Golf can be a really cool thing to watch live. You get to be outdoors, see beautiful landscapes, and get closer to the athletes than probably any sport (save for those crazy-expensive courtside NBA tickets). Seeing golf live can also be a bit of a hassle. There’s so much ground to be covered that it becomes quite easy to lose your way or spend a good deal of time searching for a concession stand, a restroom, or even the way back to your car.

There is also the feeling that you are always missing something. You may be following a certain pairing or a favorite player, but except for the occasional scoreboard sighting, it can be difficult to know what else is going on on the course. The best action might be happening 800 yards away from you.

In partnership with SAP, the Solheim Cup is looking to change these problems, by using smartphone apps to help fans get around the course and know more about the game. Fans who make the trip to Germany for the event in 2015 will be able to use their smartphones to find their way around the course, as well as find the latest scores, stats and standings from the competition. SAP is planning on instituting live streaming as well, so fans won’t have to trek across the course to see how a certain player or pairing is doing. The app will also provide live traffic and parking updates to help prevent congestion coming to and from the course, and will also offer integration with SAP’s ride-sharing app TwoGo.

This is a great step for golf. As they are already seeing a good-sized drop in event attendance, any reason to keep fans engaged is a good one for the sport. Giving spectators the ability to follow along with all the action of the event without having to log miles on their feet will help ensure fan morale and should cut down on foot traffic. An easy way for observers to find the nearest restroom or beverage stand without aimlessly wandering about should also help keep people happy. We don’t know the participants of the Solheim Cup yet, but it should bring some great competition for viewers all over the world to see. Thanks to some help from SAP, it should bring a good deal of enjoyment for the event goers as well.

(Header photo via Keith Allison)

When the San Francisco officially opened it’s new stadium on September 14th, they also opened one of the most technologically advanced stadiums in professional football. Levi’s Stadium is a connected facility through and through. One of the biggest perks for fans was the 600 Wi-Fi access points strewn throughout the stadium. Many were hidden under the actual seats, promising good connectivity even when sitting and watching the game. This allowed fans to both use the Levi’s Stadium proprietary app — allowing fans to order food to be delivered to their seats, amongst other things — and do all the necessary status updates and photo sharing that come hand-in-hand with attending a sporting event.

Well, fans certainly put that wireless network through its paces on Sunday. The stadium’s network reportedly pushed 3.3 Terabytes worth of data that day, beating a record held by MetLife Stadium during Super Bowl XLVIII. For reference, the maximum size of a photo upload allowed by Facebook is 25 MB. That equates to 1.32 million max-size photo uploads. The traffic total doesn’t come only from photos, obviously. In fact, a good deal came from video offered by the stadium’s own app.

When fans aren’t using the Levi’s Stadium app to order beer and food, they can also leverage it to watch replay video right on their devices. The 49ers said that fans watched 7,800 replays on Sunday. Considering the feature didn’t really work until the second half, those are some pretty impressive numbers.

For the most part, Levi’s Stadium’s data test went pretty smoothly on Sunday. As the 49ers work the bugs out, they will hopefully serve as a blueprint for future stadiums, as fans’ needs (or desires, at least) to view and upload content is only going to continue to grow.

(Header photo via Matthew Roth)

Are you the person people bring to bar trivia just for your sports knowledge? Can you recite a pivotal game of your favorite team’s history, play by play? Are you just a weirdo that likes sports facts? If so, newly-launched sit SuperFansCompete might be for you.

SuperFansCompete does trivia a little differently. First, it pits fans of one team against fans of another, and it’s all based on the schedule of actual NFL teams. For instance, the Tennessee Titans visit the Cincinnati Bengals in week 3. Therefor, on SuperFansCompete, fans of the Titans will be competing against fans of the Bengals.

The look of the game is not unlike the gamecasts one might find on ESPN or CBS. But instead of watching a real-life drive, players answer trivia questions in a quest to push their team down the virtual field.

The distance of a play depends on the level of difficulty. Easy questions get you a few yards. A flea-flicker play brings on a much harder question. String together enough correct answers, and you can find yourself in the end zone or with a field goal. Things like downs and a play clock also add pressure to the game. SuperFansCompete lay out all the rules on their site.

