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New 2013 ESPN Bracket Bound app for Smartphones and Tablets now available

March 18, 2013 by

bracket

It comes as no surprise that ESPN is reaching out to mobile users to offer leagues for users to enter for the upcoming NCAA Basketball Tournaments, but it is nice to know that there are features that will appeal to the diehard basketball fan as well as to people that only pay attention at this time of year.

The free “ESPN Bracket Bound” app, designed for use with both Android and Apple’s iOS mobile devices provides fans with the chance to enter both the Men’s and Women’s tournaments with either the ESPN Men’s Tournament Challenge, presented by Allstate, Acura and Taco Bell or the ESPN Women’s Tournament Challenge presented by Capitol One.

The app also allows fans to participate in the ESPN College Hoops Pick’Em challenge that allows fans to predict the winner of each tournament match up, with bonus points for correctly picking games where the lower seeded team wins.

The app can be customized to allow fans to follow individual teams and specify games that they are interested in following by providing the scores and schedules. Other features of the ESPN Bracket Bound app include game clips, video analysis from ESPN’s college basketball experts and analysts, bracketology, game previews, recaps, analysis and highlights

ESPN.com also provides several levels of support and information to help fans select their teams. Available for all fans is access to its college basketball experts and analysts. For members of ESPN Insider there are additional predictor and analysis tools available.

The tournaments are not just for bragging rights. When the Men’s tournament is over the top 1% are entered into a random drawing to win a $10,000 Best Buy Gift Card and the top 1% in the Women’s bracket will be in a drawing to take home a $5,000 card from Best Buy.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Basketball, ESPN, Fantasy Sports, iOS, NCAA Hoops, NCAA.com Tagged With: , , ,

CBSSports.com Delivers Updated Mobile App in time for March Madness

March 14, 2013 by

cbs

CBSSports.com has updated its mobile app with enhanced features that enables avid fans of the NCAA’s March Madness tournament, and even just casual observers, to follow the tournament, get insight into games and map out their bracket strategy.

This is not its first shot at delivering an app for the tournament but the company has completely redesigned the program to provide an enhanced experience for people that follow the event on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets as well as via a web site.

At the most basic level the redesigned CBS Sports mobile app provides instant access to brackets and access to insight from experts on which teams to pick, which as even the most casual fan knows is of all importance during the tournament, for bragging rights if nothing else.

However the app, available for both Android and Apple iOS device users is not just a static data program but provides a host of other features including featuring live access to all CBSSports.com bracket games (iOS users only), tweets from other game that are currently ongoing as well as updates and final scores as they are warranted.

It provides fans with several options in the area of brackets including allowing a user to enter the Bracket Challenge where a user can have as many as three brackets and competes with others who enter the event. There is also a tool called Bracket Manager that is designed to help create and manage bracket groups that you might want to form with friends or coworkers. For Users whose picking skills are similar to mine there is also something called Round by Round that permits fans to pick each of the six rounds, eliminating “busted” brackets.

For those who cannot wait for the tournament the app also provides coverage of this weekend’s Big Ten Men’s Basketball Tournament Semifinals and Championship on Saturday and Sunday.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Basketball, CBS Sports, Contests, iOS, Live sports via mobile, Live Sports Video Consumption, NCAA Hoops, NCAA.com Tagged With: , , , , ,

March Madness Online: Free, if You Have a Cable Contract

February 21, 2013 by

Once again, the epic sporting event known as March Madness, aka the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, will be available online for free… as long as you have a cable contract that includes the Turner channels.

HERE IS THE LINK TO MARCH MADNESS ONLINE.

Broadcast by both CBS and the Turner cabal of TNT, TBS and truTV, the tournament is probably the biggest online sports time-waster, given that the balance of games take place during the day on Thursday and Friday, March 21 and 22 this year. For the second year, all 67 games will be on TV, though sometimes that requires the challenge of actually finding the truTV channel on your cable box.

For online watchers, there will be the usual cable-system confirmation, which should allow you to watch on “the digital device of your choice,” according to the press release. There will also be a “preview option,” which will allow for up to four hours of online viewing for free — good if your team is a one and done.

Here’s some more goodness from the official press release:

This year’s NCAA March Madness Live® product offers several enhancements including:

— Redesigned for optimization across platforms – With improved navigation, NCAA March Madness Live® will have a completely new look and feel while also providing users with the same levels of access and a consistent user experience across all devices
— Available on new devices – NCAA March Madness Live® will be available on more devices than ever before including smart phones and tablets with the Android 4.0+ operating system, the iPhone 5 and iPad mini
— Capital One NCAA March Madness Bracket Challenge – The official bracket game of March Madness includes new designs and feature enhancements on smart phones and tablets, along with expanded social functionality across all devices allowing fans to join groups, share brackets and chat with friends and other passionate fans via Facebook
— Coke Zero NCAA March Madness Social Arena – A forum to extend the conversation surrounding all of the games within NCAA March Madness Live® products, fans can follow game and tournament tweets, participate in fan chats, watch the games and keep a pulse on all the key moments of every game via the Coke Zero NCAA March Madness Social Arena. Fans can participate in the social commentary by using the hashtag #marchmadness

Additionally, NCAA March Madness Live® will once again provide video highlights, full game replays and real-time game alerts, as well as fan-favorite features, including live game scoring, real-time tournament brackets, personal channel lineup features, live stats, live social companion views and the return of the “Boss Button.” Fans will have direct access to live radio broadcasts, courtesy of Westwood One/Dial Global Radio Network, for all 67 games across the collection of digital products.

