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Watching Golf this Week: BMW Championship, aka FedEx Cup Playoffs Round 3

September 6, 2012 by 1 Comment

If you need a break from football this weekend — which we sincerely doubt at this point — you can always check out golf’s version of the “playoffs,” which this week is another fairly meaningless tournament, the BMW Championship, the third round in the FedEx Cup Playoffs.

Being out of television range last weekend we missed the whole Rory/Tiger/LouisOoost showdown at the Deutsche Bank but really… we are saving our golf-interest for the Ryder Cup, and maybe for Sunday at the Tour Championship, if only because there will be $10 million on the line. To get there of course the pros need to negotiate Crooked Stick in Indiana this weekend, where we like Dustin Johnson to emerge victorious, possibly because he’ll be confident now that he knows he’s on the Ryder team.

Good news is you can tune in online Thursday and Friday, since Live@ is live during the playoffs. If you want to watch on the weekend, be warned that NBC will cover things early (12 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. ET) followed by Golf Channel from 3:30 to 6, while the rest of us watch college football. Sunday there’s bonus early Golf Channel coverage from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m., useful if you are experiencing a frustrating NFL blackout.

BMW CHAMPIONSHIP / FEDEX CUP PLAYOFFS

(all times Eastern)
TV COVERAGE

Thursday, Sept. 6 — Golf Channel, 3 p.m. — 6 p.m.
Friday, Sept, 7 — Golf Channel, 3 p.m. — 6 p.m.
Saturday, Sept. 8 — NBC, 12 p.m. — 3:30 p.m.; Golf Channel, 3:30 p.m. — 6 p.m.
Sunday, Sept. 9 — Golf Channel, 12 p.m. — 2 p.m. NBC, 2 p.m. — 6 p.m.

RADIO
SIRIUS XM (Satellite)
12 p.m. — 6 p.m. every day

ONLINE
Live@ video is back this week —
Live@ coverage — 1 p.m. to 6 p.m., every day

PGA SHOT TRACKER
If all you want is shots and distances (which can be addicting) get your fix via Shot Tracker, which will definitely be in action at the Barclays.

FACEBOOK PAGE
Like you perhaps some BMW Golfsport? Now is the time on sprockets when we dance!

TOP TWITTER FEEDS TO FOLLOW

Geoff Shackelford — well known golf writer. If you’re not following Geoff you are missing the online boat.
Golf Channel — official Golf Channel feed
@PGATOUR — official PGA Twitter feed
@StephanieWei — great golf writer who is a Twitter fiend.
Doug Ferguson is the lead golf writer for AP. Good Twitter insights that often aren’t part of your wire-service lead.

WHAT’S THE COURSE LIKE?
Crooked Stick is a Pete Dye course. His “first great” design. Some of us say, that hasn’t happened yet. Ah well.

WHO WON THIS THING LAST YEAR?
Walter Hagen. Sorry, that was in 1916 at the Western Open, this event’s predecessor. Last year’s winner was really Justin Rose.

FEDEX CUP PLAYOFF LEADERS
1. Rory McIlroy, 4,799 points
2. Nick Watney, 3,468
3. Tiger Woods, 3,417
4. Brandt Snedeker, 3,194
5. Louis Oosthuizen, 2,909

See the playoff full standings at the PGA site.

WORLD GOLF RANKINGS
1. Rory McIlroy; 2. Luke Donald; 3. Tiger Woods; 4. Lee Westwood; 5. Webb Simpson.
See the official World Golf Ranking list.

Filed Under: Golf, Golf Channel, NBC Sports, PGA, Tiger Woods Tagged With: , , , , , ,

NBC Sports Radio Debuts Nationwide on Terrestrial Stations, Online

September 5, 2012 by

NBC Sports Radio, airing on 178 radio stations nationwide as well as streaming on www.nbcsportsradio.com, debuted Sept. 4 and is featuring a diverse selection of programs.

Programming will be distributed by Dial Global and content will include hourly sports news updates, daily features as well as long-form shows.

The NBC Sports Radio roster includes:

The Erik Kuselias Show, Monday-Friday 7-10pm, ET;

Amani and Eytan, Monday-Friday 10pm-1am, ET: featuring former NFL pro Amani Toomer and Eytan Shander;

The Dan Schwartzman Show, Tuesday-Saturday 1am-5am, ET;

Safety Blitz with Rodney Harrison, a two-hour weekend show featuring former NFL All-Pro Rodney Harrison;

24/7 anchored national updates featuring Jon Stashower, Kay Adams and

Dan Schwartzman.

The new NBC Sports Radio is a partnership between Dial Global and the NBC Sports Group.

“This is a great day in sports radio and we’re proud to have 178 affiliates share it with us,” said Chris Corcoran, Executive Vice President, General Manager, Dial Global. “Our main goal from day one has been to deliver great content for radio stations and we are excited to finally hit the field and play.”

