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Goodell: Wi-Fi Needed in Every NFL Stadium

May 24, 2012 by

At a press conference Tuesday NFL commissioner Roger Goodell left no doubts about where the league stands on Wi-Fi in stadiums: He wants league-wide networks in every NFL venue, so that fans “don’t have to shut down” their mobile devices.

Too bad the video from the NFL isn’t embeddable (hint, guys: sharing is good) but you can view it here to get Goodell’s no-questions-about-it take on Wi-Fi in stadiums as a neccessity. If you listen to the video you hear Goodell talk about all the things the NFL wants its fans to be able to experience digitally while at games — like access to the Red Zone channel, other highlights, and social media.

The devil, of course, is in the details and when asked about how much it would cost to equip every stadium with Wi-Fi, Goodell joked, telling the questioner “you sound like an owner.” While the cost of putting a wireless network will vary at each location, Major League Baseball has a similar impetus and has roughed out the cost at around $3 million per stadium, which is pretty much in line with what we’ve heard and seen.

While some NFL stadiums have Wi-Fi in various areas, like luxury suites, we’re not aware yet of an NFL venue with full blown Wi-Fi, like baseball’s AT&T Park in San Francisco. Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis got a bunch of upgrades for the Super Bowl but that was mostly quick-fix stuff like DAS, small cell antennas that are mainly a band-aid type solution for bandwidth and not something like full-blown Wi-Fi that can handle, say, multiple video streams.

As such Goodell admitted the Wi-Fi initiative wasn’t something that would arrive by the 2012 season, though there might be some test situations where Wi-Fi gets unveiled. Certainly there is no shortage of service providers like AT&T and Verizon who are interested in stadium networking, as are gear suppliers like Cisco, Xirrus, Meru Networks, and possibly others like Brocade, which has apparently signed a deal to be the networking supplier for the new San Francisco 49ers stadium.

The good news is for the industry and for fans — with approval from the top of the league, Wi-Fi in stadiums is now a priority. App developers, integrators and others — start your innovation engines now.

Filed Under: AT&T, Baseball, Boston Red Sox, Cisco, DAS, Live Sports Video Consumption, Major League Baseball, NFL, NFL Network, San Francisco Giants, Wi-Fi Tagged With: , ,

Microsoft Slowly Pushing So.Cl Social Media Engine to Public

May 24, 2012 by

Microsoft has expanded the scope of who can use its So.Cl (pronounced social) social media search technology to everybody after a quiet beta push, as it seeks to establish it as a mainstream player in the social media environment.

So.Cl is a search engine that is designed to find and share social media, enabling you to connect with other users that have similar searches and interests and hopefully create an engagement between the participants. It enables users to take an assortment of media such as video, texts and photos, combine them into posts and then share them.

It is one of the many efforts under development at the company’s FUSE Labs and Microsoft has taken a low and cautious rollout for the product, quite the opposite of some of its efforts in the past. The company designed the technology for students and select schools were the first beta sites including University of Washington and New York University.

The student focus is intentional as the company has said that it believes that the features of the program reflect on how schools are teaching and how students are learning today, and not just computer science or technical students but for a range of scholastic focuses.

While focused on students I wonder how this will evolve, assuming that it does get off the ground. New sports blogs, apps for teaching players what to look for in an NFL defense, with commentary and past results listed in the frame? I have seen some pretty advanced sports pages and the ability to bring a large number of like minded fans, say baseball stat people, with live video examples etc.. could be compelling.

The effort was decidedly low key and that of course might have simply been because Microsoft did not want to try to be heard over all of the noise coming from the Facebook IPO or just because it is taking a different approach to establishing the technology.

So far it has had mixed reviews (I have not tried it yet) with Digital Trends decidedly unimpressed and with Cnet much more impressed with all of the features that the service provides.

Filed Under: Apps, Baseball, Facebook, Fanatic Fans, Google, Microsoft, So.Cl, Social Media, Social Media Data, Sports Social Media, Sports Social Media Data Tagged With: , , ,

Vote For MLB All-Stars- And Triple-A All Stars as Well

May 23, 2012 by

Right after the MLB season started I was at the league’s site and noticed that you could already start voting for the All-Star game, and the one moment I gave it any thought was that it was way too early for me to even start considering voting.