Sounds good to us… may the best bracket win!

Filed Under: Basketball, CBS Sports, NCAA Hoops, TNT, truTV, Turner Sports Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

The NBA Continues to Embrace Digital Age with Major Site Redesign

October 24, 2012 by

Fans of the National Basketball League are marking off the days until the season officially begins, and the NBA has been working hard at preparing a new digital approach to providing both die hard and casual fans an enhanced digital experience.

The NBA Digital is developing, along with partner Turner Sports, a new TV studio as well as updating and enhancing its presence and capabilities in both the mobile and online segments of the market, seeking to build on last year’s strong growth experience by NBA Digital.

The web page at NBA.Com is receiving an upgrade that will build on the video and social media features that it has but will be working to emphasis them more to make it a more all inclusive felling for users who can use it as a base to experience what their team has done or share with others via social media. There will be six video channels straight from the home page that fans can use and it also provides the ability to customize their website navigation according to their prioritized features.

Video will also be an important feature for the revamped mobile sites as they will also include expanded access to video as well as a new real-time ticker that will provide a running flow of league news.

The TV studio will broadcast 24-hours a day and have a number of feature programs including like “Game Time,” “Fan Night,” “The Jump,” “The Beat” and “Fantasy Insider” as well as a hardwood half-court for demonstrations.

It seems to me that both the NBA and MLB really grasp the need for good social media and mobile access, the NFL not so much. Still they have all made giant steps towards enfranchising mobile and remote fans at a pace faster than their collective initial moves to embrace the Internet, and this is a good thing.

Filed Under: Basketball, Facebook, Live sports via mobile, Major League Baseball, NBA, NFL, Turner Sports Tagged With: ,

ESPN Continues Move into International Sports with FIBA Deal

October 23, 2012 by

We have covered a good deal of ESPN’s growing coverage of international soccer but it has now signed a new deal that will have it covering a sport that has been witnessing strong growth internationally for some time-Basketball.

The broadcast giant has signed a multiyear, multi platform deal with FIBA, the world governing body for basketball, which will enable the network to present a variety of games and championships.

The scope of the deal is big, with all of the games broadcast over one ESPN property or another with Internet and mobile broadcasts included. The deal will cover the rights to approximately 400 games from six tournaments played between 2013-2015.

ESPN said that it will have telecasts in both English and Spanish, and that all Team USA and Gold Medal Games will air live on ESPN or ESPN2, and ESPN Deportes. The network plans on televise every game of the tournaments across ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN3 and ESPN Deportes.

The agreement covers the FIBA Americas Championships (2013, 2015), the EuroBaskets (2013, 2015), the FIBA Basketball World Cup (2014) and the FIBA World Championship for Women (2014).

It will be interesting to see how well the games do, viewership wide. FIBA uses slightly different rules than the NBA, and I think that many hoops fans are only aware of different international leagues when a star NBA player threatens to play for one.

FIBA is the international body governing 213 National Basketball Federations throughout the world and is recognized as the sole competent authority in basketball by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) it has been butting heads with the NBA of late.

During the most recent Summer Olympics the NBA floated a proposal that there be an enhanced World Cup of Basketball, much like in soccer. There is currently one now but the according to some reports the new one would be run by the NBA, which would also harvest most of the profits.

The NBA, which gets no profit from the Olympics, paired the proposal with the idea that the NBA stops sending players to the Olympics. SO far this does not seem to be gaining much traction. On the flip side FIBA is now pushing to add 3 on three basketball to the Olympics.

Filed Under: Basketball, ESPN, ESPN3, FIBA, NBA, Olympics Tagged With: , ,

iPad now on Duke’s hard court

September 25, 2012 by

Duke University’s men’s basketball team is the latest college sports team to adopt a tablet as a major training tool as the school revealed this week that it was going to eliminate notebooks and move over to Apple’s iPad.

The school will be providing the latest version of the iPad with a 64GB storage capacity and players will have a range of information ranging from the static such as schedules and scouting reports, to live video of the teams’ plays as well as those of rivals and scouting reports. Also included will be tracking software and the ability to wipe the memory if they are stolen or lost.

Tablets are gaining ever increasing acceptance across a wide spectrum of usage models and sports, often viewed as so old school that it is still considering the typewriter, has actually been at the forefront of adoption.

There are at least eight NFL teams that have moved away from paper notebooks and onto iPads including the Dallas Cowboys, Washington Redskins and the Baltimore Ravens. MLB and the NBA have also been quick to follow suit.

Colleges have seen what their professional brethren are doing and have also started to adopt the technology. At the start of this season Stanford University adopted the iPad for its football players. Ohio State announced earlier this year that it was going to outfit all of its student athletes with iPads over the next two years. Other schools moving in this direction include Syracuse and the University of Colorado.

The one constant I am seeing is that almost all of the schools and pro teams are using Apple’s iPad as the tablet of choice and that is a great PR boost for the company (not that they really need it), but if rivals want to get high profile positioning of their tablets they might be well rewarded by going after some teams. I guess we might see this change a bit when the Windows 8 tablets come out next month, but then again maybe not.

Filed Under: Apple, Basketball, Dallas Cowboys, Denver Broncos, Duke University, iOS, iPad, Major League Baseball, Microsoft, NBA Game Time, NCAA Football, NCAA Hoops, NFL, PlayerLync, Windows 8 Tagged With: , , ,
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