FanGraphs’ Nathaniel Grow recently unearthed an interesting tidbit buried deep in a court filing involving Major League Baseball. Per Grow’s findings, it appears as if MLB is planning on changing up its MLB.tv service.

“beginning next season MLB will make single-team, out-of-market streams available for purchase (alongside the out-of-market package) on MLB.TV.”

It’s a feature that both the NHL and the NBA offer already, but it seems to be a harbinger of a sea change in the world of sports fandom — it’s now easier and cheaper for fans to be region-agnostic when it comes to picking their favorite sports teams.

Not so long ago, and for a very long time, if one found an affinity for a certain sport, their best bet — by far — was to follow the local team. That is, they were best served following the team that held rights to the local TV and radio markets. Those were the teams that kids could watch, listen to, and follow in the local papers (insert “you see, newspapers were these things…” joke here).

Now, fans have a choice, if they want it. It’s probably true that the ensconced fan — those that have been loyal to a team for most of their lives — aren’t budging on this one. But for young fans, or fans of any age that are looking to get into a new sport, it’s a liberating proposition.

The idea behind MLB.tv and NBA League Pass seemed always to revolve around the idea of the misplaced fan — the Cleveland native who was forced to move because of work/love or the offspring of the Yankees fan who moved to the South way back. It was, and certainly still is, a way for one to follow thier favorite team from afar. And these services are great tools for that. But they are also great tools for those looking to play the field — no pun intended. These are also built for the kid in Chicago who loves Giancarlo Stanton or the L.A. native who is a big fan of P.K. Subban. We are no longer tied to our local media markets. We can be free agents.

Again, not too long ago, if people were fans of out-of-market teams, those teams tended to be what’s known in the gambling realm as “public teams.” Think the St. Louis Cardinals or Dallas Cowboys or Chicago Bulls or Boston Bruins. These were the teams that got the most air time of their league’s respective Games of the Week that played on network (and later cable) television. If you didn’t want to follow the local team, your best bet was to latch onto a team that was on TV a lot. No more. Want to follow the Flames in Okalahoma? How about the Padres in upstate New York? No problem. Even college sports are adapting a bit, though only through conference-specific packages.

I won’t get into the specifics, because I already have, but a few years ago I was interested in finding myself a new baseball team. Ten years ago, this wouldn’t really be possible. I would have been stuck with whatever team was playing in my market (i.e. the Twins). But technology allowed me to shake off the shackles of the default.

It’s a microcosm of what technology did to commerce in general. I do believe that the rise of online retailers has been a hindrance to local businesses when it comes to the subjects of scale and wholesale-buying power, but it’s also done wonders for some. I love building PCs, but I could not imagine what I would do if Best Buy were my only option for buying PC parts. I’m lucky enough to have a Microcenter in my town, but if I didn’t I could always turn to Newegg or Tiger Direct to fill my needs. I could shop around.

The same now goes for sports fans. Think your team is dumb for supporting a domestic abuser? Sick of the local baseball team’s refusal to adopt even a modicum of advanced statistics in their daily operations? Go somewhere else. Find a better option.

In the grand scheme of things, we still have little power. TV money rules the kingdom, and blackout rules and other nonsense will still burden us peasants for some time, but there’s some light shining through. Yes, it will cost us money. Yes, the delivery methods aren’t perfect. But we are slowly being allowed to make our own decisions in the realm of fandom. We aren’t tethered to the local club. We might want to be. It’s usually easier and makes for accessible small talk with other locals. But we don’t have to.

My name is David Temple. I live in Minneapolis and I watch the Houston Astros during baseball season and the Edmonton Oilers during hockey season. I am the new face of the sports fan. It’s breaking my bank, but it’s lifting my spirits. Long live team-specific streaming packages.

(Image via Bernard Spragg)

Last week, a DeKalb County, Georgia resident, Aaron Hodge, filed two proposed class action lawsuits in federal court in Atlanta against daily fantasy sports (DFS) websites FanDuel and DraftKings in an attempt to recover money he lost playing games on both sites, which, he alleges, amount to little more than “illegal gambling.”

