I personally believe the old saying “all roads lead to Rome” tends to embody “different means to the same end” and in the case of online streaming versus traditional cable subscriptions, money as always, is the bottom line. In regards to the streaming cash flow, once again Rome — okay, all of Italy — is front and center in accomplishing the end of collecting revenue, this time by means of streaming. Today the top league of Italian soccer, Serie A, announced a service that beginning on Saturday, will stream three fixtures per weekend.

The price for viewing access is €3.99 for the weekend or €2.00 per individual match. In addition to the games themselves, each will have both pre- and post-game shows for analysis and news for the matches and around the league. It’s a huge move away from the old school television broadcasts, and for here in the United States, where beIN Sports holds the broadcasting rights. Serie A is the first major European league to offer a service of this kind and this could bring about a huge boost to their fandom abroad.

Via Statista, as of 2013, Serie A held the second highest broadcast revenue, trailing only the English Premier League.

An argument could be made that Italy’s top league isn’t the powerhouse it once was, however the league has posted solid results in UEFA Champions League play, the top continental league in Europe. Even after Serie A lost one of their bids to Germany’s Bundesliga following the 2011-12 season, they’ve posted respectable results. Since being limited to three teams receiving bids to the Champions League, Italian powerhouse Juventus has managed a runner-up finish in the CL last year and both Roma and Milan have made appearances in the Group Stage of the tournament as well. Even with four teams (Juventus, AC Milan, Inter and Napoli) in the top-20 most valuable soccer clubs as of 2015, Serie A has some catching up to do if they’d like to match the brand value of the titans of European soccer.

If this streaming agreement opens up the first of many more casual soccer fans here in the US, all the better. The individual game price is well worth testing the waters of Serie A, but the model of online viewing is the most important part. If other leagues — namely the Premier League, Bundesliga or Ligue One — are able to find a way to offer streamed soccer, it will be another huge win, much like Fox Soccer 2 Go, for cord-cutting soccer fans.

Kinduct Technologies made waves in the sports tech world when they were selected as one of ten companies in the Dodgers Accelerator program. But CEO Travis McDonough admits that his company is more mature than many of his fellow participants.

“We have 40 employees, we’ve got many many different clients, we’re across different industries, we have a mature operating system,” he said. “We have now 50 professional sporting organizations that are using our tool and it changes every day.”

The tool, which is known as the Athlete Management System, aggregates data from wearable, camera-based, and even more subjective systems into a single environment. The system includes visualization tools so teams can search for correlations between the data themselves, and a machine learning component to further guide organization training plans. The system gives vital help to organizations trying to understand the massive amounts of data they collect from games and practices.

“There’s been an explosion of ancillary tracking tools on the market today, everything from camera systems to GPS trackers to heart rate monitors to smart phones,” McDonough said. “And all those data sources, as valuable as they are, reside in siloed pockets.”

In addition to the Athlete Management System, Kinduct offers similar services in the health care, wellness, and human performance market (which covers military and law enforcement applications). Their experience in these other fields informs the algorithms behind their athletic products.

“Because we have had the opportunity to start to figure the machine learning side out on the health side, we’re able to cross-pollinate and apply it to the sports market,” McDonough said.

But the operating system and machine learning tools are only as effective as the data they can handle. McDonough said Kinduct works with their clients to incorporate both new and existing sources of data. Their web page lists relationships with camera-based systems including the NBA’s SportVu system, as well as wearable trackers like Polar Global and Catapult, among others.

“We’re very agnostic, and we love to pull in data from as many sources as possible,” he said. “So we are absolutely delighted at the new technologies that are coming out, and all these emerging data sources are exactly what make us more powerful.”

Kinduct counts dozens of sports organizations among its clients — including “more than half the NBA,” according to McDonough — and is working with a few unnamed leagues to manage data across all teams. The obvious differences are there, of course: basketball teams have different expectations for their relationship with Kinduct than hockey teams or baseball clubs. But the varying levels of sophistication across organizations provides an additional challenge, and Kinduct has to ramp up or scale back their offerings according to the client’s experience and comfort level.

“The NBA teams, they put their arms right around technology so we adopt what they use,” McDonough said. “When it comes to other organizations … they’re looking for recommendations by us to suggest ancillary technologies that can do the best job of tracking their players.

From a researcher’s perspective, the fact that Kinduct works with such a large percentage of the NBA is exciting. Deep in their databases is tracking and data, across games and practices, on dozens of elite athletes. McDonough estimated that the average NBA team spent $10 million on players sidelined with “preventable” injuries, repetitive stress injuries arising from flawed biomechanics that he likened to a stone cutter chipping away at a rock. And while McDonough was more than happy to describe how an individual team could combine their various data sources to find potential injury markers, he also stressed his company’s respect for the “firewall” that protects not only each team’s raw data, but also any metrics they build on top to analyze those data.

“It’s almost like we provide a technological apartment building, but each and every team moves their specific furniture and wallpaper in it, and the keys to the front door are locked down so no one can go in it but that organization,” he said.

Still, he agreed that a league-wide approach would be more effective, allowing coaches and staff to spot trends in a wider sample of data that could keep players off the trainer’s table.

“The right thing in the future is for leagues to be able to analyze the data and intervene to make sure the players are playing at their best and reducing injury as best as they can,” McDonough said.

Nevertheless, Kinduct is still dealing with health care data, which is subject to a wide range of safeguards to protect patient confidentiality. On top of that, athletes and the players associations that represent them remain leery about biomechanical data being used against them during contract negotiations. Players associations also objected to earlier iterations of the system that tracked athlete workouts during the off-season as excessive. As a result, Kinduct has worked to produce a system that provides the data front offices are after while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to players.

“For a player, they just want to win games, they want to win a championship,” McDonough said. “And a level of surveillance [during the season] seems to be acceptable by both the players’ association, the players, and of course management and ownership.”

