The MLB postseason is upon us (yes, I understand that the play-in games were technically part of the postseason), so many eyes will be turning to baseball for these next few weeks. As it happens, given the age in which we live, a good amount of those eyes will also be glancing down at phones and tablets while the game action plays out on our TVs. The two-screen experience is nothing new — heck, I look at Twitter during games myself — and MLB is looking to capitalize on this by debuting a new, socially-minded, app for fans to use during playoff time.

The app is called MLB.com Clubhouse, and is now out (for free) on the iOS App Store (sorry, Android users. No word yet on availability in the Play Store). It’s a fairly straight-forward app, allowing users to share custom MLB emoji and GIFs revolving around their favorite team, or MLB baseball in general.

When you open the app for the first time, you will be asked to pick your favorite team. Don’t worry, you can always switch to a different club or MLB in general by using the Teams button on the upper left. Once that is done, you will be shown two categories of shareable material; GIFs and Stickers.

The stickers are merely emoji-looking illustrations of team-specific players and designs. My Houston Astros gave me the option of using Colby Rasmus, a bearded guy (Lance McCullers?), a bulldog with a beard meant to represent Evan Gattis, and a train carrying a car full of cheese balls, among others.

The GIFs option consists of exactly that. When you change the team to MLB, you get lots of options to share, including memorable moments from baseball’s past. The team page gives a plethora of clips from the current team’s season. The Astros GIFs included Evan Gattis falling down, lots of team celebrations, George Springer dancing, and Evan Gattis falling down again.

Sharing these gems can present a bit of a problem. The first launch of the app will give you instructions on how to install the third-part keyboard for your phone. After you do this, you can use said keyboard to copy/paste your favorite sticker or GIF into an app. You can even pin your favorite images to save on scrolling. Unfortunately, this only works in the Messages app of the iPhone. I could not get the images to paste in the various other programs I tried, including Google Hangouts, Twitter, Instagram, and TweetBot. The special keyboard only seems to work in the Messages app, at least in terms of the many apps I tested.

There is another way to share, however, which is baked in to the Clubhouse app itself. You simply select the image, and choose Share. This brings up the iPhone’s sharing screen, which will allow you to send the image to Twitter, Facebook, and the like. The only problem here is that you are relegated to only using the apps that utilize iOS’s built-in sharing. My go-to Twitter app, Tweetbot, does not have this function so there’s really no way to use that app to share MLB Clubhouse content. That might be more of a limitation of Tweetbot, but it’s annoying nonetheless.

All in all, it’s a fine little app. It’s nothing revolutionary, but it’s not trying to be. It’s just a fun little thing you can use to post silly pictures on the Internet, and, let’s be honest, like 90% of the Internet is just silly pictures. Also, with MLB’s recent crackdown on sharing GIFs over social media, this might be our best option that doesn’t involve the Twitter Police knocking at your virtual door. It’s free and it’s fun, so give it a shot. Just don’t be surprised if you start losing followers from posting a GIF every 20 seconds.

Much like Futurama’s Lrrr (ruler of the planet Omicron Persei 8) in the episode When Aliens Attack, many are getting upset at their current television situation. At this point it isn’t just the millennial crowd versus traditional TV package customers. Certain companies who have helped bring cord cutting to the forefront of people’s minds are now splintering.

Recently Amazon, creators of the Fire Stick and Fire TV, announced they will no longer sell Google’s Chromecast or Apple’s AppleTV. Via Bloomberg, Amazon has not offered new listings for said devices nor will the online retailer continue sales of the Google or Apple products after October 29th. As the linked article notes, it is curious to see Roku among other stream devices, unaffected by these events. Both Google and Apple still have various options for purchasing in stores or online, but seeing the the streaming options battle each other rather than the likes of Comcast, Charter and AT&T et al is disappointing.

For now, the table below is as up-to-date as possible, though again, any Amazon price listed for Chromecast or AppleTV is a deal with an October 29 expiration date. I’ve also separated the table to separate apps based on cost, determined by whether they are a monthly recurring cost, one-time payment, free, or needing a cable subscription.

*Limited to Amazon Prime members

It’s early October, which means it’s time to start making some mental notes for the approaching decorative gourd season while enjoying some playoff baseball. You’re on your own for the former, but we can help with the latter. The MLB playoffs start on Tuesday, beginning with the American League Wild Card game. Here’s how to watch:

• Traditional television: For you squares (like me!) who still want to make use of that giant box around which your living rooms are oriented, all of these games should be available to you. In general, look for the AL games on Fox and the NL games on TBS (somebody maybe tell Ted Turner the Braves didn’t quite make it this year), although you’ll need ESPN, MLB Network, and Fox Sports 1 (now being rebranded as simply FS1) for some of the early action. Here’s a helpful schedule.
• MLB.com Gameday: This old standby makes you feel both seriously plugged-in, by virtue of its integrated PITCHf/x and StatCast data, video clips, and social media streams, and seriously devoid of a human experience, by virtue of the fact that, say, Prince Fielder and Don Kelly do not really have the same body types. Free for anyone with a computer and an internet connection. Compare MLB At Bat app for mobile users.
• MLB.tv: MLB’s premium, web-based service brought you live streams of all out-of-market television broadcasts during the regular season for a non-negligible fee. Due to the exclusivity of MLB’s playoff television broadcast rights agreements, however, you should not expect this service to be available in the postseason, with the exception of Gameday Audio, which the fine print indicates will remain available to MLB.tv subscribers. Instead, things shift to what the league calls Postseason.tv, which will allow subscribers to view “live alternate video feeds,” but not the main television broadcast feed. This will set you back $9.99 for the entire postseason, and does require you authenticate with you TV provider. But if you already pay for TV, the next two options might be your best bet.
• TBS.com: It is not exactly clear what TBS will be offering this year in terms of playoff baseball streaming, but, in 2014, live streams were available to cable subscribers on TBS.com and through the Watch TBS mobile app, giving us every reason to believe the same will be available in 2015. TBS is also available to Sling TV subscribers.
• Fox Sports Go: It’s the same story for Fox, which does not appear to have announced the scope of its playoff streaming, but we assume that, at a minimum, live streams will be available to cable subscribers through the Fox Sports Go app and at FoxSportsGo.com, as they were for the 2014 postseason.
• Terrestrial radio: ESPN Radio will have every game. Find the dial location of your local ESPN Radio affiliate here. ESPN Radio also provides iOS and Android apps.
• Satellite radio: SiriusXM. A subscription is required, but they almost always are offering free trials.
  

