One of the more heralded features of Apple’s new iOS 9 was a feature called picture-in-picture (available on iPad only). It allows users to shrink down a currently-playing video down to the corner of the iPad screen so they can use other apps while the video still plays. I certainly piqued my interests — could I finally watch MLB.tv on my iPad with the ability to shoot off a quick tweet or email? On the first day of iOS 9’s public availability, my questions were answered.

Given MLB’s long-standing partnership with Apple, I half expected the feature to be available from the get-go. As I played with the new OS, I found this to not be the case.

Web videos do work pretty well in PiP on iOS9. No MLB At Bat or YouTube support yet, it seems. pic.twitter.com/zrb5oDfzyA

— David G Temple (@davidgtemple) September 16, 2015

However, later that day, the fine folks at MLB Fan Support set me straight.

@davidgtemple At Bat 8.5 has been released to the App Store with PiP support. Please continue to check for availability as the update… 1/2

— MLB Fan Support (@MLBFanSupport) September 17, 2015

@davidgtemple …propagates across Apple's servers. 2/2

— MLB Fan Support (@MLBFanSupport) September 17, 2015

Once I updated the app this morning, I was able to take it for a test drive.

I am tweeting and watching baseball on the same screen. pic.twitter.com/HSBfHGA52m

— David G Temple (@davidgtemple) September 17, 2015

To enable the feature, one only needs to click thte PiP icon when the video is playing. It immediately pops into the corner. Users can then adjust the size of the video, restore to full screen, or close it all together. If you have a new-ish iPad, just update to iOS 9 (if you haven’t already) and update the At Bat app.

The whole experience was very slick during my testing. As someone who likes using my iPad to watch MLB.tv, I’m excited to finally get the ability to use other apps while I’m watching. I often use commercial breaks to send a couple emails or see what’s going on with Twitter.

iOS 9 also offers a feature called slide over, which allows users to bring a condensed view of an app (like Mail or Twitter) onto the screen while their main app remains. I tested this with At Bat as well, but the slide over brings focus to the new app and pauses playback of the video.

Now, when I want to use another app during a commercial or even during a slow part of the game, I can send my video down to the corner of the screen and do what I need to get done.

Yes, it’s a feature that computers could do forever — and almost any device that plugs into a TV can play MLB.tv, freeing up the hands for other applications, but for those of us who like to watch baseball while doing the dishes or cooking dinner, this new way to multitask will prove to be very helpful. MLB Advanced Media has a strong relationship with Apple. Let’s hope that other sports get in on the picture-in-picture action soon.

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)

I remember not so long ago when I bought the original iPhone (yes, I’m one of those people), and I had a panic attack about emails being pushed to my device. You see, back in 2007, Gmail didn’t have default push notifications for mobile devices. That means, in essence, emails wouldn’t show up on your phone as soon as they were sent. Your phone had to … GULP … fetch emails from the server. This, at least at the time, lead to battery drain and yet another grievance to add to a list of things that ended up annoying iPhone 1 users after the shine wore off.

Eventually the iPhone got support for Exchange protocols, and Google cobbled together a sync client to help people get push email on their iPhones. MMS came a little later. All of these changes occurred because it became clear very quickly that people wanted instant communication. They wanted their messages and they wanted them yesterday. I was certainly one of those people. As I transitioned from my iPhone to my BlackBerry Bold (still the best phone I ever had and I will fight anyone who doesn’t think it was great for 2009), I was given the glorious world of BlackBerry Messenger. It was instant messaging over your data connection, so that you didn’t need to use up your text messages. REMEMBER WHEN PEOPLE WERE CONCERNED ABOUT AMOUNTS OF TEXT MESSAGES?! That’s how hungry for communication we were. We wanted our phones to buzz early and buzz often.

Now, I often keep my phone on silent and leave it sitting somewhere. At times I’ll wear my Pebble watch, but in all honesty if I don’t get the notification on my laptop (email, Gchat, Twitter, Slack message), I don’t really care. My wife knows to Gchat me to talk during the day. My parents will call if there’s an emergency. My phone has turned into a holding cell for crap I don’t care about — Snapchat, Instagram, and a horde of other messages I just swipe-to-ignore on instinct.