SuperFansCompete is still in beta, but it is free to play at the moment. As of this writing, there have been no announcements of prizes of any kind, though flexing trivia muscles — especially against opposing fans — might be enough to bring people to the site.

(Header image via nathanmac87)

Part of the problem with the new ability to track so much sports data revolves around what to actually do with it. Which datasets are the wheat, which are the chaff? Even baseball, a sport that has been collecting ostensibly the same numbers for a century, still has dissension in the ranks when it comes to deciding which numbers actually matter. Add in the element of team play (multiple players passing and shooting at once), and it becomes even more difficult for sports like basketball and hockey. Soccer runs into the same trouble as well, though a group called the Qatar Computing Research Institute thinks they may have made some progress.

The group is using a technique called network theory to dissect passing patterns of all the major clubs. As it happens, many of the clubs use the same handful of styles or variations thereof. Barcelona, however, is using a totally different strategy. Known as tiki-taka, the approach focuses on fast, short passes and fast-paced play instead of more traditional, formation-based strategies.

The idea of passing analytics is not new to the world of soccer. There have been studies about field positioning, pass length, etc. But the institute’s new approach looks relational passing — how players are passing to each other — to see if patterns emerge. This is where Barcelona throws everyone else a curve. You can read a breakdown here, and the full study here.

This is a great example of the kind of data we thought un-trackable just a few years ago being brought to light. We always had numbers about goals and penalties and maybe even tackles, but data about styles, techniques and actual gameplay is on a whole other level. And as tracking and computing get better, there should be more research like this coming. What the Qatar Computing Research Institute found is impressive, but it’s most likely a mere sampling of what’s to come.

(Header photo via Börkur Sigurbjörnsson)

Daily fantasy sports site FanDuel, fresh off their recent cash influx, ran into a bit of a problem on Sunday. Mainly, a whole host of fantasy players were unable to access the web site or mobile app to enter new contests or update current rosters. About 30 minutes before the 1 pm ET kick-offs, an important window for fantasy as this is usually when teams announce active and inactive players, FanDuel began performing poorly, with slow load times and spotty page loads. Eventually, the site degraded to the point of unusability. With only a few minutes before some teams kicked off — at which point rosters would lock — this left many people high and dry with unentered contests, unwanted rosters, and even injured players destined to gain zero points.

There was, shall we say, a fair deal of unhappiness among fans. A simple search of Twitter can tell you as much. And some of it was, in fact, justified. Many of FanDuel’s games cost money to play, and they run high-stakes tournaments like the World Fantasy Football Championships. When so much is on the line, the ability to change a roster in the final minutes is a necessity.

At the time, FanDuel did not seem to be responding to concerns on Twitter, but did offer one concession about a half hour after the opening kickoffs.

So sorry to all impacted by site issues. If you want your 1pm entries fully canceled & refunded please contact support@fanduel.com by 2pm ET

— FanDuel (@FanDuel) September 14, 2014

This gave users about 30 minutes to request a refund, assuming said users even saw the singular tweet.

Fantasy sports is becoming an ever-growing business. But, as FanDuel found out, a bigger user base can create bigger problems down the road.

When the next-gen gaming consoles were announced, there was anticipation as to which recurring sports games would make the jump. EA Sports’ Madden franchise did, as expected. So did the NBA 2K series. Some franchises decided to wait a year, as coding for a totally new platform provided some obstacles and barriers that would adversely affect the next series of games.

EA’s Tiger Woods PGA Tour series (they’ve since dropped the Tiger Woods part) was one of the latter. This is what they did during the one-year hiatus from new consoles:

The game is a long way from release, and there aren’t even any demos yet, but it certainly looks like the PGA game is attempting to step up to the challenge of improved consoles. PGA Tour’s cousin in the EA world, NHL 15, took a decidedly different approach.

Players of the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions might not notice much of a difference, but XBOX One and PS4 games certainly have. As it happens, NHL 15 has stripped many features from the next-gen version of the game. This has caused quite a stir amongst fans.

Some of the biggest omissions are the GM Connected mode, Online Team Play, and the EA Sports Hockey League. A comprehensive list can be found on Canada.com’s review of the game. Gamers can still play their friends online in a one-on-one style where each player controllers his/her own team, but the ability for a group of friends to play on the same team (each as their own individual player) is now missing for new systems. The GM Connected feature, which allows friends to compete against each other in all aspects of the sports (scouting, minor-league development, free agent signing) as well as playing the actual games is also missing. There are plans to patch some of the missing features in the future, but not all.

