The 147th running of the Belmont Stakes, where American Pharoah will attempt to beat increasingly long odds and become the first Triple Crown winner since Affirmed in 1978, airs this Saturday, June 6, at 6:50 p.m. The sport of kings still feels royally restrictive– no non-folding or folding furniture allowed on the premises?— in many respects, but, for mere spectators, a glimpse at history is increasingly accessible.

NBC is providing major-network television coverage of the race, primarily through its cable sports channel, NBCSN, beginning on Friday afternoon. For the main event, the action switches to NBC itself beginning at 4:30 p.m. on Saturday. In a new development, NBC also is offering live radio coverage of the race.

 For streamers, NBC’s television content will be available live through its NBC Sports Live Extra service. While there is no additional cost to use NBC Live Extra, it has a number of restrictions. Most critically, it is not available without a cable or satellite subscription, and it is not available outside the United States or its territories. If you’re still reading, there are free Apple and Android mobile apps, and the service is available for Roku and Apple TV, but all of these still require a cable or satellite subscription.

One sign that NBC may be loosening the reins, however slightly, on cable and satellite providers’ control of content was their decision to stream Wednesday’s draw, the event that determines the horses’ positions in the starting gate, live on Periscope. Comments by NBC Sports Group Chief Marketing Officer John Miller (not to be confused with NBC Sports Group President of Programming Jon Miller) suggest that NBC does not see the free, Twitter-based streaming technology as a part of the network’s core services going forward, however. Miller described the draw as “not an event that [ordinarily] would be covered” and the Periscope broadcast of it as “promotional.” Although Belmont Park allows fans to bring mobile telephones to the Belmont Stakes (after “screening”), Miller does not see potential unofficial Periscope streams of the race as a threat to NBC’s ratings or coverage.

As noted at this site last week, the comparatively low quality of streams on Periscope, and its cousin Meerkat, are likely to tamp down heavy usage for live sporting events. This seems particularly likely to be the case for events available on standard television broadcasts like the Belmont Stakes, and it supports Miller’s view that, at least for now, these services will be limited to a supporting role. Interestingly, though, a note on an article discussing last month’s Mayweather-Pacquiao fight, in which Periscope streams of the pay-per-view event gave HBO and Showtime headaches, discloses that NBC’s owner, Comcast, is a Meerkat investor.

Periscope et al. may yet leave their marks in the live sports space, but if you want to watch American Pharoah try this weekend to make sure we never forget his name, you’re going to need a cable or satellite subscription.

(Image via Donnie Ray Jones)

Game: Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP) 2016 (website)
Platform: PC, Mac, Linux, mobile
Release Date: 2015
Metascore: n/a
Techgraphs score: 4.3 or 86 B

General Reaction
OOTP is our most reviewed and highest reviewed game of all time. It takes all the high-level problem solving of a real baseball front office — salary management, roster management, owner expectations, and so on — and somehow condenses them all into a single game. The game is addictive. It’s fantastic.

That said, I’m trying to review this latest edition as critically as possible. And it’s hard to critique something you’re hooked on. But the game does have some flaws, and I will address those. But overall, it’s another excellent submission to the OOTP franchise.

Ratings

Graphics: 4.0 stars
Let’s face it; you’re not going to play OOTP for the graphics. The only 3D component of the game — an optional view for the in-game management — leaves a lot of a room for improvements. It’s not really a problem, per se — more of a “Where’d it go?” The old versions of OOTP had this realistic face generator. It was really impressive. But I can’t find it among the add-ons now. So we end up with this:

Concept & Game Modes: 4.5 stars
OOTP does a nice job of not stretching itself thin with game modes. The database and formulas that serve as the foundation for this game would not be at their best in a “Path to the Majors” or a work-your-way-to-the-top game mode. So having a single player GM/coach mode and a multiplayer GM/coach mode is probably sufficient to please 90% of fans.

