$750,000 in prize money — more than Xander Bogearts made this year and more than twice as much as Anthony Rendon made — is up for grabs this weekend at BlizzCon. The annual expo put on by video game developer Blizzard Entertainment, BlizzCon, marks the start of the weekend’s world championship matches and for the first time the games will be live-streamed to ESPN3 as well as Twitch.TV. BlizzCon starts today and has been long host to championship world finals for Blizzard from StarCraft II to World of Warcraft. This year the company has also included their new latest project, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, and posted a total prize pool of a $250,000 for each game.
According to ESPN3’s schedule, they will also show the matches leading up to and including the grand finals for each game tomorrow.
If you happen to be interested in more than the in-game action, there is the option to purchase the virtual ticket for BlizzCon, granting access to Q&A panels, exclusive previews and the ability to re-watch sections at a later date for the people who are too busy to sit and watch a stream for 10 hours.
Given ESPN’s recent backing of esports with their partnership between MLG and the X Games it should be no surprise to see even more events being streamed via ESPN3. With the general acceptance of esports rapidly growing — including professional players getting not just student visas to stay in the United States, but full on athlete visas — and the increased ease of access to live games via streaming services, expect more esports events to be shown to a wider audience.
As recently as October, we mused about the possibilities of augmented reality in sports, and I concluded with a brief story about some strange display technology my grandfather encountered in the 1960s — a device that could purportedly display 3D images without 3D goggles. I have always had trouble conceptualizing that idea. How to you make light stop mid air? How can you create a hologram without some sort mist or substance to reflect the light in transit? Well, I dunno. Maybe it’s not possible.
And maybe this:
This technology could be significant in many ways. It could illuminate the ball path for a touchdown throw, a three-pointer or a fastball on the outside edge for fans in the stadium (not to mention umpires and referees). It could show a glowing yellow line for the first down marker that more than just the audience at home could see. It could change the role of a scoreboard as we know it.
A butterfly image flits above a street in Japan — and everyone can see it.
Obviously, glittering dots in the sky are a long way away from an illuminated pitch tracker. But computers went from singing Daisy to World is Mine, this, in under 60 years. We cannot say where this current technology can and will end.
For those keeping score at home, go ahead and add Showtime to list of companies for cord cutters to support. On an earnings call on Wednesday, CBS — parent company of Showtime — CEO Leslie Moonves stated standalone Showtime will be available in 2015 “fairly definitively.” The news was first reported by Julia Boorstin, editor of CNBC’s Media Money, and this move by Showtime is coming off the heels of a similar move by competitor HBO.
Though it may not be a hard “yes!” CBS already has a large online infrastructure in place. With their CBS All-Access (available for 5.99 per month) and free CBSN site/app that launched today, the company is clearly headed in new direction.
Be it championship boxing, 60 Minutes Sports or any of their sports documentaries, there is no shortage of quality programming for fans on Showtime. As more and more people decide to move away from dozens — if not hundreds — of unused television channels, it’s encouraging to see the content producing companies shift as well.
Being a fan of a team in the digital age can be daunting. Not terribly long ago, anything worth printing about a team came through in the local sports section in the paper. Now, in the 24-hour news cycle, there is a constant stream of information from traditional news sources, Twitter, team pages, and the big news organizations. For those without the luxury (or with the luxury, depending on how you look at it) of not having constant access to Twitter feeds and RSS readers, it becomes easy to fall behind. If you follow multiple teams throughout multiple sports, staying on top of everything can seem impossible. The site SportsManias is hoping to alleviate some of that stress, with the help of their curated feeds.
The idea behind SportsManias is a simple yet novel one. You create an account, pick your favorite teams, and the site scours the Internet for everything from rumor tidbits to big-time breaking news. The site splits your feed into four sections; articles, tweets, video, and rumors. It’s a fairly intuitive setup, and the sections are explanatory. The articles section deals with published news from many sources, the tweets and rumors section is curated based on the selected teams, and the videos are there to satisfy your lizard brain with highlights.
SportsMania takes all the effort and guesswork out of checking for your sports news. Gone are the days where you have to open 25 tabs in your browser to check MLB.com, NHL.com. mylocalpaper.com, etc. to get what you need. SportsManias does the grunt work for you, and relays it back in an easy-to-consume scrollable feed.