The main offenders, for me, are sports apps. This has a lot to do with the fact that I’m a sports fan, but the behavior of these apps has started to get out of control.

I’ll admit I play DraftKings every now and again — but honestly, quite rarely. The developers of the DraftKings app have taken umbrage with this and have taken to berating me with offers to enter all kinds of contests. Just today, I got an alert asking me if I was ready for football season. Considering I never once played a game of daily fantasy football, this seemed like an odd question. I barely care about real football, I ain’t chomping at the bit to get going on daily fantasy.

I use MLB At Bat specifically for their Android home screen widget and the Gameday Audio function. The notifications have become so granular, that I stopped trying to set them all and turned the whole thing off. I use CBS Sports’ app exclusively now, and even it gives me the business sometimes. It does a good job of letting me know when a game starts or there’s a lead change or what the final score is. I like that part. I use the app to do the same for the hockey team I care about, the football team I kind of care about, and I’m all set. CBS Sports’ app isn’t perfect, but I feel it does the best job of letting me know the stuff I want to know. That is, unless no-hit bids or possible cycles are involved.

I kind of get no-hitters. I don’t particularly care about them all that much, but a lot of people do. That being said, I don’t need notifications if a pitcher has a no-hitter going after six innings. It’s certainly an accomplishment, but I’m not that interested. If the pitcher pitches for my favorite team — the team I have designated in the settings of the app — then sure, let me know. But at least one rando is going to have something going once a week. I don’t need to know if it’s happening. And I especially don’t need to know when it’s been broken up. There are very few no-hitters per year. How about you let me know if something’s going on after seven innings, and let me ASSUME that it will die somehow before the night is over. Let me know when it happens, not when it doesn’t.

And alerts about the cycle can suck on a tailpipe. The cycle is a random event. It’s no more important than a hitter going five for five with two doubles and a homer. I mean, yeah, technically it probably leads to a slightly higher wPA, but come on. And I’ll come out and say it; I think MLB’s app is really good. It does a lot of great things and has nice features and is a slick overall experience. But I basically neutered it after about the 100th “so and so is a triple short of the cycle” alerts. As of this writing, 148 players have been a triple short of the cycle this year. I subscribe to the “MLB News” notifications for notes about trades, managers getting fired, dudes blasting four homers in a game, and so forth. I don’t want alerts about an event that happens about one a night. Stay out my lock screen, MLB.

For a while, CBS and MLB were both blowing up my phone at a frenzied pace before I actually took 20 minutes to tweak the things. Imagine if I had ESPN or Yahoo! Sports apps on my phone.

I understand that by downloading these apps, I’m asking for it a little. But here’s my plea, makers of sports apps: let us opt in. Make us go into the notification settings of the app and enable things we want to see rather than disable the things we don’t. No one has ever said “I like this app a lot, but I wish it would bother me more.” We have enough stuff going on. We love sports, but not this much. If we did, we’d tell you.

We find ourselves constantly looking for digital shovels to free ourselves from all the alerts — all the reminders of things we have to do and things we will have to do soon and things we should have taken care of weeks ago. Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I should just hide the dumb phone while I’m watching the game and enjoy the damn thing — only stare at one screen for a change. Perhaps I’m to blame. But sooner or later, I’m going to start cleaning house. That’s the kind of integrity kick (NSFW) I’m on.

(Header image via Nicolas Raymond)

The Roundup is a little late today, as I haven’t been able to pry myself away from this video for like four hours. Nevertheless, here are the stories from the sports-tech world that we found interesting this week.

We told you about the NFL’s deal with Twitter last week, but it appears as if it came at the expense of their Facebook partnership. Now we just have a different place to read stupid/misinformed/racist responses to highlight clips. Progress!

BuzzFeed (yes that BuzzFeed) has a pretty interesting look at the new RFID technology the NFL is implementing this year.

MLB.tv is on sale! If you’ve been on the fence in the past, or were waiting for pennant races to heat up to see all the games, you can’t afford not to get it now.