Enjoy cold weather baseball!

(Header image via Keith Allison)

We are about to enter one of those wonderful convergences in sports next week. The baseball season is ending, and the playoffs begin on Tuesday. The NHL season begins on Wednesday. Add in the regular mix of NFL games, and we have a pretty busy week on our hands. Conversely, the sports tech world has been fairly quiet this week, but nevertheless, here are the stories we found interesting.

Non Sports PSA: Just in cases you hadn’t heard, there have been a couple of big data breaches this week. Some 15 million T-Mobile customer records were stolen thanks to a hack on the credit firm Experian. T-Mobile is offering free fraud protection for their users, so if you are one, make sure to sign up for that. Conversely, Patreon also got hacked, so if you use the crowd-funding site, make sure to update your passwords. This isn’t sports, but it’s pretty important so we wanted to pass it along.

A federal ruling involving the NCAA could perhaps open the doors for college sports video games to come back. There has been a two-year gap in releases of NCAA-branded video games, thanks in large part to these pending lawsuits. The reintroduction of the popular football and basketball games could still leave room for future lawsuits (hey, what can’t?), but the possibility is still there.

Do like to watch dudes punch other dudes in the head, but always wished you knew exactly how hard they were getting punched in the head? Well then, HBO might be barking up your tree. They just patented a technology that would place sensors in boxing equipment so that precise measurements of hits could take place. The plan would be to include hit metrics during broadcasts much like baseball or football broadcasts produce real-time stats during games. Quantifiable barbarism — it’s not just for the NFL any more!

Microsoft is using traditional prediction models along with your web searches and behaviors to help predict the outcomes of NFL games. Creepy? You bet. Accurate? Well … yeah. Check out TechInsider’s article for the full details. It’s actually fairly interesting in a Big Brother sort of way.

Sports-data aggregation company SportsRadar has reached a new agreement with the NHL to provide their statistics to third-party and media outlets. SportsRadar, based in my home town of Minneapolis, provides data for all kinds of sports to media, fantasy sites, and anyone else who needs real-time, play-by-play data. The NHL expects big things from this partnership, including new interactive and visual web elements. The NHL is already outsourcing their video to MLB Advanced Media, so it kind of makes sense that their real-time stats would be handled by a third party as well.

Finally, Kotaku has a very interesting video about how the American team took home this big esports prize at the latest Dota 2 tournament. I don’t know much about esports (that’s why we keep David Wiers around), but I found the video informative nonetheless.

That’s it for this week. Have a good weekend. Be excellent to each other.

We here at TechGraphs are pretty big fans of Streamable — one of the latest, and in my opinion best ways of sharing media clips, and they’ve just given us a reason to like them even more. Yesterday the company unrolled a new feature for Google Chrome users, an extension that allows users to clip video (and audio if so desired) directly from YouTube as well as Twitch.tv, and a number of smaller sites.

Being able to grab media files directly from Twitch.tv via a Chrome extension isn’t a particularly new option as Oddshot.tv has specialized in that area for months now, however support for web sites other than the esports-streaming site is a welcome sight. Unfortunately traditional sports sites haven’t caught on just yet — which should not surprise — however I’m looking forward to being able to grab a plate appearance or pitch sequence, or perhaps an incredible soccer cross and goal in near real-time.

The maximum length of the clip is 60 seconds, which is mostly enough time to capture whatever in-game moment you’re attempting to save. For the walk-through, I’ve grabbed a clip of my beloved A’s winning their 20th consecutive game, courtesy of MLB’s YouTube Channel. Before getting too far of ourselves, make sure to install the extension. It’s available for free at the Chrome Web Store and can be found by clicking here.

Once you’ve got it installed, make sure to see the Streamable icon/the infinity symbol. It will pop up on any page that is compatible with the extension, in this case the MLB channel.

Now, after finding the clip you want — say, the glory days of seasons past — simply click on the Streamable icon and you’ll open a new page, specifically the editing page for Streamable.

The extension allows users to re-name the clip (YouTube vids retain their name, but you can change it), crop, adjust the speed (as slow as x.50 or s fast as x2 with .25 increments) and to nail down a specific clip to one-tenth of a second of accuracy.

Note the picture below, at first glance it seems like I’m just ripping the clip, but I’ve cropped the black bars out of the original YouTube video and I’ve typed in exactly where in the video I want the clip to begin and end.

Once the clip is finished, you’re given the direct URL or you can use an HTML embed code to share. Within the embed code options you can mute the clip, something I prefer doing because loud (not to mention auto-playing) clips are pretty terrible if you’re not expecting it. Don’t worry, muting the clip within the embed code doesn’t lose the audio. It’s just like a Vine or Instagram video where you can tap the speaker icon for the sound and full experience.

Armed with the perfect clip of the video, observe the final product:

Grab the extension and play around with it. You’ll be sharing priceless moments in non-terrible formats in no time.