And to help with the curation and media partnerships needed for such and endeavor, SportsManias made a recent acquisition. They recently brought Tim Stephens aboard as their VP of Strategic Partnerships. Stephens is a former Deputy Managing Editor at CBSSports.com and a former president of the Associated Press Sports Editors. Stephens will use his pedigree within the sports-writing world to create new and strengthen existing partnerships with content creators to ensure that SportsManias is bringing the fans all the news they require. Per Stephens in a press release:
“SportsManias connects the great work done by professional journalists with the hard-core fans who want it delivered to today’s front porch – their smart phone, tablet or desktop – in one location, when they want it, how they want it and where they want it. It is a win-win for the journalist, the news organization and the audience. The goal is to become the digital gateway to newspapers, delivering their localized team news to the avid sports fan.”
SportsManias takes a positive-turned-negative back into a positive. It’s great that we have so many sources at our disposal for the which to follow our teams. However, that can come at a price of time and effort for the fan. Through careful curation, a streamlined presentation, and corresponding app offerings on both iOS and Android, SportsManias strives to help the fan stay well-informed. We as fans have an embarrassment of riches like we’ve never seen. SportsManias is looking to make it even better.
Once more ESPN is partnering up with esports and Major League Gaming, again at a venue for the X Games. After the successful MLG debut at this year’s June X Games where Call of Duty: Ghosts was the game, this time the showcase for esports will be Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
Both X Games and MLG executives were thrilled with June’s turnout and used that success to parlay this new venture. Tim Reed, senior director of X Games content strategy was quoted as saying:
We took a big step in creating a broader experience for our fans in Austin, with the new gaming event, the music festival and other interactive activities and content on site, and now we’re working to extend that to Aspen.
MLG President and co-founder Mike Sespo echoed a similar sentiment, telling ESPN
Our fan base was really electrified with the idea of having MLG competitions at the X Games and having our pro players earn X Games medals in Austin, where it was a tremendous success. We’re thrilled to announce that Austin wasn’t a one-off.
The 2015 Aspen X Games will take place from January 23-25 and will feature eight different qualified CS:GO teams. The original version of Counter-Strike debuted in 1999 as a Half-Life modification and different versions of the game have been in global competition since the early 2000’s.
After personally played CS 1.5 and 1.6 at a decently-high level, I can say I am thrilled to see CS:GO continue to gain steam. Despite being out for over two years, only recently has Global Offensive began to meet the previous high water marks in popularity of the Counter-Strike 1.5 and 1.6 — early-to-mid 2000’s — heyday.
If you plan on being in the crowd at Aspen, there is one downside: the esports section will be the only non-free admission area. The limited seating forces a premium to view CS:GO in person, however live streams will be available at MLG.tv as well as highlights on ESPN and ABC broadcasts. Tickets are currently available and the $100 price tag includes benefits such as reserved seating, a behind-the-scenes-tour and a gift bag full of MLG goodies. For a three-day weekend of live esports action, the price isn’t outlandish.
Continuing the merge of MLG and X Games events could very well continue, as Sespo told reporters
This is a dream partnership and we’ve always thought MLG and X Games would be a really good match. Austin was a very successful experiment where we learned that these sports play well together and that we can dramatically open up the audience on both sides of the partnership.
Over the years MLG has proven to be a stable platform for displaying esports to a greater population. The continued support of ESPN and the X Games will extend MLG’s reach even further.
It’s kind of hard to explain IFTTT to people. I’ve tried. It’s a tool, that’s for certain. It’s a tool for doing online things. What kind of things? Well, pretty much all kinds of things. And that’s what makes explaining IFTTT so difficult. If you have an account with an online service that has even a half-decent API, then IFTTT can help you streamline a process, remember to do something, or automatically do that thing you always seem to forget. While IFTTT has applications for all kinds of people, sports fans and fitness nuts can mine a lot from it too.
IFTTT stands for If This Then That. It takes its name from a basic boolean operator found in all kinds of computer programming languages. The main idea is that if something meets a certain set of criteria, a specific action is to be performed. If A, then B. The A and B criteria in IFTTT are called channels. Channels are nothing more than online accounts or services. Things like Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, Evernote, Dropbox, and Instagram all have their own channels in IFTTT. Combining two channels (one as a trigger, the other as an action) creates a recipe. A very basic example of a recipe would be “IF myfriend@gmail.com sends me a picture through email, THEN save it to my Friend’s Pics folder in Dropbox.” All you have to do is set the recipe up once, and you’re set. IFTTT takes care of all the other stuff in the background. But how does this apply to sports-minded people? Just like everything else in IFTTT, it all comes down to channels.
Fitness fans have a few options. If you use a service like FitBit, Misfit, or Nike+, there are plenty of ways you can tap into the data those collect. Maybe you want to keep a running log of every time you hit a daily goal. You can use IFTTT to log that in a Google Spreadsheet or Google Calendar. Those into public shaming can have IFTTT post burned-calorie information to Facebook or Twitter automatically. Weekly summaries can be sent via email. I use the FitBit channel to log how much sleep I get every night into a Google Spreadsheet. You can text yourself when you’ve reached a goal, or set yourself a reminder notification to to so. All of this only needs to be set up once. As our favorite rotisserie oven salesman would say, you just set it and forget it.