Rob Simmelkjaer, Senior Vice President, NBC Sports Ventures and International, said, “We couldn't be more excited to launch the newest platform in the NBC Sports Group family. With 178 affiliates on board at launch and a great starting talent line-up, the sky is the limit for NBC Sports Radio.”

A mobile applications for the network is being developed, according to a spokesperson.

James Raia is a California-based journalist who writes about sports, travel and leisure. Visit his cycling site at tourdefrancelife.com

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Filed Under: NBC Sports, NCAA Football, ProFootballTalk Tagged With: , , ,

Watching Golf this Week: Deutsche Bank Championship, aka FedEx Cup Round Two

August 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Welcome to round two of the FedEx Cup Playoffs, three weekends of golf that don’t mean much until week four. In the spirit of Jason Dufner (who skipped the first week) we are taking most of this week off, so here is your bare bones info for the TV watching this weekend. Which doesn’t start until Friday, since it’s Labor Day weekend here in the U.S. and everyone needs sports to watch on Monday… right? Right.

Oh, and in case you forgot… Nick Watney won last week. Exciting, wasn’t it?

DEUTSCHE BANK CHAMPIONSHIP / FEDEX CUP PLAYOFFS

(all times Eastern)
TV COVERAGE

Friday, Aug. 31 — Golf Channel, 3 p.m. — 6 p.m.
Saturday, Sept. 1 — Golf Channel, 3 p.m. — 6 p.m.
Sunday, Sept. 2 — Golf Channel, 1 p.m. — 3 p.m. NBC, 3 p.m. — 6 p.m.
Monday, Sept. 3 — Golf Channel, 11:30 a.m. — 1:30 p.m. NBC, 2 p.m. — 6 p.m.

RADIO
SIRIUS XM (Satellite)
12 p.m. — 6 p.m. every day

ONLINE
Live@ video is back this week —
Live@ coverage — 1 p.m. to 6 p.m., every day

PGA SHOT TRACKER
If all you want is shots and distances (which can be addicting) get your fix via Shot Tracker, which will definitely be in action at the Barclays.

FACEBOOK PAGE
The Deutsche Bank’s Facebook Page.

TOP TWITTER FEEDS TO FOLLOW

The Deutsche Bank twitter feed.
Geoff Shackelford — well known golf writer. If you’re not following Geoff you are missing the online boat.
Golf Channel — official Golf Channel feed
@PGATOUR — official PGA Twitter feed
@StephanieWei — great golf writer who is a Twitter fiend.
Doug Ferguson is the lead golf writer for AP. Good Twitter insights that often aren’t part of your wire-service lead.

WHAT’S THE COURSE LIKE?
Info on the TPC Boston.

WHO WON THIS THING LAST YEAR?
Webb Simpson.

FEDEX CUP PLAYOFF LEADERS
1. Nick Watney, 3,266 points
2. Brandt Snedeker, 2,694
3. Tiger Woods, 2,417
4. Rory McIlroy, 2,299
5. Zach Johnson, 2,166

See the playoff full standings at the PGA site.

WORLD GOLF RANKINGS
1. Rory McIlroy; 2. Luke Donald; 3. Tiger Woods; 4. Lee Westwood; 5. Webb Simpson.
See the official World Golf Ranking list.

Filed Under: Golf, NBC Sports, PGA Tagged With: , , ,

Major League Gaming Summer Championships Start Tonight

August 24, 2012 by

Major League Gaming

If you are a top gamer and are looking for glory then this weekend the place you should be is in Raleigh, North Carolina when the Major League Gaming Summer Championships start today with winners crowned at the end of the three day event.

There will be four different games all of which will be broadcast and you can look on the web site here to see what times and streams the game that you might be interested in will be playing. The first of the games starts with StarCraft II followed by League of Legends, Mortal Kombat and Soul Calibur V.

The StarCraft II tournament will have both Group play and a huge open bracket and will be playing for a total of $76,000 in prize money. The other matches will include the top competitors from the past season as well as some hopefuls that believe they can come out on top, Played on a PS3 gamers are vying for $16,700 in prize money in each of the games.

The MLG Pro Circuit has four full seasons that are each followed by a championship tournament. While players can compete over the course of the season online in a number of events, to play in the championships a player or team must be present.

This year the MLG signed an exclusive deal with CBS Interactive that made CBS Interactive the exclusive online broadcaster of the Pro Circuit. There is a good deal of speculation that CBS will broadcast events, or at least the fall championship going forwards.

StarCraft II

The games can and do change over the course of the year. For the spring championships players had StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, League of Legends, Mortal Kombat 9, Soul Calibur V as well as The King of Fighters XIII. The online viewership reached 4.7 million unique viewers and had 20,000 fans in attendance in Anaheim. The fall event will take place in Dallas on Nov.2-4.