Conversely, if you are a TuneIn subscriber, you can now get MLB audio through the web site or app for freesies.

Kotaku has a neat video giving an overview of what a League of Legends tournament is like in one of sports’ most famous venues.

And now, if you live in the UK, you can bet on eSports matches. What a time to be alive.

On a scarier note, it looks like some dummies were planning to shoot up a Pokemon tournament. If I knew more about Pokemon, I’d make a hip reference here. Alas…

ESPN College Sports Extra is a new channel launching just in time for football season. No Comcast support as of yet, but many other providers should carry it.

This sounds like a story that should be about some Texas school, but a high school football team in upstate New York is using drones to record their practices.

Meanwhile, Tennessee football players are turning to tech to track their sleep patterns.

That’s all for this week. Have a good weekend, and be excellent to each other.

My skin is finally starting to recover from the wicked sunburn I got at the PGA Championship last weekend, but my brain is still thinking about what’s going on in the sports-tech world. Here are some stories we here at TechGraphs found interesting this week.

It looks like in-market baseball streaming is coming. Well, sort of. As of now, it only applies to subscribers of Fox Sports regional sports networks. Basically, if you subscribe to Fox Sports [Something] via cable or satellite, you’ll be able to stream a baseball game on your phone if you aren’t near a TV. So, no, an MLB.tv subscription won’t save you from the grips of local blackouts. It is a step in the right direction, but we’re still a ways away from watching your local team on your At Bat app.

FiveThirtyEight did some really interesting work with Pitchf/x data looking at the accuracy of umpires’ balls and strikes calls over time.

Ned Yost won’t be able to look up Pitchf/x data on his Apple Watch, because he still isn’t allowed to have a smartphone in the dugout. But MLB says it’s OK if he wants to wear his expensive timepiece in the dugout.

FanDuel, a daily fantasy sports company, has purchased numberFire, a fantasy sports recommendation site. Mark my words, FanDuel and DraftKings will merge and buy Disney and Google some day.

Engadget has a story about a really cool project involving detecting head trauma in football using special polymers in the helmet. While a motionless player is never a good sign, many players could suffer possible brain damage without having as drastic outward symptoms. Learning the level of force applied to the head just by looking at the helmet could be huge.

World Rugby is also looking to better assess head injuries, as well as enhancing their official review system with a new partnership with Hawk-Eye.

According to the Telegraph, Rugby is also getting in on that sweet, sweet analytics game.

The role of 3D printing has boomed in the world of prosthetics lately, and now it’s helping youngsters throw out first pitches at baseball games. Pretty cool.

Do you want a shirt that tracks your vitals while you work out?! Do you want to pay $300 for it?! If so, then Ralph Lauren has your back, friend.

That’s all for this week. If you need me, I’ll be bathing in aloe. Have a good weekend. Be excellent to each other.

And heat and humidity wave has swept the American Middle West this week, and my primary laptop is not particularly happy about it. Nevertheless, let’s beat the heat by catching up on some of the sports-tech stories we here at TechGraphs found interesting this week.

I talked about MLB Advanced Media’s plans after their deal with the NHL, and it appears as if the other shoe has dropped as MLBAM has officially been spun off as its own entity — BAM Tech.

Colt’s quarterback Andrew Luck integrated (auto-play warning) virtual reality into his offseason training. It seems as if Stanford ties can help in all sorts of ways.

Speaking of nerdiness and football, the Denver Broncos are bringing their head of analytics up in the coach’s booth this year, where he will help the staff with on-the-fly analysis. If it brings down the amount of punting in the NFL, I’m all for it.

And when a team decides to go for it, there’s a good chance you’ll hear about it on Twitter this season. The NFL has teamed up with the social media giant to bring more news and highlights into people’s Twitter feeds. Yay?

I’ll be attending the final round of the PGA Championship on Sunday, but don’t expect me to post any pictures of it. I mean, I probably wouldn’t anyway, but it appears as if the PGA is cracking down on un-credentialed photogs at their tournaments.

In esports news, the League of Legends Championship Tournament is featuring a woman for the first time. The worlds of sports and technology haven’t always been the most diverse, so it’s nice to see some, albeit gradual, change.

