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Sling Media provides enhanced remote viewing for fans

October 19, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Sling Media delivers SlingPlayer for Tablets
Paying a bundle to get a sports bundle on your home entertainment unit and not willing to double dip to get it on a mobile device as well? Then maybe Sling Media may have the solution for you in its SlingPlayer platform.

SlingMedia has taken the next step in delivering streaming media to mobile users with the latest release of its $29.99 SlingPlayer platform. The SlingPlayer for tablets is designed to support tablets that run the Android operating system 3.0 or later and enable a user to basically watch home TV while on the go and is an enhancement on its previous offering for Android-based phones.

This is great news for sports fans that are seeking a method to gain access to the packages that they may already be paying for at home while on the road, and is a major step up for Sling Media’s offerings in this space.

There is more to the deal than simply paying $29.99 for the app and suddenly getting all of your home sports and other programming on your Android-based tablet. You must first pony up for a Slingbox device, which start at $180 and go up from there.

The program gives users control as if they were at home, with features that include being able to set a DVR at home, channel surf and browse content while still watching TV anywhere a user has an Internet connection.

The existing SlingPlayer application for Android Phones will continue to work on tablets in “Compatibility Mode” on tablets at no extra charge but it provides video at a much lower resolution than the tablet specific platform.

There is also available a SlingPlayer Mobile offering for Apple’s iPhone and iPads that also provide remote control over home TV and DVR and is available for $29.99

Filed Under: Android, Apps, iPad, iPhone, Live sports via mobile, Sling Media, Tablets Tagged With: , , , ,

Monday’s Tech Tidbits: Apple iPhone Edition

October 17, 2011 by 1 Comment

Samsung and Apple still claiming patent violations
Samsung has quickly struck at Apple’s new iPhone 4S, a product that sold 4 million units since last Friday, by asking for an embargo in Australia and Japan on the product, claiming patent violations. Apple and Samsung are both claiming that the other is violating its patents.

Apple to unlock iPhone?
In other iPhone news the report is that Apple will be offering an unlocked version of the phone in the next few weeks. The good news is you can add SIM cards in countries to avoid the ridiculous roaming charges, the bad news is that it will be expensive, and only GSM compatible.

Google kills unpopular products
Google continues to clean house-product wise. The company plans to focus on its successes such as Android and Google +. The latest two to be cut are the lamentable Google Buzz, its poorly thought out social networking program and Jaiku.

Google seeks to defrag Android development
Look for Google and Samsung to deliver Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) this week, after delaying its debut due to the passing of Steve Jobs. ICS is an effort to unify the Android ecosystem after it has been under increasing criticism for increased fragmentation and slow updates. Be interesting to see how well it works.

Samsung will also expand its Smartphone lineup
Following the ICS news Samsung also has a new Android-based smartphone that it plans to drop onto the market this week as well. The company is maintaining a very hard driving stance in the market both in regards to new products and aggressively taking on Apple.

Is the market waiting for a Microsoft OS for tablets?
That is what the Boston Consulting Group is claiming in a recent report. A survey found that a majority of consumers would prefer Microsoft’s Windows over Google’s Android or Apple’s iOS. Really?

Android app downloads to be tops by Summer
Xyologic, a startup that tracks and indexes the App Store claims that the monthly Apple iOS app downloads will be surpassed by the monthly Android app downloads by June 2012. Aren’t there already more Android-based devices out there?

Filed Under: Android, Apps, Boston Consulting Group, Google, iPhone, Samsung, Tablets Tagged With: , , , ,

Mobile Football: NBC a No-Show for Live Play-by-Play

October 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment


In our ongoing search for the best mobile app for following live football play-by-play, on Sunday night the MSR research team decided to check out the options available from NBC, since the Peacock network carries the Sunday night game live on TV.

The verdict? For an Android smartphone user, NBC’s mobile play-by-play options are about as exciting as a handoff up the middle, far behind the functionality of services from ESPN and the NFL. There isn’t even a standalone app for Android phones — maybe the non-smartphone featured in NBC’s “mobile web” landing page is a tipoff — instead you are sent to a mobile-optimized web page that does give you a live score and can show details of the last play run, but that is all. We didn’t even get our turkey-and-chicken sausages halfway grilled before we switched from NBC’s mobile page back to ESPN, whose Gamecast app seemed to have new life on Sunday, without any of the non-updating problems we’d seen during previous weekends.

