Masters online will show full rounds for featured groups; tourney also adds 4K TV and virtual reality options

Screen Shot 2016-03-31 at 11.11.03 AMOne of the best online sports viewing experiences, the Masters, will add a little more depth to its coverage this year, offering full-round coverage of selected “featured groups” of players. In previous years, the Masters only showed featured groups from the 10th hole on.

Otherwise, the superb Masters Live online package — which is available for free at both Masters.com and CBSSports.com — will remain largely unchanged from last year, with live coverage channels for Amen Corner (holes 11, 12 and 13) and holes 15 and 16, as well as one for a “Masters on the Range” live interview show from the famed course’s practice area. The online coverage will also include in-progress and end-of-day highlights in case you aren’t near a TV to watch the broadcast coverage. If you’re a golf nut and a Masters junkie like we are, you will probably have both options open, watching the TV coverage on a big screen while keeping up with the exciting challenges of Amen Corner and the 15-16 duo.

Maybe the best part of the extended featured-groups coverage is that online action will now begin at 9 a.m. Eastern, instead of noon like it did last year. Three more hours of Masters online? We’ll take it! Live action starts next Thursday, April 7.

HERE IS THE LINK TO WATCH THE MASTERS ONLINE

In yet another twist the Masters will also offer two new viewing options, including a 4K feed as well as a virtual reality feed. The 4K feed will cover the Amen Corner holes, while the virtual reality stream will show action from holes 6 and 16. For the 4K feed you will need a DirecTV account or an Internet-connected smart TV, along with some other requirements; for more information on 4K requirements check this page. For instructions and gear requirements for the virtual reality stream, check here.

Niners: All (tech) systems go at Levi’s Stadium for Super Bowl 50

Levi's Stadium, ready for the Super Bowl. All stadium photos: Levi's Stadium (click on any photo for a larger image)

Levi’s Stadium, ready for the Super Bowl. All stadium photos: Levi’s Stadium (click on any photo for a larger image)

As far as the technology at Levi’s Stadium is concerned, it’s all systems go for Sunday’s Super Bowl 50, according to San Francisco 49ers chief operating officer Al Guido.

In a phone interview with Mobile Sports Report, Guido said the 2-year-old stadium’s vaunted technology underpinnings — especially the wireless connectivity for fans — is ready to go for the NFL’s biggest yearly event, after a second season spent mainly fine-tuning the different components.

“We couldn’t feel more confident, hosting the game,” said Guido, speaking specifically about the technology infrastructure at Levi’s Stadium. As he stated before the regular season began, the Niners didn’t do anything radical to the stadium’s Wi-Fi network, which uses gear from Aruba, an HP Enterprise company, to bring the main wireless bandwidth to fans.

And while the stadium’s distributed antenna system (DAS) got a complete replacement over the summer, the new capabilities including under-seat DAS antennas for Verizon Wireless should only lead to better reception than the year before. According to Guido, representatives from Aruba as well as from “all the carriers” will be on hand Super Sunday just in case anything needs close attention.

“Everybody’s going to be at a high tech [support] level” on game day, Guido said.

Drink delivery order page on Super Bowl stadium app, including the $13 Bud Light.

Drink delivery order page on Super Bowl stadium app, including the $13 Bud Light.

No food, but in-seat beverage delivery as part of stadium app

The Super Bowl 50 stadium app, designed for the NFL by the Niners’ in-house app development company VenueNext, will have some but not all of the features Niners fans have available during the regular season. The most obvious omission is the lack of food delivery to all seats, something that makes Levi’s Stadium stand apart from any other large public sporting venue. Instead, the stadium app will only allow fans to order beverages for in-seat delivery, with the option to order food, beverage and merchandise that can be claimed at “express pickup” concession windows.

According to Guido, the decision to only have beverage deliveries at Super Bowl 50 was one reached jointly by the NFL, the Niners and VenueNext, and the catering company for the stadium, Centerplate. Guido said that the potential “amount of education” for all the fans new to the stadium and new to the app led the league, the Niners and the caterers toward a path of greater simplicity, namely just having beverages available for in-seat delivery.