While we’re talking about gaming tournaments, it sounds like Blizzard might be making a push into that world.

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

Golf’s final men’s major championship of the year kicks off today in my home state of Wisconsin at Whistling Straits Golf Course. The main headline revolves around two young starts, Rory McIlroy and Jordan Speith, and their reluctant rivalry coming in to the tail end of the PGA season. Whether you are a fan of those two, other competitors in the field, or just like to follow along with the event, you have multiple options for staying in the know during the tournament.

Watching

If you plan on being a couch potato all weekend, then a mixture of the TNT network and CBS will have you covered. You can check the tournament’s main page for broadcasting schedules. If you have a cool boss or a strategically-placed cubicle, you can also use PGA.com to stream video on Friday. You will be able to watch the traditional broadcast (when available), or follow a featured group around the course.

The PGA is also offering dedicated apps for both Android and iOS. The apps will allow you watch much of the same offerings as the web site, though it does appear that the app will make you register with an email address. At the time of this writing, I couldn’t find out if cable/satellite credentials are necessary once CBS takes over coverage for the weekend.

Other Ways to Follow Along

If you’ll be out and about and unable to glue yourself to a screen, you will have other options. The aforementioned apps also have leaderboard functionality baked in, and also allow you to select favorite players to follow. You can set up alerts for these players, or for tournament news in general. A helpful buzz might be more convenient than having to pull out your phone every five minutes. The app also cultivates tweets for you, if you wish, so you can see what journalists and other big names in golf are saying about the course and players’ performances.

If you don’t feel like adding yet another app to your growing stable, any sports news app that you currently have should suffice in keeping you up to date. I am a big fan of the CBS Sports app in general, and as that network is covering the tournament, you can bet they’ll be on the ball with updates. The CBS app also provides cultivated tweets from people of import in golf.

A difficult course coupled with some challenging weather should make for some interesting golf. Whether one of the household names or a more unknown pro makes a run at the Wanamaker Trophy remains to be seen, but armed with the proper tech, you should have no problem following along.

It’s a busy time for sports these days. The baseball pennant chase is heating up, NFL training camps are starting, the EPL is about to start another season, and the final PGA major of the season begins in just a few days. We can understand if you missed news, so here are all the sports-tech stories we found interesting this week.

Daily fantasy sites are making money hand over fist, but not everything is sunshine and rainbows for them. DraftKings is facing some class-action lawsuits, and the Boston Globe has some details.

SAP teamed up with women’s professional tennis a while back to provide in-game stats and insight to coaches and players. It seem that, now, coaches will be able to use these numbers — via an iPad — on the court.

Our very own (and very brave) Bradley Woodrum experimented with the meal replacement program from Soylent to mixed reviews. Well, Soylent is back with a new formula and a new ready-to-drink delivery method.

Microsoft partnered up with the NFL last year to provide Surface Pro 2 tablets to teams to use on the sidelines. It went … not as well as expected. But, the Surfaces are back for another NFL season, this time in their fancy Pro 3 form.

While on the topic of Microsoft, they also debuted a fancy new app for both Windows 10 and the Xbox One. At the heart of the new tech is something called Next Gen Stats, a hyper-granular replay system utilizing RFID chips embedded within players’ shoulder pads.

EPL teams are getting their own emoji on Twitter this season. So … that’s a thing.

Finally, Disney’s Bob Iger had an interview with the Wall Street Journal in which he opined that ESPN will be a direct-to-customer product at some point down the road. We, of course, have figured this for some time, but it’s nice to hear that from a muckety-muck. No news on when that will happen yet, of course.

That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend, and be excellent to each other.

By now, you may have heard that the NHL has partnered up with MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM) in a new distribution deal. It’s a bold move for both leagues, and one that shows that the NHL is serious about increasing their online presence and offerings. But hidden in the details are even bigger revelations about the future of MLBAM. From the CBS article:

NHL COO John Collins would not confirm these figures, but word is the league valued the deal at $200 million per year.