It would be interesting, however, so see an arcade mode — hear me out! The latest changes to OOTP have created a system where the player (you, sir or madam) are given a salary and contract based upon your reputation and recent success. What if the game took a page from the NBA 2K video game series and made those salaries worth something? Perhaps players could spend their salary on negotiation classes, improving insight and success rates during trade or salary negotiations. Perhaps players could spend on charitable enterprises and improve their reputation — thereby unlocking more prestigious managers and executives. Or perhaps players could spend money on special camps that have a chance to boost a few players’ rating in special areas (“Send [these three players] to the Barry Bonds Hitter Clinic? Grants 10% chance for increase in either Power or Eye rating. Cost is $100K per player.”).

This kind of stuff actually incentivizes earner a higher income. And it’s just kind of fun.

Gameplay & Interface: 5.0 stars
The interface hasn’t changed much in OOTP 16, but there have been a few minor tweaks that I think show the developers’ really care about user feedback. Lots of tiny things like:

I’m giving gameplay and interface a perfect score, but a big part of me wishes I could experience it all over with rookie eyes. Of course the interface seems easy to me; I’ve been playing OOTP for a half decade.

Glitches: 3.0 stars
There’s a lot of little things that impede my enjoyment of the game — problems that didn’t exist before. Ratings filters don’t seem to work in the Find a Player section (a great new addition, if it actually worked for me…).

And more than that, the new owner goals feature had serious signs of inconsistency. Several times early in my franchise, the owner could not recognize the fact that I had completed an assigned task:

More troubling, though, is that there are numerous issues with player valuation. The AI does not seem to value pitchers correctly (a lot of trades that should go through, don’t), and seems to struggle to identify medium-quality talent. Either everyone is a five-star prospect or not a prospect at all. In general, scouts seem to have a bad grasp on pitcher value (a starting pitcher with three strong pitches and good makeup will still have a 21 potential on the 20-80 scale).

And then, after several years into my franchise, the talent pool disappeared. International free agents stopped being prospects all together (except for a few hidden gem pitchers who had great ratings everywhere except their potential ratings); the draft only had one or two premium prospects at most (normally the first round should land everyone a premium prospect); and since I had a world of difficulty convincing other GM that their pitchers had differentiating between a prospect and Quad-A filler, fair trades were hard to come by.

Say what I will about the relative simplicity of Baseball Mogul, at least the ratings are close (as close as a scouting system with variability should be).

Rosters: 5.0 stars
This is always the strength, nay, the stupid strength — so strong it’s dumb — of the OOTP franchise. You won’t find a more accurate system of minor league players and managers.

See Also:

98 A+ Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP) 2015 (PC)
98 A+ Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP) 2014 (PC)
97 A+ Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP) 2013 (PC)
96 A+ Baseball Mogul ’13 (PC)
96 A+ MLB ’12 The Show (PS3)
82 B- MVP Baseball 2003 (PC)
79 C+ MLB 2K12 (PS3, XBOX 360, Wii, PC, etc.)
74 C MLB Ballpark Empire (Facebook)

Facebook recently made headlines by announcing that they would start supporting the embedding of animated version of the Graphics Interchange Format, more widely known as the GIF. This was a big deal, apparently, because people still care about GIFs. But they shouldn’t — at least not in a way specific to the actual file format.

To me, the GIF has become something bigger than itself. Its name has become ubiquitous with the idea of a short video clip that people find entertaining. Just like how we refer to all facial tissues as Kleenex or all large trash bins as Dumpsters (yes, it’s a registered trademark), a GIF doesn’t really need to be a .gif file per se, it just needs to be a short and shareable video. The problem is, the actual GIF format is pretty outdated and inefficient when it comes to embedding video clips. It’s a dinosaur. It’s Windows 95. We don’t need it anymore. We can make GIFs better. We have the technology.

Back in the day, the main pull of the GIF format was that it was supported on all browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator). You didn’t need any special plugins or software to see a GIF on a web page because it was an image file, like a .PNG or .JPG. GIFs were special in that one could layer multiple images on top of one another to create an animation effect. As expected, this still lead to large files and long load times for web pages. But it’s all we had.