It was announced in August that Kinduct was one of the ten companies selected for the Dodgers’ first annual accelerator program, which will run through a “demo day” November 15. The Dodgers are running the accelerator in conjunction with advertising agency R/GA, who has successfully run a number of similar programs in the past. Described by McDonough as “almost like a business boot camp,” the program offers Kinduct mentoring from a who’s who of sports executives and a chance to get more exposure.

“What we have is a Ferrari in a garage,” he said. “This allows us to open the garage door and have more people see our Ferrari. And people want to drive it, and it’s exciting.”

For now, McDonough and his staff have moved to Los Angeles to participate in the accelerator, and plan to open an office in the U.S. after the program to expand into the American market, especially in the health care, fitness, and military areas that fall under the same “human performance” umbrella as the company’s Athlete Management System. Still, McDonough said the company would remain true to its Canadian roots regardless of its excursions south of the border.

“We’ll always have a home base in Halifax,” McDonough said. “But we need to have a bigger presence in the United States.”

Recently, yours truly was a guest on the Offspeed Podcast talking about the plausibility of robot umpires being used in baseball. Not humanoid robots, really — more like a system of lasers or cameras similar to what the San Rafael Pacifics used recently in a game/publicity stunt. I mentioned how PITCHf/x could be better utilized to monitor and grade umpires, bringing a level of accountability to the whole process. There are a lot of caveats that go into all that, and I would suggest you listen to the episode to get all my thoughts if you are interested, as I’m not keen on regurgitating all of them here. But as I was watching Monday’s Astros/Rangers game, my thinking started to change. There were some questionable calls, as there always are in any game. But we only knew they were really questionable because of the broadcast’s replay and the use of PITCHf/x technology. It got me wondering; is it fair that we as fans are the only people that get to see the strike zone in real time?

Criticisms of the home plate umpire are nothing new. Way back when, fans in the bleachers would argue over balls and strikes. Then TV came, and fans could yell at it over a call. A little later, instant replay was brought into the fold, further increasing the fans’ abilities to form opinions on where a pitch crossed the plate. High definition video did the same. And recently, almost every network has utilized some form of PITCHf/x visualization on screen. Some do it in replays, others have it emblazoned on the screen for every pitch. Never before have we been able to criticize umpires, hitters, and pitchers over their respective opinions on the strike zone to such a degree. And the weirdest part as that we are the only people who can see it. That’s kind of nuts. In essence, we have a better understanding of the strike zone than those who are in charge of it, or whose successes or failures depend on it. It’s an odd situation we’ve put ourselves in. And I’m wondering if something doesn’t need to change.

The first option would be for MLB to enforce some sort of rule and abolish the PITCHf/x box in broadcasts all together. As complaining about home plate umpire calls is in the list of Top One Favorite Things for a Baseball Fan to Do, I don’t really see that happening. I would imagine most fans wouldn’t care (or would even applaud) if the permanent box went away, but it would certainly be missed on replays. FOX would get a slew of complaints during the postseason if our favorite umpire-measuring tool was to go away. Like $10 beer and God Bless America, it’s part of the game now, like it or not.

The second option would be to figure out a way to have the strike zone represented in real life — some sort of hologram displaying the dimensions for the pitchers, hitters, umpires, and fans to see. I understand that this would be SUPER WEIRD. But it would be effective. In all honesty, if we went through all the trouble of installing this system, we could probably do away with the home plate umpire all together and have a laser/camera setup make the decisions for us. This is the premise of the #RobotUmpsNow movement. It would be extremely accurate, and honestly would give a solid foundation to one of the more important dimensions of the game.

This seems foreign, because until very recently, it wasn’t possible. Baseball is full of lines, but strike zone lines (with the exception of the actual home plate) were never available. But it’s 2015, and it is possible now. So why hasn’t baseball adopted it?

Every other sport has lines painted where the boundaries of the game lie. This lets the players and officials know when that boundary has been crossed. We wouldn’t dream of playing a football game on a field without the goal lines. Though ball placement by officials in the NFL can leave things to be desired, the first down line is still represented by a movable arrow on the sidelines. Hockey, tennis, EVERY OTHER SPORT has visible lines depicting what’s in play and what’s out. Yet, in baseball, the strike zone — the area where every play begins — does not.

Except if you are watching at home, that is. Umpires (allegedly) get graded on their interpretation of a strike zone that they cannot see. There are dimensions written in the rules, certainly. But remember that the whole balls/strikes thing was invented when pitchers threw underhand and curve balls were illegal. Dudes are humping it up over 100 MPH and dropping nasty breaking balls in our current game. Isn’t it a little unfair to ask the human eye to interpret that data on the spot?

Yes, it takes away certain aspects of the game — I’ve even argued this myself. Some pitchers possess the ability to widen the strike zone over the course of the game. Some catchers have the ability to frame pitches to make them look like strikes. These are tangible skills that would be reduced should a concrete strike zone be put in place. But sometimes you have to break a few eggs, especially when the fairness of the sport is in question.

I doubt any of this will change in my lifetime. I’m not even sure it should. Baseball is a sport built on and respectful of tradition — some times to a fault. That doesn’t erase the fact that it’s still being played with an ostensibly-invisible boundary that we certainly have the capability of representing visually. When the fans have access to slow-motion replays at 60 frames per second of pitches traveling over a superimposed strike zone, and everyone actually involved in the game has to just kind of guess and wing it, it creates a strange dichotomy. Science and technology have created bigger and stronger athletes, faster pitches, and a system that can track a ball’s position in a split second. And for the most part, we’re asking umpires to just eyeball it. I’m not quite sure in whose interests that serves. The fans are better equipped to calls balls and strikes than the umpires now. Perhaps it’s time that everyone on the actual field of play are afforded the same luxuries that we are.

(Image via ESPN)

Behind the Code is an interview series centered around the sports-related web sites we use every day. The first installment features Sports-Reference founder Sean Forman.