The annual breakdown: a $100M rights fee to the NHL, $20M in savings from the league not having to invest in the capital resources/expertise it would take to go on its own, and $80M in equity in MLBAM’s technology business.

The equity portion may not figure in revenue calculations for the purposes of the salary cap. “We were told to expect $120M per year in added revenue… $4M per team,” one governor said.

This new deal is indicative of a fairly serious pivot. MLBAM made a name for itself as a content partner — a company that provided the infrastructure for those who wished to offer online content streaming. The massive system that they built to host their MLB.tv service was essentially leased out to the likes of ESPN, HBO, and WWE.

But with the NHL deal, MLBAM is no longer serving as the back end. They aren’t the ones being paid for hosting, they are paying for distribution rights. And they are buying everything lock, stock, and barrel. Besides being in charge of streaming NHL Center Ice, MLBAM is taking over NHL Network, NHL.com, and individual team web sites. Basically, if you want to view NHL content online, you have to go through MLBAM.

And there’s more. According to Forbes:

Along with the deal, the NHL would have equity in what is now called BAM Tech, a wholly new digital company that will be spun-off of MLB Advanced Media.

There’s the other shoe. What once started as a distribution channel for baseball games has become a lucrative technology business.

But I doubt this is the end for BAM Tech. They could certainly take their subscription fees from baseball and hockey fans along with their licensing fees from HBO and be content being a very profitable company for some time. But if that was the plan, they would have just taken the NHL’s money for distribution rather than paying them for the rights. Sure, they’ll make money from Center Ice and the NHL Network, but it could be indicative of a bigger move.

The “problem” with MLBAM’s business model is that it’s easily repeatable. Any company with enough capital and infrastructure can get in on the action. What MLBAM has that others don’t is partnerships. Right now, it works with two major sports leagues, *edit: I originally neglected to mention that MLBPA also hosts streaming for the PGA*, the biggest name in professional wrestling, the largest sports media company in the world, and the most popular premium cable channel. If one were inclined to, say, start their own over-the-top online TV provider, this would be a pretty good start.

It’s speculation at this point, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see a BAM app available on smartphones and set-top boxes in the near future. While they’d be competing against the likes of Sling TV and PlayStation Vue, the already-formed partnerships along with their world-class technology platform would certainly make them a formidable opponent. And don’t forget that HBO owns Cinemax and is a subsidiary of Time Warner (which just merged with Charter)*, while ESPN happens to be owned by Disney. There are a lot of fingers in a lot of pies here.

* – a studious commenter pointed out my mistake here.

Say you want to pay $120 for MLB.tv. What if BAM Tech could offer that plus HBO, NHL games, the Disney channel, and ESPN offerings for an extra $40 a month? Would the availability of live sports be enough to convince you to cut the cord?

MLBAM already built the gun, and now they’re starting to buy the bullets. There isn’t much stopping the once-quaint sports video service from becoming one of the biggest players in TV.

The MLB trade deadline has delayed us a bit, but we’re back to talk about all the sports-tech news we found interesting this week.

Engadget has a nice writeup regarding the money involved in esports these days. Want a hint? It’s a lot.

PGA Tour Live debuted this week. The new streaming service will allow golf fans to stream Thursday and Friday rounds of PGA events that usually aren’t aired on TV. It works on most devices out of the box. It’s a young technology, but it will be interesting to see where it goes.

It sounds like some prominent DOTA 2 players got their Steam accounts hacked. It doesn’t appear to be a wide-spread attack, but you might want to change your password anyway.

DraftKings — you guessed it — raised MORE money, and is looking to spend a bunch of it with FOX Sports. The NFL season is just around the corner, so expect to see a nauseating amount of ads running during games this year.

We talked a little about the use of robot umpires this week, and Wired has some more details.

Remember those new Converse Chuck Taylors that Nike is releasing? Well, it turns out they may be pretty great.

Nike is also working on some soft of hood that athletes can wear to keep themselves cool. It looks weird as Hell, but athletes might not care if it helps prevent overheating.

It appears that nothing is sacred these days. Technology is even sliding into the world of fishing. And it’s not just for the pros either. Amateurs can get in on the game.

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