CBS to stream entire 2014 SEC football schedule online and via app

If you’re one of those college football fans who simply can’t get enough SEC, CBS has you covered this season even if you’re not near a TV set. Starting with this weekend’s Georgia vs. South Carolina game, CBS said it will stream its entire schedule of SEC football games live online for free, and also through its Android and iOS apps. The online version of the broadcast, dubbed SEC Live, will also feature extras like an “all-22” overhead camera angle, and a special online postgame show.

The CBS slate of 16 SEC games is about one game a weekend, with a couple doubleheaders thrown in as well as the SEC championship game on Dec. 6. While the online streaming is not only convenient for those who want to watch games while away from their couch, it in many ways offers more features than the regular broadcast, with the multiple camera angles and other goodies like Twitter stream integration, player stats, highlights and polls. (Let’s see if CBS can fix the problem that plagues other online efforts, namely Twitter feeds that get ahead of the live video stream.)

The all-22 camera is one that adds a lot to football watching, especially for true football geeks who want to see plays unfold with coach-like access. ESPN had an all-22 camera among its options during the most recent BCS championship megacast. The inclusion of the multiple camera angles by CBS is good news, a signal that broadcasters are responding to fans’ wishes and using technology to answer the need. The entire package — especially the free nature of it, not requiring any cable contract qualification for access — is just another example of the savvy digital chops at CBS.

According to CBS, the SEC Live package each week will also include “a pregame show, a halftime show, and an original 5th Quarter postgame featuring analysis from CBS Sports’ lead college football analyst Gary Danielson.” We here at MSR are big fans of the postgame show with Danielson, which is sometimes conducted in a motorhome with a Skype-like feel. Good stuff.

ESPN the BCS winner with Megacast broadcast experiment

Side by side ESPN Megacast screens during BCS

Side by side ESPN Megacast screens during BCS

My favorite moment from Monday’s stupendously good BCS championship game came during a break at the start of the fourth quarter, when FSU quarterback Jameis Winston told his offensive teammates, one by one, that “you want it more” than Auburn. If you were watching the game on TV on the main ESPN feed, you missed this extremely cool exchange. But I saw it, and heard it, courtesy of the ESPN Megacast experiment.

My guess is that the Megacast experiment — in which ESPN used multiple broadcast channels to air different views and commentators on the game — was probably only experienced by a small amount of hard-core fans with digital chops. (And purported sports-site editors who call Jameis Winston “Wilson” in Twitter-speed error.) But I think it’s the wave of the future for big-event broadcasts, since it addresses the too-common problem of boring or annoying announcers and one single view of the action.

The bit where Winston was talking to his teammates came courtesy of the “Spidercam” channel, which simply showed fans what the robot camera that hovers above the field was seeing. What was unadvertised was the fact that that camera also has a microphone — in addition to the Wilson pep talk the spidercam caught coaching conversations on the sidelines during breaks, and also gave you a real in-the-arena feel of crowd noise. My new favorite digital sports moment came when I realized I could open more than one Megacast window and had the main feed running next to the spidercam feed on my desktop Mac. Nirvana. I felt like I was in the broadcast truck, deciding exactly how much info the audience of one — me — wanted to see.

Screen shot 2014-01-06 at 8.45.47 PMSome of the people I follow on Twitter really liked the channel that provided a panel of coaches watching and commenting on formations and things like that, a kind of chalk talk in real time. I wasn’t that thrilled with it because the coaches were all “aware” and tried to act too scholarly. A roundtable discussion channel had participants with a bit more life, but the “Fan Cam” channel was a fail, especially the FSU fan who looked like Zach Galifianakis — dude, you wore a red vest and texted for all of us to see?

Some other parts were hit and miss as well — the Goal Line channel had the excellent radio feed audio with Mike Tirico, and an instant replay after every play, which was great. But it also had two cameras that remained focused on the coaches, something I never need to see again in my lifetime. There was also a Spanish language feed and the home team radio feeds for each team, which I didn’t spend a lot of time on. Still, the breadth of choices was for me the amazing part and I hope it gets copied often and improved on.

I mean — imagine the possibilities! ESPN blew it by not having Jason Dufner and Charles Barkley, two Auburn alums who are hilarious, on some kind of screen or feed. Dufner’s Twitter feed during the game was 10 times more entertaining than the Fan Cam, and he was spot on in calling out the refs for missing multiple holding infractions on FSU. I also nominate the SB Nation crew to do a live commentary on their hilarious Brent Bingo if Musberger comes back for one more year on the title game crew.

You’ve also got to think that beer companies will get in on this act soon, showing R-rated commentary from sports humorists from some sponsor tent on site. The beauty of having multiple audio or complementary video feeds online is the cost of producing them has got to be a fraction of the cost that is already sunk for the main TV production. ESPN could pull this off for TV since it has multiple channels in ESPN2, ESPNU and the like. But any broadcaster could do this more easily by putting all the extras online only.

There were some apparent production glitches — viewing online, the different channels weren’t in sync, so if you tried my two-window experiment you quickly noticed that the spidercam was a few seconds ahead of Brent and Herbie. And the spidercam window could use a floating info-window that tells you down and distance, since it’s not always apparent from the behind-the-play angle the camera usually takes. Keep the live microphone, though! Moments like the one of Winston in the huddle are a priceless view into the games we care deeply about. And that, in my mind, makes the Megacast a win in its first time out. Well played, ESPN. Now everybody else, please copy it.

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