For the first century of sports, newspapers, almanacs, and baseball cards were the medium of choice for communicating statistics. But the world of sports statistics has gone from paper to electric in less than two decades — and the Sports-Reference family of websites has been a key component in that transition.

We caught up with Sean Forman, founder of the Sports-Reference network — which includes Baseball-Reference.com, Pro-Football-Reference.com, and Basketball-Reference.com — and talked about the genesis and future of his family of stats sites.

Bradley Woodrum: What inspired you to start the site back in 2000? I know David Appelman started FanGraphs to help his fantasy team. Did B-Ref have equally humble beginnings? Or was the expectation to become, essentially, the modern almanac for sports statistics?

Sean Forman: I had a similar creation story. There was really nobody doing an online encyclopedia and I thought it would be a great medium for that work. You could hyperlink between pages. So rather than leafing through a book (sounds crazy now) to hunt down Joe DiMaggio’s teammates you could just click a link and see them all. I didn’t expect it to do much. I worked hard on it for two months (while I was in grad school and should have been working on my dissertation) and got the basic site done.

BW: What was the online sports statistics scene back in 2000? What were your go-to resources for stats before Sports-Reference and before the Lahman database?

SF: The Lahman DB was the first bones of the site. It wouldn’t have happened without Lahman’s DB and the work of Pete Palmer that the Lahman DB is based upon. There was no historical content really online in 2000. TotalBaseball.com had a site, but it was barely usable. I was a disciple of Jakob Nielsen at that time, so my focus on usability and ease of use really paid off initially as there was so much cruft out there in web design. Splash pages, flash sites, image maps, blink and marquees.

BW: I understand you were previously a teacher before working on Sports-Reference full time. What was that transition like? And how did you finally make the decision to go full time?

SF: I was a full-time math/CS professor for six years. I actually completed the site before taking that job. During that time, I did B-R in my free time. One mitigating factor is that we weren’t updating in-season at that time, so the stress was a lot lower and we didn’t need to be as on top of things. I could leave it for a week and not worry about it.

BW: The Sports-Ref family is famous for its Spartan design — outside of the player pictures on B-Ref, there’s, what, a single PNG on the whole site, and that’s the logo. Even the interactive charts and graphs have a minimalist design. Has this aesthetic lasted the test of time for its functionality, or is it more just the site’s personality at this point?

SF: [It has a] few more [pictures] than that, but not many. We are trying to reduce them further.

It’s both our personality and for functionality reasons. I’ve heard some people call it the Craigslist of baseball stats. I like to think one of our strengths is that we can view the site from the user perspective better than most. That is really hard to do. We have 250 MB internet connections and gigantic phones and use the latest chrome browser and know internally how the site is put together, but a new user has none of that. They may be on an old windows machine with a 1200×800 resolution with a slow internet connection. Basically you’ve got to make things more obvious than you can even imagine being necessary.

We had a good example of this last week. We launched a new “register” section to combine the minors, Japan, NLB, Cuba and KBO stats into one area. Larry Doby is our test case for this. We called it register because we’ve got 70+ Sporting News Baseball Registers on our shelves and those showed the stats pretty much in the way we are doing it now. Within 20 minutes of launching, we got complaints that we’d taken away the minor league stats, asking are were expecting people to “sign-up” (read register) for the site. We should have caught that on our end, but we were able to fix it quickly and improve the clarity in the process.

BW: Speaking of the lesser known stats, the B-Ref Bullpen has developed into a go-to resource for baseball fans and writers, oftentimes trumping player’s actual Wikipedia pages. What inspired you to add this feature? Do you expect the basketball and football sites will eventually get their own wiki’s too?

SF: I started it because 1) I love Wikipedia. Wikipedia may be the greatest human accomplishment of all time. I’m not joking. Think about how valuable having all of that knowledge in one place is. (DONATE!). 2) For good reason Wikipedia starts their baseball articles with info like “Ty Cobb is an American baseball player…” and I thought that it would be interesting to put together pages for players that were more in depth and baseball oriented than wiki would want. The funny thing is that the star players get almost no treatment on our site, but we have 1000’s of words on Japanese players, Negro Leaguers and early players. It makes sense as there is a need to know about those players.

As for the other sites, we probably should have just done it by now. I’ve been skeptical we’d get any traction with them, but it would have been a good idea to start them.

BW: Baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and Olympics. Is there any area remaining that you might want to add? Maybe prep / high school stats?

SF: The great frontier is soccer (fbref.com). It makes the history of professional baseball look like child’s play. We have a great dataset and hope to get something launched this winter. My favorite stat I’ve discovered is that the English Wikipedia has more pro soccer clubs listed than there have been players in Major League Baseball history.

BW: Oh wow. I can’t even conceptualize that many teams. I’m looking forward to see how you handle that!

A big thanks to Sean for taking the time to talk with us! Be sure to give him a follow on Twitter at @Sean_Forman.

After a laborious break, the News Roundup is back with the football sports-tech stories we found interesting this week.

Tennis may be slower to embrace technology than other sports, but if the All England Club can get web-savvy, you know the game is catching up to the curve. For recent evidence of that, we look to Damien Saunder and mapping software company ESRI. Saunder has been using data from Hawk-Eye, the camera system in place for the purpose of line-call challenges, and other sources to develop data visualizations of entire tennis matches. With counting stats (e.g., “How many aces did Serena hit in her last match?”) still dominating the tennis analysis conversation, Saunder believes his visualizations, and the practical information derived from them, can provide qualitative context to the whens and wheres of events that drive results in a sport in which timing and location matter. (And speaking of Hawk-Eye, this new Wall Street Journal interactive site lets you go eye-to-eye in a line-call test with the Hawk itself.)