An example of some IFTTT recipes based in the Nike+ channel.
For those of use that would rather watch than do, there are options as well. As of now, there aren’t any channels for specific sports apps like NFL Now or MLB At Bat, but luckily ESPN offers a channel that can accommodate many needs. You can set a recipe to get text or smartphone notifications for your favorite teams — every time a game/match starts, when there’s a lead change, or just the final score. You can collect the results of every game in a Google Spreadsheet, have breaking news sent via text or added to your Pocket account for later reading, or set pre-determined tweets to be sent out depending on if your team wins or loses.
Some IFTTT recipes that can be set using the ESPN channel.
Sadly, though you can get alerts about fantasy sports news using the ESPN channel, it isn’t set up yet to incorporate specific league. However, if you are in a Yahoo! fantasy league, you’re in luck. You can have IFTTT send you a weekly trade summary in an email, or post to Facebook or Twitter if you’ve secured a fantasy victory.
The best way to find out how you can use IFTTT is to try it for yourself. Use a few pre-made recipes or try creating your own. Go back in and tweak them to your liking. IFTTT also offers mobile apps for iOS and Android so you can create and rework recipes on the go. Whether you’re looking to actually streamline some life workflow or simply fool around with a very fun and very powerful tool, it’s hard to beat IFTTT.
Feeling nostalgic for video games of the 1990’s? How about the 80’s? Maybe even the original 70’s games? If so, then good news everyone! The Internet Archive (IA) just expanded their Arcade section and added a wide variety of games from previous decades. The Arcade boasts over 900 different games, ranging from SEGA Champion Boxing to Champion Baseball to both Hyper Sports as well as Hyper Olympics.
Rather than requiring a download and setup of an emulator, IA runs games within your browser. The website suggests Firefox, though I didn’t come across any issues using Chrome. My fondness of baseball is no secret around these digital pages, so the first game I loaded up was Curve Ball, published three years prior to my existence.
There is a brief loading screen, but at least there aren’t any cartridges to blow into.
And it is worth the wait. Those graphics are glorious.
Each game will have different buttons on your keyboard — or use a controller, unfortunately my joystick wasn’t allowed to be used — to accomplish different things. Bunting, swinging and pitching inside or out are all various options and if using your keyboard, can be changed at will.
I didn’t come across an error in the games I explored, but IA provides the email address of their primary Operator, Jason Scott, on their website. In a blog post that went up yesterday, Scott outlines any known issues as well as thanks for every who has helped get the site up and running. Head over there and show your support by putting up a triple bogey while on the first hole of Birdie King 3. Failing that, you could always grab a Shasta, your all-Rush mix-tape and play on Saturday night.
Picture it: You’re sitting in the stands during an NBA game. The action on the floor is slow — maybe there are free throws or a 30-second timeout on the floor. You grab your phone, connect to the arena WiFi, and pull up a webpage. You scroll through a list of players, pick your favorite one, and choose a highlight you want to see — a dunk, a sweet finger roll, a step-back jumper, etc. During the next timeout, on the big video screen over center court, the video you selected is playing, along with your name. This is what Steve Ballmer wants to do with Clippertron, and it’s already happening.
The Los Angeles Clippers have teamed up with the company Second Spectrum to work on developing a new approach to fan engagement at sporting events. The system allows fans to use their mobile device to pick a favorite highlight to be displayed on the scoreboard. While Blake Griffin’s dunking prowess is impressive enough, Second Spectrum isn’t stopping there. Using their proprietary DataFX system, they will also display key stats and measurements that will show how and why Griffin dunks so hard, what makes up DeAndre Jordan’s shot-blocking ability, or how Chris Paul gets so many assists. As Second Spectrum co-founder Rajiv Maheswaran told the LA Times:
“It’s not just going to be highlights […] It’s highlights with a lot of effects but also telling the story with numbers you can’t get anywhere else. Nobody else on the planet is going to have them.”
According to the Times, the Clippers will be the first team to incorporate this kind of technology during games.
DataFX showing rebound probabilities (courtesy Second Spectrum)
It’s a fairly logical move for the Clippers, as their new owner has such a rich tech background. But as certain NBA teams struggle to bring in crowds, something like what Second Spectrum is offering could help with fan retention. Basketball games can be expensive endeavors for fans when compared to staying home and watching the game on TV. Now, teams have the ability to bring a little bit of that TV experience into the arena. It wouldn’t be shocking to see more teams implement the same system — or something similar — very soon.