Since we are waiting for Tuesday’s expected new iPhone announcement to decide what our phone-upgrade strategy will be for the MSR Verizon account, it may be another week or two before we can check out Verizon’s NFL Mobile app. (Apparently NBC does have a standalone iPhone app, if you have knowledge of how this works please leave a comment below.) Until then we are putting ESPN and NFL 2011 in a tie for first, with Sprint TV a game behind and NBC’s offering at 0-4, looking for a new quarterback and maybe a new head coach.

Filed Under: Android, Apps, iPhone, Live sports via mobile, NBC Sports, NFL, Verizon Wireless Tagged With: , , , ,

The Ongoing Search: What’s the Best Mobile Play-by-Play Service for Football?

September 27, 2011 by 1 Comment

NFL 2011 mobile app, showing play by play. Good clear screen, detailed info.


There’s a whole lot of folks telling you that you can keep up on football games by using your mobile phone — but how well do the services actually work? In an ongoing search that will probably last all season long, your MSR crew (meaning me) will perform random acts of mobility, following NFL and college games via mobile to see if these services deliver, or if they fall incomplete.

Monday night my dinner-making grill-master duties coincided with the Monday night tilt between the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington Redskins, giving me a perfect chance to test out some of the mobile play-by-play services, like ESPN’s Gamecast, the NFL.com NFL 2011 app, and Sprint (my cell phone provider’s) Sprint Football app. The early verdict says: go with NFL 2011 as your starter, ESPN as your backup, and leave Sprint Football on the bench.

Though the NFL 2011 app has a little annoying banner ad at the bottom of the screen (the ESPN and Sprint services also have banner ads), its play-by-play updates are generally more informative than ESPN’s, giving it the edge in a basically even competition. Both services suffered from an annoying lag time between play posts — which, if your screen is set to go dark to save power like mine is, means you may occasionally have to hard refresh the device to keep the app alive. I’d buy a beer for the first service to add a simple “status” banner that could tell you something like “play under review” or “game in TV timeout” so that you aren’t stupidly staring at the screen waiting for an update.

The Sprint Football app. Basically unreadable, so bench this one in favor of other services.

I ruled out the Sprint app after less than a minute — though it might be informative it suffers from a too-cute design that uses a screen shot of a football field as a backdrop, making its white type illegible when you are looking at a post that blurs into the lines of the field on the drawing. Seriously, Sprint folks — does anyone there look at these things? You can’t read it. Change it, please.

Both the ESPN and the NFL app, which have sensible, clear backgrounds, both suffered mightily to keep up with a fast, complex play — like the interception thrown by Dallas QB Tony Romo in the first quarter that ended with a fumble out-of-bounds call that needed replay review. The play by play apps were no help, basically stalling and never getting around to explaining what happened — they just both picked up with Washington running plays in Dallas territory.

ESPN's Gamecast app, not live but even this wrapup shows the clear black-on-white format that works well.

Having access to a TV set just a few steps away from the barbecue gave me the ability to see how well the online apps were keeping up — and the answer was, not well at all. Both the ESPN and the NFL apps were at least three plays behind the live action; if you watch the Internet version of Gamecast on your PC you can even see that the Twitter stream embedded in the app usually has info that is ahead of the Gamecast info. If I ran either one of these operations I would strip them back down to make sure that the play by play is as close to live as possible. Remember, fans may be using this service as a replacement for the TV announcers who annoy us all. So you’ve got to be faster than they are now.

The bottom line — neither of the top two services is satisfying if you are doing nothing but concentrating on the screen, since they don’t stay “live” enough to hold your attention or keep your phone’s screen lit. I will keep looking to see if there are other services that concentrate solely on play by play, as well as trying to cobble together a Twitter stream to approximate play by play because Twitter is fast. We should have a Verizon phone in hand soon to test out the NFL Mobile app, and we have also heard that Yahoo has a pretty good service so we will look for that as well.

Anyone else out there figure this out? Chime in below in the comments.

(all photos credit: MSR.)

Filed Under: Android, Apps, ESPN, Live sports via mobile, Monday Night Football, NFL, Sprint Tagged With: , , , , ,

‘Tour Tracker’ App Brings Race Action to Cycling Fans’ Phones and iPads

September 7, 2011 by 6 Comments

The Tour Tracker app shows not only live racing action, but also a wealth of race-related information, like elevation profiles and current standings. Credit: Tour Tracker.


The traditional time sacrifice made by cycling fans — hours spent waiting on a remote hillside for only a brief glimpse of the riders as they pass by — is now history, thanks to a revolutionary app that brings full live race action to phones and handheld devices.

At the recent USA Pro Cycling Challenge in Colorado, many fans were seen alongside race courses with mobile devices in hand, watching both the live race in front of them as well as the television-quality coverage provided by the Tour Tracker application, a free app for iPhones, iPads and Android devices.