With the NFL regular season kicking off last night, a lot of us have had football on the brain. We’ve recently covered concussions, NFL Sunday Ticket alternatives, and television streaming devices. Now comes news that Fox will be streaming live NFL games this season through its Fox Sports Go app and online at FoxSportsGo.com. Although this is a good step for fans of NFC teams, it’s a small step for the network. Access still requires a paid television-provider subscription (Dish Network users currently don’t have access), and while this does permit mobile viewing on a tablet, smartphone viewing is not supported. Finally, coverage is restricted to the game your local Fox affiliate is carrying, so if you’re an NFC North fan living in the NFC South, you’re going to need a longer Ethernet cable.

Meanwhile, Comcast is trying to improve the television viewing experience– and maybe keep your eyes off some other, non-Comcast-connected device– with a new, on-screen football app that provides interactive statistical data about players and teams in action. Use of this app requires a Comcast X1 subscription.

CBS and ESPN have been testing “Pylon Cam,” which is what it sounds like, and probably very expensive, so stop using the pylons as golf clubs. (Also from that story, New York Giants head coach Tom Coughlin expresses skepticism about the utility of using drones at training camp, and all players’ shoulder pads will contain RFID tags for on-field movement tracking.)

Not to be left out, the NFL itself is expanding its digital offerings. For example, the league’s new video network, NFL Now, will be available on its redesigned mobile app, creatively dubbed NFL Mobile, as well as online and on a number of other popular platforms, all without a subscription. Additionally, all Verizon users can stream Thursday, Monday, and in-market Sunday afternoon games on connected Android and iOS smartphones, but not tablets, at no additional cost. (Sorry, BlackBerry PlayBook users.) Sure, the NFL may be turning into a mind-melting mixture of golden-age prizefighting and professional wrestling, but at least we have little excuse for missing a second of it.

It’s looking like there will be some fresh faces in the 2015 MLB playoffs, and with less than a month to go in the regular season, the race for those final postseason spots is hot. Also hot: all that internal data the Cardinals nabbed from the Astros. Remember that? Baseball is big business, and as big data becomes an increasingly important part of that big business, data industry actors are counseling baseball teams to behave more like sophisticated corporations with intellectual property worth stealing and protect themselves accordingly.

Finally, included in Apple’s live-action data dump community theater show Wednesday was news about a new MLB At Bat app for Apple TV. The app offers plenty of features, including split-screen viewing of two live games and on-screen statistics. An NHL app also is reported to be coming to Apple TV in 2016.

That’s all for this week. While you’re streaming football straight into your domes this weekend, don’t forget to be excellent to each other.

This is the third and final installment of Seth’s look at VR’s role in sports. You can find parts one and two here and here.

Branding & Marketing

Whether it’s a leprechaun tattooed on the bicep of a Boston Celtics fan or a white “G” circled in yellow on a green background on a flag that flaps at your neighbor’s next door during the fall, sports fans are fervent brand supporters. For some franchises, such as the Yankees, Cowboys or Lakers, the loyalty is passed down from generation to generation. For others, like the Oklahoma City Thunder or Washington Nationals, fandom is produced by geographical location or a winning product. For the unfortunate franchises, like the Jacksonville Jaguars or Miami Marlins, building a passionate fan base that regularly splurge on game tickets and scoop up team merchandise can be a rougher go.

And for those unfortunate franchises, creativity and a coolness factor is a must for marketing departments that can’t rely just on a winning team or legendary history to meet monthly metrics. Which is where VR could make a difference, as the Jags have already tried.

Last September, 3D-4U teamed up with the Jaguars and invited fans to watch part of the game in VR via an Oculus Rift. Eric Johnson of re/code, viewed a demo of the product.

The company positions between four and six cameras around the field, and depending on where the action is happening, viewers can change their angle on the game. Each camera is slightly zoomed in while recording video, which makes it possible to look around in the video by turning your head. It was also possible, at least in the demo I saw, to rewind the game and see a big play again, sort of like a cable DVR.

Despite a 3-13 record last year and a 4-12 2013, the Jaguars ranked first overall in fan experience, as voted upon by season ticket holders league wide in the NFL’s Voice of the Fan research campaign. And despite a tie for the third worst record in the league, the Jags ranked 21st in home attendance figures, ahead of the San Diego Chargers, and filling a higher percentage of capacity than the Cleveland Browns and Buffalo Bills, which ranked ahead of them. Jacksonville’s focus on fan engagement and immersion is working.

Meanwhile, the Sacramento Kings developed software to pair with Oculus Rifts to help sell premium seating in the yet-to-be-built arena — the Golden 1 Center, expected to open for the 2016-2017 season. The Kings told The Sporting News that they’ve sold all 850 sideline club seats ($200-$300 each) and they expect to sell all remaining courstside seats within the next several weeks. The 16-minute animation allow viewers to see a high-resolution, animated view of the team’s planned arena along with views of sponsorship inventory, suites, club seats, hospitality spaces and seats.

“It is brand new, and we can take it on the road and to someone’s office and bring the new arena to our fans,” Kings President Chris Granger told Sports Business Journal. “Instead of an old-school PowerPoint document, you create an immersive experience. It also allows partners to weigh in to create something with a great sense of understanding.”

Marketing doesn’t only extend to fans. When it comes to big time college athletics, programs need to sell themselves to recruits, too. Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim connected with Next Galaxy to create a tool to wow potential Orange players. While NCCA rules prohibit the coach from many possibilities, the idea is to invite an audience into his home, his gym and showcases his trophy room.

“You’ll be able to wear (them) and feel like you’re in Jim’s house,” Barrett Ehrlich, a financial consultant for Next Galaxy, told Syracuse.com.

Joe Favorito, a sports marketing and public relations consultant and former vice president of public relations for the New York Knicks (2001-2006), holds reservations about VR capturing a live sports audience. However, he said that when it comes to marketing, VR will succeed.

“Virtual reality is more of a secondary experience for those that can’t be there, “Favorito said. “[It] will provide a secondary experience that will be invaluable moving forward that will enhance the brand.”