On the flip side, NHL 15 has been lauded for the gameplay on newer consoles. While I have only logged a few hours, I can echo that statement. The on-ice play is pretty fantastic, and genuinely a lot of fun. The addition of the NBC Sports presentation of games (now with Doc Emrick!) is also a nice touch and adds to the realism.

Whether gameplay alone is enough to counter such glaring omissions has yet to be seen. No sales figures have been reported as of yet. If the showing from casual fans — those that really only want to play against friends online or in a season as one team — is strong, then perhaps EA won’t take a huge hit. But from the reports circling around blogs and review sites, it seems as if the hardcore players will skip this version or buy it for the 360 or PS4 PS3. When popular features are stripped away, fancy graphics and snappy physics engines can only take a game so far.

(Header image via BagoGames)

Way back when (i.e. 1975), the NFL was up in arms about television taking business away from individual teams. The thinking was that people’s abilities to watch the local team from their homes was causing a slide in ticket sales. In those days, gate receipts were a big part of a team’s (and the league’s) revenue. So the NFL went crying to the people who control TV markets — the FCC. The FCC enacted rules saying that games that were not sold out couldn’t be aired on local television. It was a rule to protect teams. In 2014, it’s become a rule that hurts fans.

Blackout rules have been a constant point of consternation to fans (and critics) of the NFL. Now, that movement has a big name in its corner — Tom Wheeler. You might not know the name, but if you aren’t a fan of the current blackout rules for NFL football, Wheeler is the kind of guy you want on your team. Tom Wheeler happens to be the chairman of the FCC.

In a recent op-ed for USA Today, Wheeler came out against the current set of rules, calling them “anti-fan.” He states his case about how the rules are now out-of-date, and confirms that he has sent a proposal to the rest of the commission to change how blackouts are handled. Wheeler states he plans to vote on the new proposal on September 30th.

Whether this new proposal discusses online-streaming rules and regulations is unclear. As of now, even subscribers to the expensive NFL Sunday Ticket package on DirecTV cannot stream a local game on the app if they are not near a TV. Fox has worked around this with their Fox Sports Go application, but CBS has no such option as of now.

The first step is getting games on TV. Hopefully, if these regulations pass, some definitive standards can be set for online streaming, as well.

(Header photo via Kyle Nishioka)

Even veritable strangers to the world of soccer like myself know that one thing reigns prevalent over every game — the running. Some players have been tracked running over 9.5 miles in one game. Multiply that by 22 players, and you get a lot of footsteps. The energy corporation Shell is looking to turn those footsteps into storable power with the help of some new technology.

Shell announced today in a press release that they have completed refurbishing a soccer field in the Morro da Mineira community of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil that uses 200 specialized tiles buried underground to capture energy of the players running on the field. The energy is stored — along with energy generated by solar panels next to the field — and used to power the flood lights that allow play after dark.

“The pitch proves the potential and power when scientists and entrepreneurs focus their efforts to develop creative and innovative energy solutions,” Andre Araujo, the Shell Brazil Country Chair, explains. “By tapping into the world’s passion and interest in football, we aim to capture the attention of youngsters around the world so they think differently about energy and the opportunity of science studies and careers.”

The technology to achieve such feats was developed by a company called Pavegen. Pavegen’s CEO, Laurence Kemball-Cook, was a finalist of Shell’s LiveWIRE UK Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2011. The project is part of Shell’s Make the Future campaign that hopes to inspire young people to pursue careers in science and engineering.

The price of such a project was not disclosed, but similar implementations have been installed by Pavegen in places like the 2012 Olympics in Sochi and Heathrow Airport in London. While it’s fair to assume that impoverished neighborhoods will not all be getting new decked-out soccer pitches, the idea is certainly an intriguing one. If this technology can become easy and affordable enough to install in even a handful of the thousands of fields in Europe and South America, it may help offset some of the costs and energy consumption of a typical match.

Sports teams all over are looking at ways to conserve resources, to save both money and face with the public. There is no reason that such a thing can’t be installed in a new American football stadium in the near future. They don’t run as much as soccer players, but wouldn’t it be cool to know that your new beer was kept cold with help from your favorite player as he a broke a 40-yard touchdown run?

