ESPN holding nothing back for tonight’s BCS broadcast

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An era ends tonight in college football with the last of the current format championships about to be played between Florida State and Auburn. Next season will usher in a playoff format that is a major change from the current poll-based system.

The current system was introduced in 1998 and now it is gone, but when you look at the freight train of equipment and army of personnel that ESPN is bringing to the event, it will likely live on for quite a long time in the form of multiple digital recordings.

The sports channel is broadcasting the 2014 Vizio BCS National Championship game tonight with the biggest broadcast team in its history and has termed it the “BCS Megacast” with it being presented across six of its television platforms as well as its audio and digital outlets.

You can pretty much take your choice of platforms- ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNEWS, ESPN Radio, ESPN3, ESPN Classic, ESPN Deportes, ESPN Goal Line and ESPN International. There will be pregame talkshows, interviews, analysis, celebrities and much more available prior to the kickoff at 8:30 ET.

Social and digital media will be strongly represented in the mix with the personalities posting thoughts and comments prior to kickoff as well during the game.

For those that are not able to watch at home or in a comfortable sporting establishment the presentations that were broadcast on the ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN3 and ESPNEWS will be available to a range of alternative platforms via WatchESPN including online at WatchESPN.com, on smartphones and tablets, through ESPN on Xbox LIVE to Gold members, on Apple TV and Roku to fans who receive their video subscription from an affiliated provider.

So how many people and trucks will this take? According to USA Today Sports and ESPN it will be 16 trucks, 63 cameras, 73 microphones a four-engine generator and as many as 200 employees, only a few who you will see online.

Hopefully this will make for a great broadcast, but much of that will depend on the teams. A stinker of a game will lead to fans tuning out as happened a few years ago when Alabama crushed LSU 21-0. The blowout was obvious early and fans tuned out in droves even though ESPN had added some interesting bells and whistles to its broadcast. At that time the future was 3D and ESPN had a 3D broadcast of the game as well as a more traditional broadcast.

However I am looking forward to the game and hopefully in all of the broadcasts comes something that will last to enhance future broadcasts.

Friday Grab Bag: 49ers’ Levi’s Stadium isn’t a fit for MNF

The San Francisco 49ers will be playing in a brand new stadium next season but no matter how well the team performs on the field it looks unlikely that it will have any home games broadcast for Monday Night Football, at least for the first season.

The soon to be finished facility — in Santa Clara, Calif., well south of the team’s namesake city — does not have enough of its own parking spaces and is planning to use neighboring office lots for its weekend games but these spaces are in use when the fans start to arrive for the games on weekdays. According to a report in the San Jose Mercury News the team isn’t asking for any of the sought-after prime-time MNF games or the Thursday night games until it can figure out how to fit all the fans’ cars in lots jammed by the folks who work in Silicon Valley.

One option the team is now considering is asking its neighbors to change their work hours to accommodate the team. Wonder what Marissa Mayer thinks about that idea?

BlackBerry history
If you are one of the few, the proud, the remaining BlackBerry users this is a pretty interesting read from Bloomberg. It is an oral history of the rise and fall of the BlackBerry, a device that probably did more than any other to kill the pager and usher in the age of smartphones.

Bloomberg conducted dozens of interviews to get a good picture about the rise of the platform and then its sad decline. Interesting to see if any of the current tech behemoths will follow the same path.

Google Glass takes another hit
Google Glass may be banned in another state as Illinois is now considering banning drivers from using the wearable computing devices, joining Delaware, New Jersey, West Virginia and Great Britain as well as sundry businesses and bars.

Mobile Marketer makes a spirited defense of the technology but it seems to me that they missed the point in a few places: they are not the same as a security camera and does anybody honestly believe that having a second image in front of a driver’s eye will make them safer?

A Heisman tale
As the college football season winds down the talk about who deserves the Heisman always starts coming to the forefront. Should they look at more than just offensive players, did so and so’s stats really put him in the race.

Well the Washington Post has taken a different tack and did a very interesting piece on the history of the first 78 trophies, where they are now and how they got there. It’s a fun read.

NBA to embrace its inner geek
Baseball in the last decade or so has undergone a revolution in the way that stats are looked at, with the time honored numbers such as RBIs, Wins and HRs getting re-evaluated in terms of how they relate to the team and individuals performance.

Football is also undergoing that same revolution to a smaller extent and now the NBA has joined the fun with the launch of NBA.com/stats web page that will feature detailed box scores and video from all of its games.

Super Bowl will be no walk in the park
The rules for parking, tailgating and generally schmoozing at the upcoming Super Bowl in New Jersey are out and it looks like if you are attending you had better leave the house early if you don’t want to miss the game.