Experiences such as sitting in a race car with Jeff Gordon, slapping a penalty shot against goaltender Henrik Lundqvist or a Sacramento Kings fan in Mumbai touring the Sleep Train Arena.

IBM gave tennis fans a similar experience last year at the Australian Open. IBM’s ReturnServe captured real-time data of the action on the court which was used to create a virtual serve for fans to try and return, utilizing an Oculus Rift headset and a motion-sensitive racquet.

“You’re used to seeing players that are serving at 80, 90, 150 mph,” Elizabeth O’Brien, sports marketing manager for IBM, told The Atlantic. “Here’s what 100 mph serve would look like to you, let’s see if you can return it.”

Challenges

Those within the VR industry only have to look at 3D TV’s demise for cautionary tales to avoid. While much more limited in scope and capabilities than VR’s likely offerings, 3D TV failed in several common denominators it shares with VR that the latter must focus on as building blocks of success. Nail these issues and VR is on its way to mainstream acceptance.

The Headsets

Virtual reality headsets are silly looking, let’s face it. A tux’d up George Clooney sipping a martini couldn’t look cool with this strapped to his head. Remember earlier in the series, even Peter Moore of EA Sports called them dorky. Others have called them creepy. No doubt they’re unattractive. And there’s no legitimate argument against that description.

“People are going to look back at this thing and laugh,” said Brad Allen, executive chairman of NextVR, comparing current headsets to the brick cell phones of the 80s.

The hardware will shrink and become sleek. It has to. Any wearable piece of tech has to look cool to reach the mainstream. Gizmodo summed it up nicely:

Cool gadgets that look dumb are always a bummer. But looking slick, or at least not extremely goofy, is super important for a VR headset and the future of VR in general. Any wearable gadget has to reach with a higher bar of attractiveness simply because consumers have to wear it. That’s something smartwatches are still struggling with. Not to mention Google Glass.

And while no one (in their right mind) is going to wear a VR headset out in public or all the time, virtual reality is already fighting an uphill battle against looking doofy by involving bulky face-puters. We’ve finally gotten to the point where the tech is cool enough that it’s worth wearing one, so the last thing it needs is a layer of gaudy pseudo-chrome to convince people who haven’t given this new generation of virtual reality a try. “Yeah no. That looks stupid.”

Allen envisions an evolution of the headsets similar to cell phones; headsets will continually reduce in size until it reaches a comfortable balance of functionality and fashion. Likely, they’ll be a tad larger than sunglasses.

And they also need to be comfortable. Consumers didn’t want to wear 3D TV glasses around the house, and don’t want to wear uncomfortable headgear for entertainment. For long-term sustainability, VR will need to develop headsets that can be worn for hours at time. Otherwise, they’ll end up in the tech graveyard with the Zip drives and the RAZR phone while software providers lose their grip on customers.

And then there’s the sound. The initial focus, rightfully so, in VR development was on the visuals. But without sound quality to support the 3D visuals, the immersive experience all VR developers aim for falls short. It’s 360 visuals but with 2D audio. And it’s an issue VR-invested companies know they need to address to keep consumers on board. AltspaceVR and Next Galaxy – both introduced earlier in this series – created solutions to a limiting auditory experience.

Next Galaxy created its own headphones, dubbed Ceekars, which were introduced on Indiegogo earlier this year. Marketed as a VR 4D smart headset, the wireless, battery-powered Ceekars aim to add depth and perspective to a 360 virtual environment and complete the ultimate VR experience. When watching a NFL game from the sideline, that vicious hit on the far side of the field that laid the wide receiver out for a minute will sound a lot less fierce than the tackle in front of the user that knocked the quarterback on his tuckus. The headphones also feature haptic feedback, where an embedded actuator applies motions, pressures and vibrations based on sound intensity and range, for yet another level of immersion. So not only will you hear the hit right in front of you, but you’ll feel it, too.

Business Insider spoke with AltspaceVr’s Bruce Wooden, head of developer and community relations, about their auditory offerings.

As I would later see in my demo — where I was standing in a giant mansion highlighted by an enormous television and a half-moon couch, as well as a balcony off to the side — the sound is what brought everything together.

“If you’re near to that screen, it’s loud, you hear everything,” Wooden said. “But if you’re at the balcony, you can’t hear that screen at all. So it’s just like a real party, where you’ll have two people at the screen, you’ll have French guys over there in a circle talking about whatever French guys talk about, there’s a few people on the balcony doing their thing, and it’s just like a house party. You’ll have these natural social interactions, which is exactly what we’re shooting for.”

The audio is what will tie a nice big bow around the VR package to provide an elegant product.

Health Concerns

One of the biggest issues facing VR today is the perception that it’ll make you sick. It’s not a myth. But hardware companies and software developers continue to design VR experiences to avoid a sickening experience.

“People like the demo, they take it home, and they start throwing up,” John Carmack, the chief technology officer at Oculus, said at the Games Developers Conference in March. “The fear is if a really bad VR product comes out, it could send the industry back to the ’90s,” he said.

Dizziness, nausea, sweating and disorientation – dubbed VR sickness – is caused by the inner ear and the eye sending different messages to the brain at the same time. Valve claims to have cracked the code on eliminating the sickness and to be sure, every hardware designer is focused on delivering an experience that avoids reliving that hangover following that first night of Jägermeister.

Researchers at Stanford claim they’ve developed a headset that reduces eye fatigue, nausea, and VR sickness using light-field stereoscope technology which gives the eye a hologram-like experience for each eye to make the experience more natural. This is compared to “flat” stereoscopic headsets where each eye only sees one image, allowing viewers to freely move focus and experience depth in the virtual scene.

“You have a virtual window which ideally looks the same as the real world, ” Gordon Wetzstein, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, told Hacked, “whereas today you basically have a 2D screen in front of your eye.”