“It was a risk-reward decision about the amount of fan education needed,” Guido said. “There’s so much going on at a Super Bowl and so many people new to the stadium that it didn’t seem worth it to us to risk someone not getting an order delivered because of their error, or our error.” Guido added that with all the extra breaks in action for a Super Bowl, and additional concessions stands, “there’s enough time to get around” to get food.

View of the temporary media towers on the Dignity Health concourse

View of the temporary media towers on the Dignity Health concourse

Michelle McKenna-Doyle, senior vice president and chief information officer for the NFL, told Sports Business Journal that the league was also concerned about game-day delivery traffic patterns being disrupted by the new media towers that have been built for the game in the corner plaza areas of the stadium. “We were worried about having to keep up with demand … and we need to keep the aisles clear, which is important to the security team,” McKenna-Doyle said in a story by SBJ’s Don Muret.

The app will, however, include its normal live wayfinding capabilities, which should prove useful to new visitors to Levi’s Stadium since they can watch themselves walk through a map of the facility as a familiar moving blue dot. Like it does for Niners games, the app will also have instant replays from multiple camera angles available, as well as Super Bowl extras like a “celebrity cam” and the ability to watch Super Bowl commercials right after they are broadcast on TV.

Guido said the Levi’s Stadium app performed well all season, with an average of about “2,000 to 2,500” in-seat delivery orders per game. What was especially pleasing to the team was the number of fans who used the app’s ability to support digital ticketing, a feature that makes life somewhat simpler for fans but exponentially better for the team, which can gain valuable marketing insight from digital ticket-use statistics. According to Guido almost 35 percent of fans used digital ticketing during the past season.

Media towers save seats for fans

Niners fans watching Sunday’s game on TV might be surprised by the media towers, which Guido said were built in the Intel and Dignity Health concourse areas, which during regular-season games are simply open spaces. Guido said the decision to build temporary facilities for media means that the regular stadium seats will be saved for fans. At many other pro championship or playoff events, the overflow media are often housed in regular seating areas.

“The NFL made a great decision there” to put the media in the pavilions, Guido said.

If there is one thing that can’t really be controlled, it’s the traffic and transportation issues of bringing fans to the game. On Sunday fans coming to the game will confront Levi’s Stadium’s unique location in the middle of many Silicon Valley corporate headquarters buildings, which presents challenges that stadiums like AT&T Stadium in Dallas or the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz. — which are surrounded by acres of stadium-controlled parking lots — simply don’t have. To help with Super Bowl traffic the planners are using multiple methods, including using Google employee buses as shuttles as well as signing Uber as a sponsor with its own dedicated pickup and dropoff lot. There is also light rail service which stops right outside the stadium, which intially in the past experienced lengthy delays especially after games, but has improved over time.

“Traffic and transportation is our largest concern,” Guido said.

Bring on the players and fans!

Bring on the players and fans!

Time for The Masters — the best digital experience in sports

Gary Player (R) congratulates Jack Nicklaus after Nicklaus' hole in one (Sam Greenwood/Augusta National)

Gary Player (R) congratulates Jack Nicklaus after Nicklaus’ hole in one (Sam Greenwood/Augusta National)

There’s no small bit of irony in the fact that The Masters, one of the few places left on earth where you absolutely cannot carry a working cell phone, offers perhaps the best digital experience in all of sports. I’m biased, because I like golf and like the tradition and history of the Masters competition, but I would challenge you to find another event, team or league that offers the breadth and depth of the online/mobile experience brought forth by The Masters, CBS and IBM.

With live competition beginning Thursday morning, I’m not worried that I won’t be next to a TV set for the excellent, mostly commercial-free broadcast (Thursday-Friday on ESPN, Saturday-Sunday on CBS). That’s because if I am online or on my phone I will have access to no fewer than five different live feeds from Augusta, including featured groups as well as focused coverage on “Amen Corner,” the classic stretch between the 11th and 13th holes of the famed Augusta National course.

What makes the online and mobile experience so good? Production that parallels the TV broadcast, for one. No need for cable contract authorization, for another. That The Masters is like Harvard with its endowments — and as such doesn’t need to pander to advertisers — is nirvana for all golf fans, but especially so for those of us who watch a lot of sports action these days online. While TV commercials are easily endured (or muted, or skipped) it seems of late that broadcasters are doing their best to reclaim eyeball turf online, by subjecting digital viewers to more and more invasive ads.