No walking through the parking lots, you must either drive or take mass transit, no tailgating or BBQs allowed and a host of other restrictions. Who says that NFL stands for No Fun League?

USA Today gets into sports-event ticket business

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I think fans everywhere agree that there are a huge number of sporting events that they would be interested in attending, at least once in their life, but finding out how to apply for tickets much less working your way through the red tape will always be an impediment.

Now leaping to the (possible) rescue is USA Today Sports Media Group which has teamed with QuintEvents to launch a joint venture called USA Today Sports Events that promises access to the biggest sports events.

The effort seeks to establish USA Today Sports as the go-to site for fans looking for tickets and packages to events such as the NFL’s Pro Bowl and Super Bowl, Kentucky Derby and the NBA All-Star game, among others.

It does not just offer tickets but much more in some cases such as access to players and coaches, the ability to walk a field or arena prior to an event, hospitality tent and parties access, and other amenities. The packages it offers are not third-party ones that cobble together hotels, seats and transportation but ones from the official sponsors of the events.

A look at the website shows it is offering tickets for the upcoming Super Bowl next year, with a clock counting down the days, hours and minutes. It has a link to different ticket packages, then a second to extras that can be added to your package, then a seating chart and so on. Currently tickets max out at $11,799 each.

The Level White Package starts with seats at $5,899 and has seats in the corner of level 100 at MetLife Stadium. The amenities include a $100 In-Stadium Super Bowl XLVIII merchandise coupon, preferred on-location parking (for an addition fee for the actual parking) and access to the NFL On-Location venue.

It does seem that all but well-heeled fans are increasingly phased out of the modern sports picture and while I like the idea of this and if I had the cash might actually try and use the service but increasingly fans of teams are the last that get served by the leagues when the biggest events come around, forcing them to try all sorts of maneuvers to get tickets. Maybe USA Today can also start a business finding bargain seats for real fans who aren’t loaded with cash?

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.

Fanatic App Tells Out of Town Fans Where to Go

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Have you ever traveled to a distant city and been forced to miss watching your favorite team play because you did not want to watch the game in a sports bar filled with hostile fans? Well Fanatic has developed an app that helps like minded fans find each other and enjoy a game together.

The company is actually delivering its second iteration of the app, it first hit the market with a version that only supported iOS digital mobile devices late last January and now has expanded into the Android space as well.

The concept is very simply. A fan of a team, or league, can search for the top venues to watch that team in a specific city. So a Bears fan in Charlotte could seek out a bar that caters to fans that root for the team. Rankings will rise and fall as Fanatic users recommend sites for other fans. It recommends specific venues nearby based on a user’s location, sports interests and the team ranking of those venues.

It feature top venues for a wide range of leagues including NCAA football and basketball, the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and MLS, along with the top European soccer leagues, including the English Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Serie A and the UEFA Champions League.

The company is currently developing a system that will have specific rewards for users. You will earn points for usage for such things as checking in and at some future time they will be redeemable for specific prizes.

This seems like a very good mixture of social media and sports, and as any fan that has been in a different city and wanted to watch their home team knows, some bars are hostile to out of town fans and some cater to them, the difficulty is finding them.

Would Proposed A La Carte Cable Bill Hurt Sports Channels?

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Senator John McCain is introducing a bill that would enable cable companies to offer subscribers the ability to select which channels they would watch, and pay for and allow them to relegate the remainder to the waste bin.

The push is not his first try at this, he had a similar bill back in 2006 that did go very far, and the new effort, called the Television Consumer Freedom Act of 2013 is designed to encourage the cable companies to offer freedom of choice for their customers.

ESPN and its related channels and packages are one of the more expensive set of channels available, and currently if you get basic cable a nice chunk of your bill gets sent to them. This in turn has allowed it to have a war chest that has seen it increase its power in the sports world by buying broadcast rights. If this passed and a large number of people opted out of its sports channels it would be weakened.

Also the growing number of league channels would also be potentially harmed as well. The rise of the SEC, PAC-12 and other dedicated networks has been helped by their channels getting bundled with other properties, something that the bill would outlaw. Would you pay extra year round to have a network that may broadcast only one sport that you are interested in?

However one interesting thing about the bill is that the unfettering would be voluntary, but does include some incentives to get the major players on board. There are a few sections that do appear to have some teeth in them. One of which is if networks pull their on the air broadcasts and put them on cable they would be stripped of their spectrum and the spectrum would then be sold by the FCC.

There are some other interesting tidbits in the bill including a provision that would prohibit television blackouts at publicly funded stadiums or even stadiums that have used some public funds. I am pretty sure that includes all of the NFL stadiums.

This type of a la carte push has been strongly resisted by both broadcasters and content providers and they will likely launch a strong effort to kill the bill or to at least remove its few teeth.

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