Obviously eye strain is a natural concern when a lit up brick is strapped to one’s forehead. But how will this affect one’s brain? Can neurological damage occur following long-term use? Is it safe for children, whose brains are developing? And finally, if hours of Grand Theft Auto V play on my XBox One plants thoughts of driving up a mountain to avoid bumper-to-bumper traffic, what kind of intense impulses will an immersive experience feed my cerebral cortex?

Most of these questions can’t be answered without significant study. However, the preceding 3D experiences users had can lend some insight. Eye strain and dizziness were common symptoms that were not fixed. Warning labels reminded parents that their child’s brain was still developing, and it’s uncertain how 3D would affect that.

Livescience.com spoke with Mayank Mehta, a neuroscientist at UCLA, about virtual reality’s affect on the brain.

“We don’t really know what’s going on,” Mehta said. “I would say this is reason for caution, not business-as-usual.”

Mehta and colleagues put rats on treadmills in a virtual room, then looked at their brains. While the animal’s behavior appeared normal, they found 60 percent of the neurons shut down. And of those that don’t shut down, many showed abnormal patterns of activity and destroyed an individual rat’s map of space. Mehta admitted the consequences of the neural shutdown are unknown, but it’s worth looking in to if VR becomes such a big part of people’s lives.

Content is King

Imagine the snazziest baseball stadium you can imagine. Of course it’s tech friendly with features and amenities bursting from every seat – not just the box level. Supreme WiFi is abound. The bathrooms are sparkling clean and the concession stands lines are never longer than a TV commercial break. Getting in and out of the parking lot is quick and painless. This is VR hardware. Now imagine this same franchise without any on field talent. Like, none. There’s nothing on the field worth coming to see, since it’s filled with a bunch of Jason Tyners. This is VR without content. A snazzy stadium will bring in fans initially, but it won’t keep them coming back.

“Content is king,” Allen told me during our hour-long interview.

These VR headsets and demos will bring users in, but the content is what’s going to keep them coming back.

“We can immerse the players, and now the question is, what are we going to do with that?” said David Votypka, the senior creative director at Ubisoft-owned Red Storm Entertainment. “The way we answer that determines whether VR becomes its own growing, breathing, living gaming sector, or whether it’ll just be a cool way to play games we already know.”

Equally important for users is the ease in which content is found. Spio said for users to have to scour the web to try and find content is a big turn off for most people. Will a Netflix-like platform emerge as the go-to hub of VR content? Or will users split their time, and money, between multiple platforms, depending on which platform has the VR rights to host each sports league and conference.

And then there’s the importance of progression of content. Experiences can’t grow stale, and content-producers will need to continually offer new options for users to spend a buck on. Outside of live sports, of course.

“Constant, constant reinvention is needed,” sports marketing and public relations consultant Joe Favorito said. “How many times are we going to drive around Daytona? Once? Twice? Do we need to show a crash to get people to come back?”

Demand

Even with the coolest, most comfortable glasses which didn’t require Dramamine or result in Visine eye drops every 45 minutes, 3D TV wasn’t going to succeed because it didn’t vastly improve the way people watched television. It’s tough to get consumers to upgrade their current tech for only a marginally improved experience, which 3D TV arguably offered, at best. For VR to grow a market beyond hardcore gamers, tech nerds, and early-adopting rich guys that want the newest toy, it has to move perception from nice-to-have to must-have.

But how does VR create that must-have demand? It needs to provide an exclusive experience that is convenient and affordable that will make some part of a consumer’s life better.

That means affordable VR hardware. A $400 headset will be tough for many to swallow. Upgrade your personal computer to meet minimum standards headsets will require and now you’re up to $1500. The hardware costs will eventually come down. But initially, adoption will be slow because many won’t invest on potential.

It means no hassles. Nausea, eye strain, and any other health-related issues cannot exist. The headset needs to be comfortable and the content must be easily accessible.

And the content needs be be out of this world.

“What’s the drug?” Favorito asked. “How does this become a must-have drug that I have to have around my team, league or favorite player?”

Realistic Reality

Opinions vary substantially on the timeline of mainstream use of VR. Some think it’ll be next year, after the release of consumer headsets Oculus Rift, Project Morpheus and HTC Vive. Chris Ciaccia, a tech editor with the New York-based business and tech publication The Street, is more conservative.

“I think it’ll stay a niche for another five to seven years,” Ciaccia told Stream Daily. “People are still on the fence of ‘Why do I need another device?’”

But sports is niche. A big niche, but it’s niche. So the timeline moves up. VR in training is already here. Conversely, sports video games in VR may not hit the market until 2019, as the big developers wait to see if VR games are profitable. Sports marketing departments, which have started integrating VR in to campaigns, will continue to create and gauge the cost effectiveness of the tech to push brands and drive sales and fan engagement, increasing use VR annually as long as it proves viable. But the holy grail of it all, live broadcasts in VR of games across all leagues, may still be two or three years away.

To quote Yogi Berra, “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

(Header image via Sergey Golyonkin)

With the NFL season kicking off tomorrow, MLB in the middle of the playoff hunt, and of course college football and other sports already going on, it’s time to kick off a monthly series highlighting some of the best cost efficient ways of catching sports broadcasts and more. From set-top boxes to HDMI dongles to consoles, count on seeing an updated list here at TechGraphs every month. As more and more devices and channels are released, count on this list changing, especially as we approach the holiday season. It feels weird saying “holiday season” in September, but some of my local stores are already posting Black Friday store hours.

There is no shortage of options available, but I’ll be limiting the list by two criteria: they have to be available in the United States, and there has to be separate hardware involved (I’m looking at you, SlingTV, Pluto and Plex). I’ve also specifically chosen Google’s Nexus Player, though there are many more other Android TV boxes. Some streaming options such as WatchESPN, HBO Go and NBC Sports Live Extra require a cable subscription, however all devices can be more than adequate for those looking to cut the cord. Given the rising demand of streaming, particularly among Millenials, all of these devices can play in a role in fulfilling your entertainment needs, be it sports or other stream options.