(Not so) long ago, creating GIFs was a pretty big pain. You had to finagle some software to record the video from your screen, then split up the video into frames with a program like Photoshop or GIMP. The results were rarely the same, and there was usually some sort of stuttering or ghosting or another weird issue that made the thing look off a bit. They were usable, but not always pretty.

Today, Flash is pretty much dead and every major browser supports the most common video codecs. HTML5 ushered in a new way to display video — a way that was baked in to the HTML standard. Long story short — if your computer (or mobile device) has any kind of modern browser installed, it can support HTML5 video. It’s leaner and loads quicker, and we all should be adopting it.

We here at TechGraphs have gotten requests to give a how-to on creating GIFs. But I’m not going to do that. Because, as Managing Editor, I’m making a statement on behalf of the site. We’ve pussyfooted around the issue before, but we’re making a stand. The GIF is dead. It’s time to put in on an ice flow floe and let it float on into the Great Beyond. It’s been supplanted by younger and stronger technology. No, I will not be showing you how to create a GIF. I will be showing you how to create short video clips that are easily shareable on Facebook, Twitter, your Tumblr page or your blog. We’ll be utilizing two different sites for this tutorial — Gfycat and something we’ve featured here before, Streamable.

To create these videos, we’ll first need, well, some video. There are a couple ways to go about this. Both Streamable and Gfycat allow you to simply input the URL of your video and let them do the converting. However, Gfycat only allows 15 seconds worth of upload. Streamable does allow larger uploads and the ability to trim time off, but long videos still lead to long upload and conversion times. It’s probably best to get the video on your computer and work with it from there. To do so, I’ve had good success with a Chrome Extension called Video Downloader Professional. This extension will search the code of the page you are on and will find the source file for any video used in that page. You just click the little green arrow next to your address bar and it will give you the option to download the video. A couple notes: you may have to start playing the video for the extension to pick it up. Also, if the video has an ad, it might show up in the list of available downloads. Just make sure you are grabbing the right video. The file sizes are displayed on this list. You almost always want the longer one.

So, let’s say I want to make a clip of Joey Gallo’s first career home run from last night. (I’m using an MLB clip here, but this will work in many sites, including YouTube). I use the extension to download the video into my Downloads folder. Now, it’s fairly long, so I probably should edit it down a little. How you do this depends on your OS. If you have a Mac, you can use the built-in Quicktime Player to quickly trim down a video. Windows users can download the free Windows Movie Maker and use that to edit the clip. Read the tutorials and get comfortable with the software. You’re not re-making Jaws here. You’re just cutting a single video clip. Remember, Gfycat only allows 15-second clips, so edit accordingly if you’re planning to use that service. Once the clip is edited, save it somewhere. It is now time to upload.

Uploading to Gfycat

Go to Gfycat and click the Upload button in the upper right. Click Browse and find the video on your computer. It will begin uploading and converting.

Click the newly-created link to go the clip page. Here, when you move your mouse to the right, you’ll see a couple buttons. One is to create an actual .gif file (IF YOU MUST), and the other is to grab links.

You can get a straight link, and some code to embed the clip in a webpage. Like this! You can tweak that embed link a little to change the height and width of the clip if your blog has certain size constraints. This creates your standard GIF-looking clip. This is good enough for most applications, but what if you want more an actual video experience? What if you want a little longer clip? What if you want sound? Sure you could use your phone to take a Vine of your computer screen, but we’re better than that. Let’s use Streamable to create a quality clip that’s still shareable.

Uploading to Streamable

Go to Streamable and click the Upload button right in the middle. Again, find your video and Streamable will start uploading and converting. Much like Gfycat, you get options to add a title and share the link.

If you click Share, you again get options to copy a regular link or an embed code. Streamable offers some options to change the height and width of the video as well as enabling autoplay and muting. Clicking both will give you a GIF-like experience, but leaving them off will make it feel more like a video. The choice is yours, but it’s certainly nice to have the choice.