I am in the ‘what have you done this year’ group of voters, one of a number of major groups I see voting. There is also fans I know that only vote for players on their team, ones that vote for last year’s performance, and a few rare ones that only vote for a player in either the NL or AL.

It is now getting to the point that I will vote and have really appreciated the fact that I can do it online for two reasons. I no longer live in a town with a major league team and the closest is a two hour drive. The second is IBM punch cards went out with the VAX.

What I have not realized until a MLB Advanced Media note came my way that you can also vote for Triple-A All Stars. I suspect the voting in this contest will be much more team-oriented since if you do not live in a town with a AAA team it is unlikely that you have watched any of the players perform, although games are shown on MLB’s network.

The fan voting will represent 1/3 of the total vote with other votes being cast by by members of the media and each club’s field manager, coaches, and general manager.

However this is a good move by MLB in trying to bring more attention to its minor leagues. It certainly looks like it is trying to make the Triple A All Star game, which will pit players from the Pacific Coast League against players from the International League, into a must see event. While I doubt it will ever reach the NFL’s minor league games’ popularity — i.e BCS college football, this is a good way to increase interest in baseball.

The Triple A All-Star game, which has been played for the last 24 years, will be played at Coca-Cola Field in Buffalo, N.Y., home of the Buffalo Bisons, on July 11 at 7:00 p.m. EDT

Filed Under: All Star Game, Baseball, Major League Baseball, Triple-A All Star Game Tagged With: , ,

MLB’s Latest Playoff Move a Head Scratcher

May 18, 2012 by

Major League Baseball has announced its playoff broadcast partners for the year 2012 and 2013, and normally that would seem to be a rather innocuous announcement, until you notice that it will be broadcasting two of the games itself.

Rather the MLB Network, which is a property of MLB, will get two of the games, and not the Wild Card games that have been added to the schedule but two of the more desirable division series games. It has also awarded the Wild Card games to TBS.

I had taken a glance at the release on the playoffs but did give it much thought until it was mentioned by Michael Hiestand over at USA Today. He points out that while the NFL broadcasts some of its own games, they are regular season games and they are shown locally on broadcast TV so that the home town fans can watch.

This strikes me as a very short sighted and backwards move. They risk alienating home town fans by a refusal to follow the NFL’s example of at least throwing a bone to the locals.

But more so is that with the still limited reach of the MLB Network they miss out nationally on appealing to fans. There is really no real incentive for a fan of baseball that is not a fan of the teams involved in the selected games to offer to pay for the privilege of watching two teams that they are uninterested in. I suspect that if the fans had the option of just tuning in on regular broadcasting of the game they likely would.

A last tidbit is that according to the USA Today piece baseball’s national television rights will be up for bid again in 2013, and networks might not want to increase their fees if premier portions of the sport are going to be broadcast by MLB. This will be interesting to see if MLB backs down or alters the plan by the time the playoffs reach us.

Filed Under: Baseball, Major League Baseball, NFL, TBS Tagged With: ,

The War of Words begins between ESPN and NBC Sports

May 17, 2012 by

ESPN has had an emerging rival in the all-sports all day broadcasting model in recent days with the rise of NBC Sports Network, and while the two have not had much to say about each other that may be changing.

According to USA Today the war of words began earlier this week when ESPN President John Skipper made some comments about rival NBC during ESPN’s upfront presentation that on the face of them did not seem to extreme, but that lit the fuse.

NBC shot back deriding ESPN’s quality and the value they deliver for the dollar they charge, ESPN shot back that more people use its mobile app than watch NBC, and so it goes. I expect that this will continue for some time, mostly at events such as the upfront presentations.

For those of you with a long memory you will recall the battles between ESPN and rival Fox when Fox was working on establishing itself as a 24/7 sports network. They sniped at each other; put their logos over all sorts of images to prevent rivals from using them and a host of other actions, many of them infantile.