*Amazon Prime price
**Best Buy Online price
†Coming soon
Also of note, the Amazon Fire TV is currently off of the market apparently due to selling the entirety of the stock. There is speculation it could be relaunched in a 4K resolution shortly.

With the national mean cable bill at nearly $100 per month according to Leitchman Research Group, up 39 percent from 2010. The soaring recurring costs of TV make one-time payments for top boxes and streaming services such as MLBtv or NBA League Pass more and more enticing. Between my MLBtv and Fox Soccer 2 Go via Chromecast (plus Netflix and Amazon Prime), I’m personally spending less than the near $1,200 per year that I might with cable. I’m admittedly in the minority as a cord cutter, but our numbers are rising, and for good and simple reason. It makes sense.

(Header image screencapped from my season 2 DVD of The Simpsons, specifically episode 13, Homer vs. Lisa and the 8th Commandment)

America’s appetite for football is insatiable.  Between fantasy rosters, office pools, betting the point spread or the purity of football fandom, the NFL continues to attract more and more eyeballs to its product. According to Zap2It, the shield grabbed 202 million viewers in 2014, 80 percent of all television homes and 68 percent of potential viewers in the U.S. It was the second-most watched season of average viewers (17.6 million) behind 2010’s mark of 17.9 million. In the last ten years, viewership has increased 25 percent by almost 4 million viewers. Thursday Night football increased 53 percent in one season.

For many, three free Sunday games, one Monday and one Thursday night game aren’t enough to feed one’s football fix. And for them, there’s DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket. But at the Max package, which includes the Red Zone Channel, a fantasy zone channel and the ability to stream to another device, one’s per-month cost (the season is four months long) is $88.49/month. To put it in perspective, Major League Baseball charges $129.99 for its premium MLB.TV package and the NBA League Pass costs $199.99. Those amounts cover the entire six-month season of each league.

For those without such comfy disposable incomes that still want to suck in every breath of the NFL this season, here are some other options.

Go to a Bar

The obvious alternative is to find a bar with the games on that you want to watch. But is this cost efficient compared to slapping Sunday Ticket Max on your Visa and living off of ramen until spring?

Rudy’s Pub and Grill is a popular spot to watch football in Newport Beach, Calif. Considering a three-and-a-half hour game, I priced out what may be a typical, if not a tad aggressive, bar bill.

$9.95 – Bacon/jalapeno wings

$11.95 – Pub hoagie

$20 – Four domestic beers at $5 a pop

After tax and tip, you’ve just spent $53.57, or 61 percent of the monthly cost for Sunday Ticket Max. And this is for one, maybe two games on one Sunday. It’s a fun day, but not cost efficient.

There are cheaper bar options. One of my favorite hang outs is an Irish bar in downtown Orange, where I grew up. It’s not a sports bar, but they do draw a football crowd on Sundays and it’s a more affordable way to enjoy several hours of football.

At O’Hara’s, a domestic pitcher typically costs $7. Just next door is a tasty, fast Mexican food joint, a sandwich shop and a pizza place. O’Hara’s has no issues bringing food in to the bar, as they don’t provide food themselves. Since we’re going cheap, we’ll give ourselves a $10 limit.

$14 – Two domestic pitchers

$3 – Tip

Food from next door  – $10

Total – $27

At half the cost of a Sunday Funday at Rudy’s Pub and Grill, a day at O’Hara’s still is 31 percent of that damn DirecTV product. For 16 weeks (a couple Sundays away from the bar and attending a family member’s birthday), you’ve just spent $432 to watch Sunday football, or, $78.06 more than it would’ve cost Sunday Ticket Max for the season.

Of course, skipping O’Hara’s would mean missing out on the sciatica caused by the stiff booths. And since you have an actual lock on your bathroom door at home, there’s no chance of a stranger walking in on you peeing. That’s what the extra $78 buys you. Experiences!

Cheaper Sunday Ticket Options

Regular Sunday Ticket, which doesn’t include the Red Zone channel or other perks, runs $62.99 a month ($251.94 total). For college students, that cost drops to $24.99 a month, or $99 total.

Order the Sunday Ticket To Go, which streams only to a tablet, phone or laptop, and the monthly charge is $49.99.

Cost Sharing

Sunday Ticket without the Red Zone Channel is like Nevada without Las Vegas – what’s the point? So grab some friends and split the cost of the Max package. For three of you, the cost is $29.50 for a month ($117.98 for season). Add in one more and you’re at $22.13 a month ($88.49 a season).

Watching football is fun. Watching football with a friend is more fun. And watching football with multiple friends is even more fun. So not only do you save some cash, but you’re having more fun. It’s science. And you don’t have to worry about tipping your server at 40 percent because you’re smitten by her blue eyes and dimpled cheeks.

NFL Game Pass

There’s two ways to go about Game Pass. For $24.75 a month ($99 for the season) you can watch every game, not including the Sunday night game. The kicker is the games won’t unlock until after the last game of the afternoon has finished. But you do get access to the All 22 camera and you can block scores from other games. And maybe brunch with the in-laws, church with grandma or spending time with your kids is a healthy and productive thing.

If you live outside the U.S., however, you can use Game Pass for live viewing. This is great for fans who had to move for work or family, but still want to watch NFL games live at some ungodly hour. Of course, the more nefarious can use this option and couple it with an IP spoofing service or VPN and watch live streaming in the good old U.S.A., but that will take a little more research on your part. And any VPN service that offers decent streaming bandwidth is going to cost, adding to the monthly fee.

Stream Illegally

It’s the internet. This is what the internet does. Google search or hunt around Reddit and you’ll find what you’re looking for.

