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Are Carrier-Exclusive Sports Deals Good for Fans?

February 13, 2012 by 8 Comments

If you have a Verizon Wireless phone and are a hockey fan, good news today — Verizon extended its deal with the NHL and NBC Sports to add live streaming capabilities to its NHL GameCenter Premium app, presumably meaning that you might be able to watch those fisticuffs in real time on your handset.

CORRECTION: Thanks to a friendly note from the folks at the NHL, hockey fans are not tied to one provider for the NHL’s GameCenter Live app, which provides live out-of-market coverage (for $79 for the rest of this season) to a number of different platforms, including Andriod phones, iPhones and iPads. The new Verizon deal with the NHL provides “bonus” coverage not offered in the regular GameCenter program. But fans with other carriers’ devices can still watch live NHL video. We apologize for the reporting error, and have edited the original post to eliminate confusion.

Even though fans can still watch NHL games live using any provider’s device, my greater worry is whether these deals in general are at all good for fans, or if they are short-sighted pacts made by leagues and broadcasters who are choosing some easy-picking rights fees over what’s best for their fan base at large. Though the NHL deal sounds more like a bonus for a Verizon subscriber, other pacts like Verizon’s NFL Mobile deal and Sprint’s NBA pact seem to put the deal before the concern of the fan.

Is that a good long-term strategy for any league? I mean, I understand all about rights deals — and why you have to switch from Fox to ABC to ESPN to NBC to watch different events at different times. But usually you can watch all those on the same TV. On a mobile device it’s different because for most of us the device is tied to the network via a subsidized contract. And few of us can afford another cell phone plan just to watch a certain sport.

The NHL, perhaps, should be praised for moving to a “carrier agnostic” plan this year for its GameCenter app. Let’s hope that practice catches on with other sports. Maybe the deals could simply result in a price discount for customers of a certain carrier; but exclusion of content by contract seems a slippery slope.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, NBC Sports, NHL Tagged With: , , ,

AT&T, Golf Channel Missing the ‘Tiger’ Opp With No Online Video for Pebble Beach

February 10, 2012 by 15 Comments

For the second day in a row, we are incredibly frustrated at the lack of any online video opportunity to watch Tiger Woods in his PGA season debut at the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. Though the Golf Channel has live coverage today and yesterday, the unique three-course setup for the Pebble Beach Pro-Am means no Tiger TV Thursday or Friday since there are apparently only camera crews at the Pebble Beach course and nothing from the other two courses being used, Spyglass and Monterey Peninsula.

So the reason Tiger isn’t on TV is that he played Spyglass Thursday, and is playing Monterey Peninsula today. We get it, because that means that Tiger will be on TV Saturday and Sunday, playing both days in front of the CBS cameras. But it’s an oversight not to have the game’s biggest draws on some kind of live media for the first two days.

This is a huge missed opportunity for the tournament and for Golf Channel, since there are probably millions of fans like me who would tune in online to catch some Tiger action even while at work. It’s hard to believe that with AT&T adding Wi-Fi clouds to the greater Monterey Peninsula to give fans at the tourney better wireless coverage that we couldn’t at least get someone with a GoPro camera on their head to follow Tiger around and stream that video? Hello sponsor opportunity!

Seriously, not having an online component is really a big error especially for events like golf tournaments where there may be an outsized interest in a single player instead of the traditional multi-camera, multi-announcer setup. I mean, online I have been able to follow what Tiger is doing in words; meanwhile on the Golf Channel they are showing some celebrity comedian eating a plate of ribs. I couldn’t hit the off switch quicker. So tell me how that strategy makes sense either to the event or the sponsors.

Note: the best places to follow El Tigre online today are the Golf Channel home page, where writer Jason Sobel is doing a hole-by-hole Tiger recap in real time. You can also follow Stephanie Wie, who is Tweeting Tiger’s round live. But really, AT&T and Golf Channel, you shoulda done better.

Filed Under: AT&T, CBS Sports, Golf, Golf Channel, PGA, Twitter Tagged With: , ,

Super Bowl Online: 2.1 Million Uniques, Lots of Room for Improvement

February 7, 2012 by 5 Comments

The stats are in and as expected, the live Internet streaming of Sunday’s Super Bowl game was by far the biggest online audience ever for a sporting event with 2.1 million unique viewers, according to a press release from the NFL.

Broadcast both on the NBC Sports website as well as to smartphones via Verizon Wireless’s NFL Mobile app, the online showing of Super Bowl XLVI racked up some impressive numbers, according to the NFL:

Online Traffic Data
Unique Users – 2,105,441 (live stream online)
Live Video Streams – 4,589,593 (live stream online)
Total Minutes Streamed – 78,624,422
On-Demand Clips – 1,838,812 VOD clips viewed
User-Generated Camera Switches – 1,835,676
Engagement – More than 39 minutes per visit.

