most popular phrases for a baseball fan is that pitchers and catchers have reported, meaning that the preseason has started and regular season baseball is not too far away. Now a new phrase may start bringing the same excitement-MLB.TV is now on sale.

While this may be a bit of an exaggeration it is not that big of a leap since the huge popularity of the program has seemingly increased every year as baseball fans continue to sign up to watch the streaming video of MLB games. Now in its 12th year the program is the top sports streaming product.

The program allows fans to watch out of market games on a growing variety of platforms ranging from televisions to on iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, supported Android smartphones and tablets, Amazon Kindle Fire and Windows Phone 8. There is a range of additional devices that are or will be supported as well such as the Xbox and Sony’s Playstation.

It should be noted that the games shown are only those that are out of market games and the map for which teams claim which territory is very convoluted. For instance I think four or five teams claim Las Vegas. There is (or was I cannot find the current status) a court case that seeks to throw out MLB’s blackout policy, but you should probably not hold your breath for any changes this season.

All subscribers to the service that sign up early i.e. prior to the start of the regular season, will have access to more than 200 live games from Spring Training in Florida and Arizona. Spring Training game broadcasts are scheduled to begin on Wednesday, February 26, 2014.

Some subscribers, depending on which version they select will also receive a free subscription to MLB.com At Bat, enabling fans to listen to any game on a huge range of supported platforms. MLB.TV comes in two flavors. For $129.99 a year you also get At Bat as well as support on mobile devices. For $109.99 you just get the standard features that do not include mobile devices and choice of feeds.

Variety of apps to support the Sochi Olympics

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NBC’s broadcast of the Olympics should be boon to its online and streaming viewership, even though this is something that the network has made available for some time. As with many apps and capabilities users often only discover them when looking for specific tool or event.

There are a surprising number of apps available for the upcoming 2014 Winter Olympics that will be held in Sochi starting later this week. They range from simple calendars to one that will be showing live events.

Actually this is probably not surprising but then it’s hard to say why you would want something aside from the one that is available from NBC Sports, the official broadcaster of the games. Aside from the fact that the app, NBC Sports Live Extra, is from the broadcaster it was hardly just conceived for the Olympics.

The app also provides live sports events that air on NBC, NBC Sports Network and the Golf Channel so that over the course there will be IndyCar, the PGA Tour, Premier League Soccer and the NHL to name just a few.

We have already mentioned most of the features of the app as it pertains to the Olympics but it’s good to mention that there will be 1,000 hours of live streaming video with some replay on demand capabilities. It is free to use with select caveats.

However if you are looking for different functionality there are plenty of options starting with the U.S. Olympic team’s official app. It details who has made the team, links to athletes’ social media and an up-to-date following of how they do.

Another general purpose sports app, this one with a more international flavor, which will have a special focus on the Winter Olympics, is BBC Sports. It will have live coverage of events at the games and can be used to follow a wide range of International sports.

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An interested app is the Sochi 2014 WOW (Wireless Olympics Works) that comes from Samsung Electronics, one of the major sponsors. The app is customizable so that a user can have it focus on their specific interests. Not too surprising is that it is also optimized for Samsung devices.

Pebble takes second step in smartwatch space

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Pebble has brought out its second generation smartwatch with the $249 Pebble Steel Watch, a more fashionable, and expensive version of the original $150 Pebble offering from last year. The watch is being shown at the current CES International trade show in Las Vegas.

The Steel Watch will be available in either a brushed stainless or black matte finish as the company develops a look that would not look garish on an executive. It replaces the plastic cover with Gorilla Glass and comes with both steel and leather straps.

The battery life is good for between 5 and 7 days and it is waterproof to 5 meters. The company has added a tri-colored LED and as with the earlier model will run both the Android and the iOS operating system. Scheduled to ship at the end of the month the move coincides with the launching of the Pebble Appstore, a place where users can easily find apps designed to run on the device.

Pebble, the Kickstarter favorite, wow the market when its funding effort went massively over the amount that the company founders were seeking, something that slightly harmed the company, at least public relations wise, by forcing it deliver the product late because it needed to build significantly more than it had expected in its early run. Not that this is not a problem that most startup companies would kill for.

Pebble was certainly one of the groundbreakers, if not the groundbreaker in the wearable computing technology with mainstream devices that connected a watch with a cell phone to bring data to your wrist. There were already sports specific devices that did some of the same features in areas such as golf and running but none that seemed to serve as a pure extension of your mobile phone.

That started a land rush by larger mobile developers to lay claim to this space as well, with Samsung, Apple, Google, Sony, Dell and others delivering products, planning to or simple becoming part of the rumor mill that they have one in the works.

Samsung, Qualcomm and Sony have already brought out products with the Samsung Gear, Qualcomm Toq and the Sony SmartWatch and I am sure this year we will see a wave of additional devices introduced to the market, much like how the tablet space exploded a few years ago. A number will be simply me-too devices while others will take the time to create truly differentiated offerings.

Friday Grab Bag: Apple’s big iPad? And NCAA football changes thru history

Rumors are that Apple is now looking at a large format iPad, one that would be in the 13-inch screen size territory, at least according to a recent piece in Forbes that is relaying news from the Korean Times.