These clips will load faster and won’t bog down the browser. They won’t take up space on your servers. They aren’t quite GIFs, but that’s OK. They’re better. You can have the best of both worlds. Short, shareable clips will be around for a long time, but not in the aging format we’ve been using. You now have the knowlege. The tools are free and easy to use. Be a part of the future.

(Header image via Eric Norris)

Few topics are so regularly discussed among my baseball circle of friends and colleagues as local blackout policies. While I am certainly biased in that I watch and talk baseball more than any other sport, I — among plenty of others — have found numerous flaws in MLB’s way of blocking local fans from their favorite teams. By no means is baseball’s governing body alone in limited television access for regional fans, as the NFL, NHL and MLS have a blackout policy of some sort in place, however given the sheer number of MLB games played each season, more baseball games are blacked out than the other sports combined.

To be fair, the NFL did lift local blackouts for the upcoming 2015 season, however as the linked article notes, zero games were blacked out in 2014. NFL games are only subject to local TV blackouts if the game isn’t sold out 72 hours before kickoff rather than the constantly blocked games in other sports. Professional hockey has seen its share of blackouts in TV, though a recent development for the Tampa Bay Lightning may be expanding the definition of “local blackout.”

Via CSN Chicago (warning: auto-playing video), Tampa is following in the footsteps of St. Louis and Nashville hockey teams in making it difficult for visiting (read: Chicago) fans to see the game in the stadium. The policy also affects actual Lightning fans living in other states. If fans have the time and the means to follow their favorite team from another state, tickets may not be available for them. A screenshot directly from the Lightning Ticketmaster describes the situation:

Building a home field advantage or looking for any competitive edge is all well and good, but at what point is a line drawn? How far will fans go to avoid the blackout issues, both on TV and in-person? Going back to baseball, there are massive numbers of people who can’t watch games based on their geographic location. One of my friends was recently accepted to graduate school at Iowa State University, located in Ames, Iowa. The sole downside for him thus far, other than the workload, has been being subjected to blackouts for his favorite team — the St. Louis Cardinals. According to Google Maps, Ames is nearly 370 miles away from Busch Stadium, yet he is still blocked off from their games. Running the Ames 50010 zip code through the MLB blackout finder, the Cardinals aren’t the only team subjected to broadcast issues. Both clubs in Chicago, the Twins, Brewers and Royals are blacked out for him. Even if he were a more broad baseball fan without ties to a specific team, his location alone blocks him off from 20 percent of MLB teams.

The lengths organized sports are going to block off fans from games has only been surpassed by those same fans looking for a way to circumvent the blackouts. Last week a free and popular virtual private network (VPN) came under criticism not from any league or association, but its own userbase. The Chrome and Firefox extension Hola! or Hola! Better Internet was denounced as a potential botnet to be used for malicious attacks on websites, to which they responded to Monday. Danger comes in the form of Hola! using other people’s idle bandwidth — and vice-versa — in order to circumvent geo-blocked content. By granting access to your Internet connection, it can be taken over and re-routed, potentially as part of a DDoS attack on a site or IP address. Be it accessing Canada’s or Australia’s Netflix or someone over there accessing the United States selection of TV and shows, Hola! provided a free and easy way to get around geographically-blocked content. Despite it no longer being available in the Chrome Store, the extension is still downloadable straight from the company’s site. I’d urge caution before a download of Hola! is considered, as the recent allegations have once again shown there is no such thing as a free lunch.

According to the Hola website over 47 million people have downloaded the extension to enhance their web browsing, despite the clear risks involved. That such a number of people would be willing to risk their idle connection in order to open the Internet for their browsing or entertainment needs shows the measure of their resolve. Whether companies like Netflix and HBO or leagues such as MLB or NHL open up their blackout restriction policies on their own accord may not matter. As long as people have a workaround — questionable or not — the market will find a way to access the desired content.

(Header image via BizOfBaseball)