There’s a lot of talk about energy consumption and conservation going on these days. And while talking heads on cable news continue to yell at each other over the merits of their arguments, it’s nice to see that some people are taking the initiative to work on a solution. I don’t envision a future in which every pee wee soccer game is played on a magic energy-making field, but it’s a nice start.

It is not totally uncommon for one brand to be designated as the signifier of an entire product group. All tissues are known as Kleenex, all large trash containers as Dumpsters, all photocopies are Xeroxs. There is a whole Wikipedia article devoted to this, in fact. And while other lip balm makers probably aren’t thrilled that their product is usually called ChapStick, the effect is lessened by the fact that their product is on the same shelf as ChapStick. Consumers get to see the products side by side and compare packing and promises and pricing. Their sales aren’t ruined simply because Pfizer has a trademark on a catchier name.

This isn’t necessarily the case in the consumer electronics field. In this cutthroat world where competition is fierce, prices are high, and margins are low, brand recognition can be everything. We don’t ask friends and family what brand of cotton swab they use, but we’ll surely probe for opinions on tablets or laptops, making mental notes of the brands mentioned. When walking into a Best Buy or Fry’s, people are overwhelmed with choices. Having a trusted, recommended brand can be the difference between winning and losing a sale.

Getting their hooks into customers is everything for electronics makers. If someone is buying their first tablet, Google or Apple or Microsoft doesn’t just want the revenue from the device. They want to get consumers to be reliant on a specific ecosystem. Apps purchased in their app stores ensure revenue for these companies. This is basically Amazon’s entire model when it comes to their Fire tablets. Even free apps that consumers decide they can’t live without become sticking points when it’s time to upgrade devices. It’s not a hardware-based arms race. It’s a fight for brand loyalty.

And, at least right now, it’s a fight that Microsoft is losing badly. Apple and Google have their tentacles wrapped around the mobile market and up until now, Microsoft has had a hard time breaking in. This is part of the reason Microsoft entered an agreement with the NFL worth a reported $400 million to allow their Surface line of tablets on the sidelines of football games. These kinds of product placements aren’t all that new. Samsung has been doing it everywhere from the Oscars to the White House. Microsoft wants more people to know about their Surface. A lot of people watch NFL games. It all seems pretty straight forward. Except for one problem — TV announcers keep calling them iPads.

NFL announcers aren’t paid to be tech know-it-alls. They are hired for their expertise in announcing or their knowledge of the game (some jokes could be made here, but I’m leaving it alone for the time being). It’s a pretty safe bet to say that they are making these mistakes due to a lack of education, rather than malicious intent toward Microsoft. But that is part of the problem. If Microsoft is willing to drop that much cash on implementing Surfaces on the sidelines, wouldn’t they want to make sure the announcers know that? Yes, the announcers are technically employed by the TV network, but those are networks that have a tight and lucrative affiliation with the league. Certainly someone could have passed a few memos around. Forgetting the name is one thing, using the name of a direct competitor — a competitor that is kicking the butt of the product in question — is another.

There’s a bigger problem here, as well. The Surface is more than a tablet. Save for the ill-thought RT version from a few years ago, the Surface strives to out-feature the iPad. The Surface 3 is the most laptop-like tablet Microsoft has released. It even markets itself as a laptop replacement. However, the integration with the NFL doesn’t highlight those features — the features that set it apart from others in the space. The implementation simply calls for the Surfaces to show photos of previous plays (replacing those binders of black and white snapshots) with the ability to draw on said photos. That’s it. Microsoft is trying to raise eyebrows by showing off features a $200 Android tablet could do.

This is not entirely Microsoft’s fault. Security and fair-play considerations had to go into the integration. Therefore, no Internet connections are allowed (they are connected to a locked-down wireless network). The Surface allows (and promotes) pen input, but I have yet to see a player or coach using one. The case that adorns every Surface on the sideline covers up the kickstand — another selling point of the device. Nothing the NFL does with a Surface sets it apart from the crowd, especially from the iPads that NFL teams are already using.

In fairness, a lot of this couldn’t be helped. There isn’t a whole lot of use for tablets on the sideline to begin with. As far as application goes, Microsoft and the NFL have pretty much exhausted their options. Which makes the $400 million so curious in the first place. Could that money be better spent on more advertising? Perhaps product placement in movies or TV that can show off more of its features? This space is a tough one to break into, I get it. But as it stands, Microsoft’s partnership with the NFL isn’t enough to get the Surface recognized. Especially if announcers can’t even get the name right.