As DFS gained popularity and attention this summer and fall, in large part due to broad advertising campaigns by both FanDuel and DraftKings, users may have noticed that residents of a small number of states– including Washington, Louisiana, Arizona, and Iowa– were not allowed to play games for cash prizes.

While these early restrictions did little to slow the momentum of DFS and its two largest sites, the industry recently has come under more substantial public scrutiny following New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman’s initiation of an investigation of and request for an injunction against FanDuel, DraftKings, and Yahoo!, which also hosts DFS games.

Last week’s suits by Hodge are believed to be the first legal challenges to FanDuel and DraftKings brought by a private citizen. (Hodge’s attorneys have since filed a similar lawsuit in Alabama.) Hodge’s complaints (available here and here) are basically identical. The essence of his allegations is that the DFS games offered by FanDuel and DraftKings constitute unlawful gambling under Georgia law and he therefore is entitled to restitution for his losses at both sites. Hodge does not reveal how much money he lost playing DFS, but he does allege that the aggregated losses of the proposed classes — comprised of “All persons in the State of Georgia who participated in Defendant’s DFS, deposited money in a [FanDuel/DraftKings] account, and lost money in any game or contest” —  exceed $5 million in each case.

Hodge’s complaints allege only state law claims, and the legal centerpiece of these cases is O.C.G.A. § 13-8-3, Georgia’s gambling contracts statute. That law provides that all “[g]ambling contracts are void” and that a loser may recover his or her losses from a winner under a gambling contract:

(a) Gambling contracts are void; and all evidences of debt, except negotiable instruments in the hands of holders in due course or encumbrances or liens on property, executed upon a gambling consideration, are void in the hands of any person.

(b) Money paid or property delivered upon a gambling consideration may be recovered from the winner by the loser by institution of an action for the same within six months after the loss and, after the expiration of that time, by institution of an action by any person, at any time within four years, for the joint use of himself and the educational fund of the county.

Hodge argues that DFS contests on FanDuel and DraftKings are not skill games but rather games of chance; that these sites therefore are doing little more than taking bets on sporting events; and therefore he and the sites are parties to gambling contracts for which the user entry fees constitute the gambling consideration that Hodge is entitled to recover under O.C.G.A. § 13-8-3(b).

Among his other claims, Hodge also contends that the sites violate Georgia criminal laws pertaining to commercial gambling and the advertising thereof, and he argues that the sites’ claims that their DFS contests were lawful games fraudulently induced him to participate.

An interesting allegation Hodge sprinkles throughout his complaints is that both FanDuel and DraftKings “failed to disclose the use of ‘bots’ or fake accounts designed to operate as ‘shills'”:

Upon information and belief, [FanDuel/DraftKings] uses “bots” or fake accounts to act as “shills” in the gambling scheme in order that certain winnings go to the “house” ([FanDuel/DraftKings]), and also creating the illusion to the [FanDuel/DraftKings] user of interacting with a gambler on equal footing. The employment of “shills” (or “bots”/fake accounts) employs a similar concept to those “shills” that are permitted by law in states with casinos such as Nevada, but Georgia does not permit any gambling, never mind the use of “shills” in the form of “bots” or otherwise fake accounts. And regardless, in states where such devices are employed, there is no illusion, nor effort to create the illusion, that the “house” is not winning the losing bets (in the form of monies that are attributed to “shills”) and in the case of [FanDuel/DraftKings], there is no disclosure of the use of “shills” nor any legal basis for doing so in Georgia.

One of the first procedural hurdles Hodge will need to clear to proceed with his proposed class actions in federal court are the sites’ terms of use. He wants to avoid the applicability and enforcement of these terms of use because they contain arbitration, jurisdiction, and venue provisions that would neutralize his ability to maintain these class action lawsuits against FanDuel (terms of use) and DraftKings (terms of use) in court. On one hand, Hodge is arguing that a contract — albeit a gambling contract that’s void under Georgia law — existed between him and each DFS site. On the other hand, though, he argues that the sites’ terms of use are not part of any contract or binding agreement between him and each site.