Verizon Wireless also confirmed that the Super Bowl was the “most viewed” game on the NFL Mobile platform all season (what a surprise!) but the company’s weak press release didn’t reveal any actual numbers. We’ve asked Verizon PR for more info but have not gotten a reply as of yet.

We also find it hard to agree with the canned quotes in the NFL’s release from Kevin Monaghan, senior vice president, business development & managing director digital media, NBC Sports Group, who claimed the online show lived up to fans’ expectations. This fan for one didn’t like the fact that the online show was 3 to 4 plays behind the TV show, making it nearly impossible to use as a “second screen” device since it was so far behind what was happening in front of you. Monaghan had a different view, according to his quotes in the press release:

“Increasingly, sports fans are looking to digital coverage as a complementary ‘second screen’ experience, and we delivered on that promise with unprecedented robust coverage. The record traffic that grew throughout the event, as well as the record high engagement numbers, underscores the complementary aspect of digital as an enhancement to our exceptional television coverage.”

With no way to question Monaghan (we tried tweeting @NBCSportsPR asking why the broadcasts were so far apart but got no reply) we’ll just have to stomp our digital feet a little bit louder to hope for a closer sync in the future. And others around the web didn’t think too much of the limited screen choices and sometimes skippy transition process — and the fact that getting Silverlight installed on a Chrome browser for a Mac was a chore (we got it done on the laptop Sunday but it took two tries because the download screen hung the first time).

But all in all those are some small problems to what will likely be viewed as a watershed moment in sports broadcast history, when we all switched from thinking, “Wow, cool, it’s online — I never expected that!” to something more like “how many different online options to watch do I have?” Especially since Sunday’s TV broadcast was the latest Super Bowl to win the “most watched program ever” award with 111.3 million viewers, it’s obvious that having an online choice — even one that attracts 2.1 million viewers — doesn’t detract from the live TV audience.

For all other promoters the question now becomes: What are you going to do to get your event online, and to make it more competent than the Super Bowl? Getting the broadcast at least close to the same time as live TV would be a start.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, Live sports via mobile, Live Sports Video Consumption, NBC Sports, NFL, NFL Mobile, Super Bowl, Verizon Wireless Tagged With: , ,

Super Bowl’s Social/Mobile Angles Don’t Move the Needle

February 5, 2012 by 5 Comments

My quick post-game take on the whole “social Super Bowl” angle is that I don’t think any of the ad campaigns really moved the social-networking needle. Though I missed part of the first quarter I didn’t see any ads that asked for an online audience interaction, which might have been fun. And the mobile game platforms, both NBC’s website broadcast and Verizon’s NFL Mobile app, were so far behind the live action they were useless as a “second screen” for viewers also watching the television.

A quick kudo to Twitter for not crashing in what was probably the most-active day ever on Twitter (which is kind of a meaningless stat since every big event for the foreseeable future will become “the biggest” as Twitter becomes more mainstream and adds more users). But I have to give a conditional “fail” to NBC’s online broadcast of the game, which was anywhere from three to four plays behind the live action, even showing commercials while the “real” game was live.

Though I understand why technically the online show might be slower, the wide gap made it impossible to keep the laptop (or tablet) open while watching the game on TV, eliminating the whole “second screen” thing that the online broadcast was supposed to enable. Plus I was underwhelmed by NBC’s multiple-choice camera views — they were uninteresting and pretty much blah compared to the rapid-fire screen switching you get from watching professional broadcasters produce a game live. So maybe that whole viewer-choosing-the-camera thing is overrated.

And Verizon’s NFL Mobile app, while glitch-free over in-house Wi-Fi and a 4G cellular signal, was still anywhere from 23 to 28 seconds behind the live action, also rendering it useless except maybe for trips to the bathroom. But with all the commercial breaks that’s hardly a concern during the Super Bowl. Maybe these alternative platforms will be more important for events with multiple things happening at once, like the Olympics or a golf tournament like the Masters. And maybe advertisers will become more bold and try more live interactive ads in the future. But for right now the “Social Super Bowl” didn’t live up to its advance billing.

UPDATE: As we thought, the Twitterers were out in force:

In the final three minutes of the Super Bowl tonight, there were an average of 10,000 Tweets per second.

February 5, 2012 8:43 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite
@twitter

Twitter

Filed Under: Facebook, iPad, Live sports via mobile, NBC Sports, NFL, Super Bowl, Twitter, Wi-Fi Tagged With: , , , , , ,

ESPN: We Design First for the Mobile Experience

January 30, 2012 by 2 Comments

There’s a lot of talk on the interwebs today about ESPN saying that it designs its content sites and programs first for the mobile experience, a statement that is not so surprising on its face but still probably somewhat of a shock to the general public who still thinks of ESPN as something you watch on a TV, either in a bar or in your living room.