Like the live TV coverage from the Versus cable channel, the Tour Tracker app brought live in-race coverage to fans’ mobile platforms, allowing people to both see the race in person — if for only a few seconds — while still following every second of action via their portable devices.

“It’s the perfect example of technology really solving a problem, instead of just being a cool device to play with,” said Rob O’Dea, one of the two brains behind Tour Tracker. As a professionally published cycling photographer (as well as a longtime successful marketing executive), O’Dea knows well the problem cycling fans have traditionally endured when it comes to watching races live: You might spend hours by the side of some remote mountain pass with no idea what was going on until you saw the racers quickly pass you by.

With the Tour Tracker app, all that is changed since fans can basically watch an entire stage unfold from start to finish, combining the best of the couch-potato TV-watcher and on-the-scene worlds. Sponsored by electronics retailer and pro cycling team sponsor Radio Shack for the USA Pro Challenge, the “Shack Tracker” was the buzz of the crowd lining the streets in Aspen and Vail during the two USA Pro stops there in late August, with people watching the race on their phones and iPads while waiting for the cyclists to arrive at their viewing spot.

Cycling fans in Aspen watch the USA Pro Challenge on an iPad while waiting for the racers to reach town. Credit: MSR.


Though Tour Tracker isn’t a brand new phenomenon — “it’s an overnight success that has been years in the making,” joked O’Dea — it’s safe to say that the combination of application maturity and great mobile-viewing platforms like the iPad are the perfect storm for an app that’s perfect for its intended audience — zealous cycling fans who want to watch both the entire race and the few seconds of live action, who can now do both things at once.

Close-up of the Tour Tracker app in action on an iPad. Credit: MSR.


Though O’Dea won’t give out audience download-number specifics (he says those stats are the ownership of the individual races like the USA Pro Challenge or the Tour de France, which Tour Tracker licenses its app to on a race-by-race basis) it’s a safe guess that it has probably already attracted hundreeds of thousands if not millions of viewers who learned of the app’s existence while watching the Tour de France or the USA Pro Challenge on TV this year.

Though this year’s app was already chock-full of important race information beyond the live action — such as elevation profiles, maps and even an fan-interaction forum via Twitter — O’Dea said that he and Tour Tracker co-founder Allan Padgett (one of the original architects of Acrobat, now part of software giant Adobe) have even bigger plans for 2012. For cycling fans, that’s like Christmas in July — knowing that they may never again miss a moment of the Tour de France, no matter where they may be.

A race fan follows the live coverage while watching course-side in downtown Vail during the USA Pro Cycling Challenge. Credit: MSR.

Filed Under: Android, Apps, iPad, iPhone, Live sports via mobile, Tour de France, Twitter Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

HP First to Fail in Tablet Space

August 19, 2011 by 4 Comments

Hewlett-Packard has indicated that it is departing the PC business and it looks to jettison its TouchPad tablet device as well. The company said that it will focus on its strategic priorities of cloud, solutions and software with an emphasis on enterprise, commercial and government market. One of the early pioneers in the PC space this move is probably a sign, much like IBM’s departure from this space a few years back, that the overall market is both mature and changing.

Most mature markets see a reduction in the number of suppliers, and as Scott McNealy, once CEO of Sun Microsystems said years back, the PC industry is now just a distribution system for Intel and Microsoft. Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs recently said that the issue with a number of the tablet makers is that they are touting speeds and feeds, just like in the PC’s heyday, rather than focusing on tight integration of hardware and software and seamless user experience.

Yet it was just two months ago that HP released its TouchPad tablet, to poor reviews and reports of very poor sales, it should be noted. Built on the WebOS operating system it gained via its $1.2bn purchase of Palm last year, it looks like it is flushing all of that away. There are reports that the company has sold just a fraction of its already built tablets, compared with Apple’s estimated 9 million plus in the last quarter.

For tablet users it means one less offering, and for developers’ one less operating system that they might have to consider. It is likely that the market will break down to two major operating systems, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, probably leaving Blackberry and any others out in the cold. Currently market researchers are predicting that Apple will maintain the lion’s share of the market for the next few years and then the Android wave will overtake them. This is a market that, according to market research firm Informa, will experience a ten fold growth by 2015, with an estimated about 87 million Android tablets sold in 2015, compared with 90 million iPads, according to the estimate.

Remind anybody of the PC market? For HP, think they might spin off the business? I have a good name for it, Compaq.

Filed Under: Android, BlackBerry, iPad, Top News Tagged With: , , , ,
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