If Hodge is able to keep these lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, where he has filed them, his further success will depend upon his ability to convince the court that the DFS contests FanDuel and DraftKings host really are gambling, not skill games. On this point, in addition to the well-publicized New York AG investigation and Nevada’s determination that DFS constitutes gambling, he may find some in-state assistance as well. Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens now has opened his own investigation into the legality of DFS, and the court in Hodge’s cases could find Olens’ conclusions on the matter persuasive.

Another issue possibly lurking in these cases is preemption, a legal concept based on the supremacy of federal law over state law. In general terms, preemption means that if a federal law and a state law conflict, the federal law controls. On the question of whether their sites’ contests constitute gambling, FanDuel and DraftKings may argue that their contests are permissible under the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), a federal law that prohibits certain activities and transactions connected with betting and wagering. Part of that Act provides that “[t]he term ‘bet or wager’ . . . does not include . . . participation in any fantasy or simulation sports game . . . in which (if the game or contest involves a team or teams) no fantasy or simulation sports team is based on the current membership of an actual team that is a member of an amateur or professional sports organization . . . and that meets the following conditions:

Meanwhile, as legal scrutiny over DFS heats up in the United States, FanDuel and DraftKings are hoping to find friendlier regulatory environs abroad. Some wonder whether their expansion into the United Kingdom may come back to haunt them stateside, however. Calling themselves “gambling software” companies, both sites have applied to U.K. regulators for gambling licenses. DraftKings received a gambling license in August, while FanDuel, which applied this month, still is waiting on a decision. DraftKings’ Chief Internal Officer says he doesn’t see a contradiction between the site’s representations in the U.S. and U.K., but American officials, including the judge or judges handling Hodge’s lawsuits, may see things differently.

(Header image via Karsten Bitter)

Behind the Code is an interview series centered around the sports-related web sites we use every day.

For many college basketball fans, Ken Pomeroy’s kenpom.com is the first–and often the last–word in statistics and analytics.

Pomeroy’s efficiency-based team ratings have received praise from the likes of Nate Silver and have led Pomeroy to consulting opportunities for several college and professional teams. Yet they only scratch the surface of the info “KenPom” provides, including player comparisons, posts on college basketball trends, and preseason game-by-game projections — the latter of which just went live for 2015-16.

TechGraphs writer Brice Russ spoke recently with Pomeroy about what’s new and what’s next for kenpom.com.

Brice Russ: What’s new on KenPom.com for the 2015-16 season? It seems like every fall, there’s another half-dozen features on the site. What should we be looking for this time around?

Ken Pomeroy: The main offseason addition was expanding the player stats to break out performance against different levels of competition.

That is an extension of the conference-only player stats and minutes tracker that I added towards the end of last season. I’ve added some search boxes to the navigation bar so people can find teams and coaches a little more quickly.

There are some other things on the burner for this season, but they’ll be surprises for people when they appear. I’m usually reluctant to call my shots because I don’t want to over-promise something.

BR: What’s your motivation when you’re adding new stats to KenPom? Are you looking to incorporate what you think will be most popular? Most useful? Anything you’ve added as a result of your consulting work?

KP: There’s definitely a selfish motive. Usually, I’m thinking of things that I’d like to see, but that’s also consistent with doing something that will be useful to an audience interested in analytics.

I’m not opposed to adding what I’d call trivial stats that have little analytical value. I mean, I have team free throw percentage defense on the site. But I try to avoid adding trivial stats that might be misconstrued as useful. I always get a few requests for home/road splits and largely the differences in home/road performance over the course of the brief college hoops season is noise and not useful from a predictive standpoint, so that’s why they aren’t on the site.

BR: KenPom is unquestionably one of the oldest and most well-established sports analytics sites around, particularly in the basketball arena.