If you attend the current championships and have a good story or images drop me a line at gquick@mobilesportsreport.com and maybe we can get it into a future piece.

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Filed Under: Major League Gaming, NBC Sports, Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

NBC’s Digital Olympics: Mobile Growth Huge, TV Ratings Not Affected

August 14, 2012 by 4 Comments

NBC released its full numbers from the Olympics Monday, and to no surprise the peacock network set viewership records in just about every category. I’m sure most of you have your own opinion already (#NBCfail) about how NBC actually performed, but on one level it’s simply true that for sheer totality of coverage, this Olympics offered the most live and archived video ever, and will likely set a standard for other big events to follow.

What we hope, of course, is that they learn the lesson NBC learned the hard way — that people want the ability to see events LIVE, whenever they are happening — AND, most importantly, that even if you show something live you will still have humongous audiences for your weirdo 1950s prime-time shows with announcers who seem to only emerge every four years, like cicadas. I mean, really — Al Trautwig? But I digress. On to the numbers:

First, the broadcast numbers — NBC “killed it,” as the kids would say, but just barely — up to 219 million viewers, just surpassing Beijing totals of 215 million. What matters to us here at MSR, of course, are the digital numbers, and there was a mild surprise in that unique visitors to the NBCOlympics.com website increased only slightly from the Beijing Games, with 57.1 million uniques this year compared to 51.8 in 2008 (see chart we screen-grabbed below). Mobile unique users, however, rocketed off the charts — 10.1 million uniques for the NBCOlympics mobile web site (compared to 6.5 million in 2008) and another 11.2 million downloads of the Olympics Live Extra app.

What do those numbers tell us? That the audience for mobile device viewing is still growing rapidly while the online audience is plateuing. All these numbers could also conceivably be much much bigger when you understand that because of the necessity of having a cable contract to view online, NBC limited itself to a potential audience pool of 100 million, which is the number of cable customers NBC said was eligible to watch the games online via its sites.

Some more tidbits: When it came to live streams, 63% of live streams were viewed on the web, 37% in the Live Extra App; and our favorite stat: “Users are averaging 111.4 live streaming minutes per viewer on the web and 94.3 live streaming minutes per viewer on the app.” So, that means that having a mobile app isn’t keeping people from watching for long long periods of time. You’re welcome, Verizon and AT&T.

Another screen grab of stats below. (Click on it, because it’s too big to fit on our page.) Go to the NBC page for more stats orgy.

Filed Under: Apps, NBC Sports, Olympics Tagged With: , , , ,

Worst Moments of the Summer Olympics: Opening Ceremony to Synchronized Diving

August 13, 2012 by

The Summer Olympics in London had wondrous times. But there were also moments of catastrophe. Athletes and announcers said stupid things and NBC obsessed over the irrelevant.

Here are the top-10 worst moments of the London Olympics:

The Queen of England wasn't smiling (and with good reason) during the Summer Olympics' opening ceremonies.

10. The over-the-top-after-every-point gyrations by American beach volleyball silver medalists Jennifer Kessy and April Ross. Ladies, please, don't do that in Rio. Please.

9. Usain Bolt said in his post 200-meter gold medal effort: “I would like to say one more thing. I am now a living legend. Bask in my glory!” Great runner, yes. Jesus Christ, he ain't.

8. A few seconds of NBC pandering to Michael Phelps' mother would have been more than sufficient, right? Could she have possibly changed her jewelry more often?

7. The NBC gymnastics broadcast braintrust of Al Trautwig, Tim Daggett and Elfi Schlegel. Repulsive shills.

6. Opening ceremony. For once, it was easy to understand why the Queen of England wasn't smiling. Two-word review: jumbled mess.

5. Synchronized diving. Hot tub and miniscule hand towels after a few seconds of exhaustion? I kept waiting for John Belushi and Dan Akroyd to come out from waiting room and drop some epic cannonballs off the 10-meter board. I would have gladly handed them a towel.

4. NBC's decision to showcase volleyball. How could coverage of bikinis and sand and spikes and digs turn out so bad? Answer: When NBC over produced every move.

3. Ryan Seacrest/Shaun White. Wrong guys for their respective gigs and it showed.

2. Andrea Kremer. I kept hoping a swimmer would push her in the pool after she asked for the umpteenth time, “What were you thinking?” Probably not one swimmer who didn't want to reply, “To swim f-ing fast.”

1. Serena Williams. Girl, guess what? The fallen American flag during the awards ceremony did not want to hug you. Shame on you.

James Raia is an editor and publisher in Sacramento, California. Visit his site: www.tourdefrancelife.com

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Filed Under: NBC Sports, Olympics Tagged With: , ,
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