(Header photo via Kārlis Dambrāns)

The advent of NFL Sunday Ticket on DirecTV must have felt like a godsend for re-located football fans across the country. Never again would they have to comb through the TV schedule to see if their favorite team played in the local market, or perhaps got a Sunday night or Monday night game. All they had to do was pay a lot of money and plop down in front of the TV. But as our culture turns ever more mobile, we have different needs. It’s no longer good enough to have all the games on our TV. We want them with us wherever we go. Enter the NFL Sunday Ticket mobile app.

We’re officially through our first NFL Sunday of the 2014/15 season. My favorite team got drubbed on Thursday, so this left me some time to test out the NFL Sunday Ticket app for iOS. It’s hard to talk about the app without first discussing the price. It’s technically free in the app store, but you won’t be able to get past the login screen unless you are a subscriber of Sunday Ticket. And even then, you need to have the right version of Sunday Ticket. Spoiler: you need to more expensive one.

DirecTV offers two different packages in which to get games: Sunday Ticket and Sunday Ticket Max. The former will get you the bare-bones setup for $39.99 a month: all the games, the Mix Channel that allows you to watch eight (tiny) games at once, and various on-demand features. Sunday Ticket Max comes in at a whopping $54.99 a month, and adds the Red Zone channel (which is actually pretty cool) and the ability to watch games on a computer, phone, tablet, or gaming console (XBOX One, PS3, or PS4). So basically, it’s an extra $15/month to stream games on the go. Sunday Ticket bills for six months, so it’s an extra $90 on top of regular Sunday Ticket which is already on top of your DirecTV package. (It is possible to get Sunday Ticket without a DirecTV subscription, but there are a good deal of requirements that must be met.)

When you first open the app, you are greeted with an advertisement. Though it only lasts for a few seconds, it seems like an incredible kick in the pants to have to see an ad in a service you paid a great deal of money for. You are then greeted with the opening screen which has a video player on the right, and the list of current games  and scores on the left. Just tap a game to watch. It’s that easy.

Switching between games is very fast, a nice feature that other apps like MLB.tv lack. After tapping a game, the video was up in less than a second. This was true on WiFi or 4G, though the WiFi offered a higher-quality video at first. The 4G connection needed some time before the picture was HD-quality. There is a tradeoff, however, as there seems to be a significant delay in the streamed games and actual games. Using the Bills/Bears game as a test, the app stream clocked in at around 43 seconds behind the game on TV. The amount that this is a big deal depends on the watcher. If you’re just clicking around during commercials, it really doesn’t matter all that much. If you are following along on Twitter (on another device, presumably) it might.

The app offers a few other nice features, like on-demand highlights from the game you are watching listed below the video. If you turn to a game and want to see how the score ended up the way it is, the video evidence is right there. The app also pushes highlights from other games that appear as little widgets on the video screen. If you click one, you are sent to the highlight, then, when it’s over, immediately back to the game you were watching. The widgets only show for a few seconds, so they are not too intrusive, and the ability to see an insane down-the-field-catch on the fly is a nice thing.

Overall, the app performed well. I only had one instance of it misbehaving over the course of a couple hours of heavy game switching. The glitch was fixed on a close and relaunch of the program. It was annoying, but the app cooperated much more than some from other leagues (cough, cough, MLB). There was also a slight issue with audio where after switching to a different game, the audio would be loud for about three seconds, then drop in volume quite a bit. This seemed to happen on all games. The first three seconds weren’t painful, but the dropoff was so drastic that I often found myself adjusting the volume.

The Sunday Ticket app would work well for football junkies, fantasy junkies, gamblers, or people who can’t be homebound on a Sunday. The app works very well, and does exactly what you want it to do — stream all out-of-market games — with solid performance. For the fan who just wants to watch their team on their couch every Sunday, it might not be worth the price of Sunday Ticket Max. The addition of the Red Zone Channel is a bonus, but if the main goal is just to watch your team, you might be better off with the standard package. Going on just the features and reliability of the app alone, DirecTV has put out a fairly solid product.

Grade: A-