So, the breakdown:

If you’re looking for the best value, get three friends together, split the cost of DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket Max package and persuade the friend with the best TV to accommodate. Don’t leave a mess and toss in a six-pack once a month for the host. After all, he’s cleaning up your urine on the toilet seat.

Image courtesy of Mike Reynolds 

The Easton Power Sensor, produced through the partnership between wearable sensor manufacturer Blast Motion and baseball equipment manufacturer Easton, was recently released. The sensor was the result of a collaboration first announced in January 2014, and has been in the works since before the official launch of the Blast Baseball Replay.

The product, which will go on the market this fall, is largely a re-branding of the existing Blast Baseball Replay sensor. For the first time, however, Blast will expand its offerings to support Android devices. Donovan Prostrollo, Blast Motion’s senior director of marketing, says that current users will also benefit from future software changes that will come out of this partnership.

“There has been a lot of infrastructure work that has gone on behind the scenes,” Prostrollo said. “We will be providing a free software upgrade to Blast Baseball Replay customers, allowing them to gain all the benefits of the Easton Power Sensor and the new features that are on the way.”

Now that the sensor has been officially released, Easton plans to incorporate it into its traveling Hit Lab, which combines video capture and Trackman radar systems to help players learn more about their swings.

“[The Hit Lab] offers an unmatched opportunity for players to experience the science of hitting,” said Henry Fitzgerald, a member of Easton’s performance sports group. “The Easton Power Sensor will have a central role in this.”

Plans to further improve sensor performance are currently being discussed, but Fitzgerald was understandably reluctant to divulge specific improvements.

“Our R&D department is always searching for ways to improve our bats and any relevant technology,” Fitzgerald said.

The announcement coincided with the start of the 2015 Little League World Series, which ended this past Sunday. As the official equipment sponsor of the event, Easton brought the Power Sensor to Williamsport (shown above) to demonstrate its capabilities for the second straight year.

“It’s exciting to see the kids when they get their hands on the sensor and see their metrics,” Prostrollo said. “By combining the science of hitting with innovative technology, we’re able to give players of all ages and skill levels the insights they need to improve their swing.”

Like Major League Baseball, Little League Baseball currently does not allow wearable senors like the Easton Power Sensor on the field during competitions. But Fitzpatrick says Easton has been lobbying for these groups to lift this ban.

“The sensor as it is today does not offer any sort of performance advantage,” he said. “It’s simply an attachment.”

Like the Blast Baseball Replay, the Easton Power sensor is driven by a “tactical-grade” inertial measurement unit (IMU), which combines more precise sensors, more processing power, and on-the-fly calibration to improves the device’s accuracy and consistency. Both the Blast and Easton apps revolve around video, typically captured by setting the device on a tripod and automatically clipped so that only the events of interest are included. Users can view their swings in adaptive slow-motion, which automatically adjusts the playback speed around key moments in the swing. In an earlier interview, Prostrollo said Blast Motion’s focus on video allows Blast’s Baseball Replay — now re-branded as the Easton Power Sensor — to give users insights into more than just bat path alone.

“Because we approached it from the natural motion capture side, we knew that it was going to be a lot more about what is your entire body doing,” Prostrollo said. “The metrics are really only half the story. You really need to put that in context, you need to make it personal.”

Concussions are bad.

Nobody has ever really disputed this, but over the last decade, it has become increasingly apparent that repetitive head injuries, seen particularly often in football, can lead to significant long-term medical effects.

The “concussion debate” has largely taken place on the professional stage, from the controversies generated by League of Denial to Will Smith’s forthcoming feature film Concussion and beyond. Yet the true impact is being felt across the nation, as schools and innovators work to protect the more than 1,000,000 young adults who play college and high school football each season.

This fall, new devices large and small are being tested to reduce the frequency and effect of football-related concussions.

The Dartmouth Dummy

Five years ago, the Dartmouth Big Green football program eliminated athlete-on-athlete tackling during practices. Cutting out these collisions in favor of tackle sleds and dummies cuts down on injuries and concussions–which makes sense–but made it harder to actually practice tackling against a moving target–which also makes sense.

Enter the MVP–the “Mobile Virtual Player”.

Designed by two Dartmouth engineering students, the MVP is a remote-controlled, human-sized dummy that resembles a cross between the Headless Horseman and a Weeble. Less bone-crushing than an actual human, the MVP allows for relatively realistic tackling simulations while significantly decreasing the risk of head and neck injuries.

Two MVPs were deployed in August, with a third on the way, and the experiment has received the attention of major media, tech blogs–and, reportedly, a few NFL teams.

New Helmets InSite

This doesn’t do much to prevent contact during games–and, as long as there’s tackling in football, there’s only so much you can do–but some new tools are being developed to limit the effects of major hits when they do happen.

The sporting company Riddell is in the process of bringing a new line of helmets to high schools around the country. The SpeedFlex helmets, equipped with Riddell’s InSite Impact Response System, use six built-in accelerometers to measure the individual and combined force of every impact a player receives. This data is sent live to a laptop on the sidelines, where trainers and staff can monitor players for potential danger signs.

As programs continue to adopt the system, one trainer says, this data will itself be useful for better understanding what leads to football brain injuries.

Watch Your Mouth

In fact, before long it might not even take a special helmet to easily detect potential concussions. Smithsonian reports on FITGuard, a mouth guard co-created by two Arizona State grads–one a veteran of the rugby team.

Like InSite, FITGuard uses sensors to measure hits to the head and can transfer data to a nearby computer. If FITGuard sees any signs of danger, though, it simply lights up the player’s mouth using LEDs. FITGuard is scheduled for release in early 2016.

These tools aren’t without their caveats. A recent Stanford study, for example, found that some currently existing concussion-measuring devices (particularly helmets) can significantly mismeasure the actual force of impact.

Nevertheless, with room for improvement and no end to the concussion crisis in sight, technology like this can still have great potential to help protect our next generation of football players.

(Featured Image via Dartmouth)