It would be interesting to see as the current trend in tablets has been strong growth in the 7- to 8-inch format, but as tablets start to increasingly replace notebooks and desktop PCs a larger tablet might meet this segment’s needs.

PC sales lag as tablets fill their place

Speaking of tablets as PC replacements eWeek reports that according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker shipments of PCs are expected to fall 10.1% this year in the consumer market and 5% in the business space.

PCs are still used more that smartphones and tablets, but mainly for computational and work exercises while the use of more mobile platforms has seen a dramatic increase as they fill many of the needs that a PC used to perform.

A history of NCAA football conferences

For casual fans, and even some of the more than casual college football fans the changing face of the different conferences, with teams coming and going, can be confusing. The New York Times has a very interesting interactive page that shows the changes since 1965.

It highlights the moves and you can trace teams and conferences over that span as the morph and in some cases dissolve. Also interesting is the huge decline of unaffiliated schools.

Amazon to develop drones for delivery?
One of the funnier news articles from last weekend was the proclamation of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos that the company was developing drones that would deliver packages in 30 minutes. It was widely reported and commented on, and yet no one, at least initially put any thought into this.

Really? Drones? Aside from getting FAA approval, the logistics would be a nightmare and they would have to have thousands of warehouses and airports across the nation to support the effort. Who would be controlling them, Sidd Finch?

The perfect holiday gift from the NFL
Teams sell all sorts of swag for their fans and as it is the holiday season many are looking for the perfect gift for both the NFL fanatic as well as the more casual fan who follows the local team but thinks a quarterback that retired 5 years ago is still at the helm.

Mike Tanier of Sportsonearth kindly went to all of the trouble of tracking down the proper gift for all types of fans. Want a toaster that embeds your team’s logo? Got it! A Cleveland Browns thong-uh yeah about that.

MLB’s At Bat app rakes in the viewers and sales

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Major League Baseball has been very aggressive in developing and delivering a variety of apps that can enhance a fan’s appreciation of the game and the flagship product in that effort is clearly At Bat, a program that enables fans to watch and/or listen to games.

The program has seen strong demand, with 10 million downloads in a single season, and very high usage with 1 billion launches. MLB said that 60% of fans open it every day. Last year it had 6.7 million downloads.

Apple recently announced that the program is one of the 10 top grossing iOS apps of all time, and that is no surprise in view of how long the two have partnered. When Apple opened its App store in 2008, At Bat was one of the original apps available.

Of course the app is not just for Apple’s platform, although they are often the first to get the latest releases and have the most features, but it also has an Android version as well as BlackBerry and Kindle Fire.

It would be interesting to see if the growing popularity of the app, which helps fans view games that might not be broadcast in their area, or hear favorite broadcasters has had any impact on other areas of the game such as television viewership. The recently concluded series between Boston and St. Louis saw TV ratings jump 17% this year.

Nokia delivers tablet as market continues to diversify

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Nokia has introduced its Lumia 2520 tablet, a $499 offering that will run Microsoft’s Windows RT 8.1 operating system and is destined for the consumer marketplace, a space that is already saturated by the likes of Google, Amazon, Apple and Samsung.

The Lumia 2520 futures a 10-inch 192 x 1080 display and is powered by Qualcomm’s 2.2GHz Snapdragon 80 processor, 2GB RAM, 32GB of internal storage with an expansion slot that enables the addition of 32GB more.

The tablet has a 6.7 megapixel rear-facing camera ad a 2 MP front-facing camera and an app that it has included called Storyteller that enables users to plot their photos on a map. The tablet is expected to be available later this quarter.

The company has included other technology brought over from its handset division and with that and its use of a different processor is differentiating its offering from the Microsoft Surface 2 that was also introduced this week.

That is an interesting move by the company since Microsoft is in the process of buying Nokia’s handset business for $7.2B and will get the tablet business as well, if and when the deal closes next year. So now it will have two similar, yet slightly different offerings for the same market segment.

I can understand Nokia wanted a product that helps generate revenue in the time between now and the closing of its sale but it seems that both parties would have benefited if it had focused elsewhere, no matter how nice the Lumia 2520 is.

The move by Nokia comes as tablet prices continue to drop and the number of players continues to grow. One of the surprising moments in Apple’s rollout of its new iPads this week was that one of them was actually more expensive than the last generation.

According to market research firm ABI, as reported in Mobile Marketer, tablet prices have been dropping and will continue to do so. Apple had been falling from its premium priced spot and its recent move was an attempt to move back into that space.

The report went on and discussed how the high end is pretty well saturated by existing manufacturers and that most new products in that space simply enhance existing features rather than add bold new capabilities. However it pointed out that there are several market segments that are currently underserved by developers.

Those spaces include the educational and business markets. The business segment is one of the last strongholds of the PC but that dominance is slowly changing, mostly driven initially by the BYOD (bring your own device) movement.

So with these large and relatively unexploited markets available why did the company make a “me too” offering that will compete with Microsoft and others in the heavily competitive consumer space? It will also be competing with them in the business and education markets but since those spaces appear to have the most room for growth it seems that they present the best opportunity for Nokia to establish itself.

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