But as our old pal Om Malik notes, with 400 million smartphones out there it’s pretty clear what’s going to happen. Om says:

With more than 400 million smartphones expected to be sold, it makes perfect sense for sports to get the mobile bump. I mean, don’t we want the baseball gossip, score updates or results of the F1 race when on the go?

The obvious takeaway from ESPN is: The future of fat profits in content is mobile, and we’re all over it. What that means for startups and established players looking to get into the mobile-sports arena is that your business plan better have a provision for what you will do when the WorldWide Leader becomes your competitor.

The design-for-mobile-first mantra is widespread in the sports content world — it is even part of our internal thinking here at humble MSR — but when big players like ESPN and Bleacher Report start talking about how mobile isn’t something in the future but something that is here now it makes sense.

For most desktop Internet connections, bandwidth, screen size and network latency generally aren’t problems when it comes to site experience. On a small handset with extreme variables in network connection, screen size and local processing power, how a site is designed has a huge impact on how it is seen. And you don’t need any exhaustive usability studies to tell you that people don’t come back to a site that doesn’t load or isn’t usable on a small screen. With development resources in demand everywhere, it makes sense to put an emphasis on mobile, which is growing fast and has the more-stringent demands.

At least it does to ESPN. If you’re a business looking at the mobile-sports space, the question is now: if the leader is already there, what are you doing to design for mobile?

The MediaPost recap by Mark Walsh of the keynote speech from Michael Bayle, vice president and general manager of ESPN Mobile, is worth a long read because it touches on a lot of places where ESPN sees mobile going. But a quick grab of a stat from the post should make it easily understandable why ESPN cares so much:

Bayle pointed out that its mobile audience across its mobile properties has surpassed 20 million, with users spending 45% more time with ESPN mobile content in 2011 than the prior year. ESPN Mobile now ranks as the company’s fourth-largest network and it has 150,000 people plugged into its mobile offerings at any given time.

Sounds like it’s more than just cowboys at horse troughs watching ESPN in a mobile fashion. And it will be more so going forward.

Filed Under: bleacherreport, ESPN, Live sports via mobile Tagged With: , ,

MSR Profile: Stadiums a Target for Wi-Fi Gear Maker Xirrus

January 26, 2012 by 1 Comment

Add Wi-Fi gear maker Xirrus to the expanding list of technology providers targeting stadium owners who are looking to better serve the wireless needs of both the fans sitting in the seats, as well stadium owners looking for wireless applications to help run their business better.

Like networking giant Cisco, which has created an entire business unit dedicated to stadium installations, the relative newcomer Xirrus is going to aggressively pursue more stadium clients this year, according to Steven Wastie, chief marketing officer for Xirrus. Last year Xirrus’s high-performance wireless network arrays (the antennas and other gear that provide the wireless link between Wi-Fi user and the network) helped bring video services and Wi-Fi power to business applications inside Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots.

In a snappy video (embedded below) you get not only a customer’s explanation of the benefits Wi-Fi can bring to teams (wirelessly enabling point of sale systems allows for greater building flexibility), but also a quick data point on why you need Wi-Fi to provide features like video highlights — the Patriots’ content guy talks about how each video highlight stream takes up 300K of bandwidth, something that would be nearly impossible to provide using cellular airwaves.

The Xirrus xr4000, which can fit up to 8 wireless radios into its smoke detector-like housing. Other arrays can fit as few as two or as many as 16 radios.

The edge Xirrus brings to the stadium Wi-Fi game is its “high density” arrays, which can fit up to 16 wireless radios into a single device and are highly configurable especially directionally. By comparison, the wireless router in your home or business probably has just two antennas, which are pretty much just set to broadcast out in a circle as far as they can reach.

Being able to have more throughput per device, Wastie said, is key for stadium deployments where there are a lot of people in one place, all trying to do the same thing on their mobile device. “It’s very different from just two years ago,” Wastie said in a recent interview. “Back then high density situations were a niche. Now high density is everywhere.”

Having arrays that support more users also gives Xirrus a technology edge over competitors, since it can cover a stadium with fewer devices and less network infrastructure — often meaning significantly lower costs. Mobile Sports Report will be watching Xirrus closely throughout 2012, to see if its less-is-more wireless message gets across to stadium owners and operators.

Founded in 2004 by CEO Dirk Gates and some of his pals from chip manufacturer Xircom, the Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based Xirrus is privately held.

Filed Under: Cisco, Live sports via mobile, Live Sports Video Consumption, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Video Streaming Tagged With: , ,
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