During the recent NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament there was a lot of praise for the online product, but nowhere did I see anyone report the fact we found out — that when you were watching online or on your phone, during commercials the Turner/NCAA folks kindly blocked your ability to mute the sound on the screen controls. On my phone during the great regional game between Kentucky and Notre Dame I also saw a small button with a Pizza Hut logo remain on the left side of the screen during play. You would never try that on a broadcast offering, but for many events it seems OK to smack the online viewers around for any profit possible.

During the Masters, that’s not happening. (Or at least it didn’t last year! Hope I’m not jinxing things.)

Anyway — when play starts Thursday just go to Masters.com or download the app, watch away and see if you don’t agree. If there’s another online experience that’s better, I’d like to hear about it.

BONUS: Watch the Golden Bear back one up for a hole in one during the par 3 contest.

March Madness online resets the record books with 17.8 million hours of live viewing

Screen Shot 2015-03-10 at 6.37.28 PMTurner Sports and the NCAA said that online viewing of the 2015 men’s NCAA basketball tournament once again set new records, showing (again) that the demand for live sports online is still growing steadily with no top in sight.

From the round of 64 to One Shining Moment this year’s March Madness Live audience racked up 17.8 million hours of online viewing, according to figures released by Turner Sports and the NCAA Tuesday. The 80.7 million individual live streams were an increase of 17 percent over the 2014 tournament coverage, and the total hours watched was up 19 percent from last year.

Things really ramped up online for this past weekend’s Final Four games, with the Saturday semifinal doubleheader recording 6 million live video streams (an increase of 59 percent over 2014) and 1.5 million hours (an increase of 53 percent) of online watching, according to Turner and the NCAA. Monday’s championship game saw 3.4 million video streams started, with 1 million hours of live video consumed — totals that increased 66 percent and 69 percent, respectively, from 2014 figures. Overall, the NCAA and Turner Sports also said that mobile-only viewing also surged, increasing 20 percent in both views and hours from last year, though they did not provide a breakout figure for mobile-only viewing.

What is helping the increase in online watching? For one the ease in which March Madness could be consumed — watching this year on various platforms I noticed that the sign-in procedure with my cable contract info didn’t need to be repeated — ever — on my desktop or on my mobile device; in previous years the sign-in technology had been somewhat of a gating factor, and in the earliest years the extra-charge fee for watching games online almost certainly kept the audience much lower than it could be.

And now that fans know the games will be available online in an easy to find place — MarchMadness.com — they seem to know to go there for the early games that take place during work hours. In fact, the most-watched game online after the Final Four was a Round of 64 game between Notre Dame and Northeastern, which took place in the morning of March 19 — with 3.9 million video streams, it was clear that people at work got wind of the potential upset in the making and tuned in.

For once I have no complaints about the technical parts of the online March Madness offering — I watched the entire second half of the gripping Notre Dame-Kentucky regional game on my phone over Wi-Fi, and had no glitches, buffering or any other transmission problems. The only nit I would pick is why broadcasters like Turner feel it’s OK to impose technical control over online viewers, like blocking the mute button on the video screen during commercials, or by floating the little “Pizza Hut” icon on the left of the screen during game play, a small annoyance but noticeable. You’d be crucified for trying stunts like that on broadcast TV, so why insult viewers online just because you can?

All NFL playoff games available online; Verizon only for smartphone watching

vzn_playoffWe’ve come a long way from the days when it was a struggle to even find NFL live action online. This season, all NFL playoff games, including the Super Bowl, will be available for online viewing, via a desktop computer, laptop or tablet, no matter which network is carrying the games. The league has even created a handy single web page to find instant access to the live streams, no small matter since network pages usually make you jump through several clicks to find the actual live stream.

Depending upon the broadcast network, you may need to have a qualifying cable or satellite contract to view the games. For this morning’s CBS game there was no confirmation process but for the afternoon Fox game I needed to submit cable provider info. Let me know what you see.