Ah, the good old days. First they seemed to come to an understanding and ceased over use of their respective logos and refrained saying trite and petty things about each other and then finally Fox eventually threw in the towel and dropped its efforts, although rumors have recently come that it might be reexamining the idea.

While in some ways this current fight has no impact on sports fans, in other ways I believe that it will have a positive one. Competition is good for fans because hopefully it means the players involved will raise their game. I think that the rise of MLB’s network has made ESPN raise the level of Baseball Tonight, for instance.

One issue is that there is little overlap, ESPN has a large range of premium sports and NBC does not, although it does have the upcoming Olympics and a few other sports such as the NHL’s Stanley Cup Playoffs, which are seeing a strong resurgence in viewership. Other events such as the Volvo Ocean Race 2011-2012 and the Amgen Tour of California, while very good, just do not have the viewership of or the range of games that ESPN rolls out.

Filed Under: Baseball, Contests, Cycling, ESPN, Fox Sports, Live sports via mobile, NBC Sports, NFL, Sailing, Volvo Ocean Race Tagged With: , ,

Will NFL Concussion Issues Drive Athletes to Other Sports?

May 9, 2012 by

If you are a fan of the NFL, or really just football in general, you cannot have avoided the ongoing debate on concussions-an issue that was recently brought once again to the forefront with the tragic death of former NFL star Junior Seau.

I am in no position to say how this should be handled but I am curious if it will have an impact on the sport by driving multi-tool athletes to head to other sports, particularly baseball but I expect others might see a growing interest as well.

The death of Seau, Dave Duerson and others and the growing understanding of the possibilities of damage that impacts on the brain in the form of long term health issues such as Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, dementia, depression and others might cause players to consider a different sport, at least players that are good at more than one.
I will point out that while a growing body of evidence appears to point to the impact as causing the damage most also say that they have nothing definitive to link the two. Also when the damage offered is a contentious issue as well.

However someone, or more than one, is taking it seriously and that is the more than 1,200 former NFL players that are involved in the over than 50 lawsuits against the NFL over this issue. You can get a breakdown here on all of the cases so far.

That amount of players and the comments they are making about the sport are enough to make anybody pause about their intended career. But there are other draws to play rival sports.Pay and career lengths are also issues that could come to the forefront. According to this story the average pay for a player in MLB is $3.44 million last year and the average career length is 5.6 years.

The NFL claims that the average career is almost the same, at 6 years, although others claim that it is roughly half that at 3.5 years. The average salary is about $1.1 million. Of course there are a ton of qualifiers including bonuses, etc… but the biggest seems to be that in baseball your contract is guaranteed while in football it is not aside from the first years usually.

Crossover players are nothing new, both into baseball from football and vice versus. Reggie Jackson and Dave Winfield are always the first to come to my mind. Winfield was drafted by four teams in three sports coming out of college-The San Diego Padres as a pitcher with the 4th pick, the Atlanta Hawks in the NBA and the Utah Jazz in the ABA as well as the Minnesota Vikings in the NFL, despite the fact that he never played football.

Jackson, having been recruited to play at Alabama, Georgia and Oklahoma in college ended up playing football at Arizona State. Having broken bones in his back in a high school game Jackson new the issues with injuries and quickly ended up with the baseball team. Both are now in MLB’s Hall of Fame.

The current generation of baseball players has lots of athletes that played other sports at a high level, players such as the Twins’ Joe Mauer was a top ranked quarterback in high school, Rockies 2010 first-round draft pick Kyle Parker was also Clemson’s starting quarterback and others include Jeff Francouer and Carl Crawford.

Off course this happens the other way as well- with Tom Brady getting drafted by the Expos, Jack Del Rio drafted by Toronto and Jake Locker drafted by the Angles before all of these players went on the college and pro football.

I am sure there is no real way to see if the concussion issue, along with pay and career length, will make a difference. I enjoy both sports greatly and do not want to see a drop off in talent in either sport, but if the concussion studies do turn out to be accurate I hate to see someone die before their time just for my entertainment. However hopefully technology will come to the rescue.

Filed Under: ABC, Baseball, ESPN, Junior Seau, Lawsuit, Major League Baseball, NFL Tagged With: ,
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