However, if you want to watch playoff games on your smartphone, your only option is to be a Verizon Wireless customer since that provider is the exclusive NFL live action host for smartphone devices. To view the live action, Verizon customers need to have either a More Everything plan or pay the $5 monthly premium fee for the NFL Mobile application. To be clear, customers of any wireless provider can download the NFL Mobile app to get all the stats and archived video it provides, but only Verizon customers can purchase access to live action on phone platforms.

UPDATE: Congrats to FOX for having the first playoff online broadcast fail:

Screen Shot 2015-01-04 at 3.01.07 PM

No word from Fox yet on when its stream will come back, or why it was down.

CBS to stream 27 college hoops games online and via app

Just like it did for college football this fall, CBS Sports is going to make a bunch of its men’s college basketball broadcasts available online or via a mobile app, according to a press release out today.

Beginning with Saturday’s all-cheesehead game between Wisconsin and Marquette, CBS’s College Basketball Live will appear online 27 times during the 2014-15 season, with not only a full stream of video but the cool “DVR” functionality as well (which allows you to go back and see highlights from previous parts of the broadcast). CBS says there will also be a “social stream” as part of the online offering, but we can only hope that with the social-media stuff CBS doesn’t make the error NBC seems prone to commit in its online broadcasts, namely having a window that shows tweets with info that hasn’t yet happened in the video window.

The full schedule (all times Eastern) is below, and it already looks Kentucky-heavy — we see at least four games with the No. 1 Wildcats scheduled so far. There’s also a big dose of Big Ten action, just in case you like that style of play. If you don’t want to stay tuned to the schedule, you can also follow the CBS Twitter handles @CBSSports and @CBSSportsCBB which will give you handy scoring alerts so you know when to fire up your app or browser to catch the action in real time.

CBS HOOPS ONLINE SCHEDULE 2014-15

Sat., Dec. 6 Wisconsin @ Marquette 12:30 – 3:00 p.m.

Sat., Dec. 13 North Carolina @ Kentucky 12:00 – 2:30 p.m.

Sat., Dec. 20 CBS Sports Classic

North Carolina vs. Ohio State 1:00 – 3:30 p.m.

UCLA vs. Kentucky 3:30 – 5:30 p.m.

Sat., Jan. 3 UConn @ Florida 2:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Maryland @ Nebraska (Women’s) 4:00 – 6:00 p.m.

Sat., Jan. 10 Kentucky @ Texas A&M 1:00 – 3:30 p.m.

Sat., Jan. 17 Florida @ Georgia 2:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Michigan State @ Maryland 4:00 – 6:00 p.m.

Sun., Jan. 25 Indiana @ Ohio State 1:30 – 4:00 p.m.

Sat., Jan. 31 Arkansas @ Florida 1:00 – 3:00 p.m.

Sun., Feb. 1 Michigan @ Michigan State 1:00 – 3:00 p.m.

Sun., Feb 8 Michigan @ Indiana 1:00 – 3:00 p.m.

Sun., Feb. 15 Illinois @ Wisconsin 1:00 – 3:00 p.m.

Sat., Feb. 21 Florida @ LSU 1:00 – 3:00 p.m.

Sun., Feb. 22 BIG TEN WILDCARD 1:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Ohio State @ Michigan

OR

Iowa @ Nebraska

OR

Indiana @ Rutgers

Sat., Feb. 28 Georgetown @ St. John’s 12:00 – 2:00 p.m.

Arkansas @ Kentucky 4:00 – 6:00 p.m.

Sun., Mar. 1 SMU @ UConn 2:00 – 4:00 p.m.

BIG TEN WILDCARD 4:00 – 6:00 p.m.

Michigan State @ Wisconsin

OR

Purdue @ Ohio State

Sat., Mar. 7 Florida @ Kentucky 2:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Sun., Mar. 8 Memphis @ Cincinnati 12:00 – 2:00 p.m.

BIG TEN WILDCARD 4:30 – 6:30 p.m.

Wisconsin @ Ohio State

OR

Maryland @ Nebraska

OR

Penn State @ Minnesota

Sat., Mar. 14 Big Ten Semifinal #1 1:00 – 3:30 p.m.

Big Ten Semifinal #2 3:30 – 6:00 p.m.

Mountain West Championship 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Sun., Mar. 15 Big Ten Championship 3:30 – 6:00 p.m.