How have you seen the perception and role of analytics change in sports over the years, especially in the public eye? Has the field grown more competitive, or does it feel like there’s still plenty of ground for everyone to cover?

KP: It’s definitely more accepted than it was a decade ago. A lot more people understand the concept and utility of points per possession. But then again, almost every broadcaster and coach still cites regular field goal percentage to measure shooting accuracy, so it’s not like there has been a revolution.

As far as competition, there are certainly more people coming out of college with the goal of working in sports analytics. But it seems like most of the people interested in basketball gravitate to the NBA level, where the data is so much more granular and there are fewer teams to cover.

BR: One of the biggest stories for the upcoming season is the introduction of the new 30-second shot clock. Presumably, this will lead to an increase in tempo, but how else do you expect this to change the game from a metrics standpoint?

You took a brief look at the clock before it was tested in last year’s NIT; have you had a chance to look at the data since then?

KP: I haven’t looked at it any further, although my series of blog posts over the summer was partly inspired by trying to develop a theoretical framework to figure out how we got to this point. And what I found was some evidence that the offense deserves a good chunk of the blame for the slowing of the game.

The cool thing is that with 200+ games during the opening weekend we’ll get a real good idea of the impact of the clock (and the expanded charge circle) fairly quickly.

BR: 2015 will mark the fifth season that team-level KenPom data has gone behind the paywall. Is it fair to say this has been a successful experiment at this point? Any data or trends you can provide about subscriptions?

KP: It’s worked out well. I had a choice between appealing to a mass audience and blasting people with ads, or putting up the paywall and keeping the site clean and limiting the audience to folks who really wanted a source for advanced stats.

BR: What’s next?

KP: Usually the events of the season dictate this, so it’s difficult to say.  But I’m sure it won’t take long for something interesting to happen.

Thanks to Ken for speaking with us! You can follow Ken on Twitter at @kenpomeroy and, of course, at kenpom.com.

Slovenia probably isn’t the first country you’d expect new baseball technology to come from. But they do have a baseball league and a national team (trounced by such powerhouses at Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Slovakia at this summer’s European championship qualifiers). And it’s this Balkan country that’s produced the Scoutee, a handheld radar that its creators hope will help those just learning the game measure themselves.

According to Scoutee, the first prototype of the device was created last summer. Design was completed over the past year, and the device is now available for pre-order through a Kickstarter campaign. Of the four co-founders, only chief executive officer Miha Uhan came into the project with experience playing baseball. I asked if his fellow Scoutee developers even knew about baseball when they started the project.

“They sort of knew,” he said. “The hardest thing for our team was actually the technical point, not the baseball point.”

Naturally, the product is small, weighing around half a pound. The Scoutee can attach to a tripod or be clipped to a fence, but also ships with a magnetic sticker so users can attach the device directly to their smartphone. Inside is a Doppler radar transceiver, hardware to perform amplification and other signal processing, and a low-energy Bluetooth transmitter to send the readings to the user’s phone or tablet. Scoutee also claims a battery life of up to six hours, and a range of up to 130 feet. For most amateur games (which seems to be Scoutee’s target demographic), that should be just enough for someone positioned just behind the backstop, which is supposed to be 60 feet from home plate (or about 120 feet from the pitching rubber).

The most common question Scoutee fields is related to the device’s accuracy. Scoutee claims to be accurate to within one mile per hour, based on side-by-side tests with traditional radar guns. Tests have been performed with both human pitchers and (because the pitchers available during testing never broke 90 mph), with a high-velocity pitching machine to test the device’s accuracy at speeds over 100 mph. Additional ballistic tests are planned by Scoutee’s technical team to establish the device’s accuracy for objects moving at a known speed.

Though designed with baseball applications in mind, the Scoutee is at heart a radar gun, and thus has a number of other potential applications. Scoutee’s Kickstarter comments page is filled with suggestions for other uses, all of which Uhan claims are possible with the existing hardware but may require additional algorithm and app development.

“We got requests from national ski associations, they want to measure how fast their skiiers go,” Uhan said. “We even got requests or emails from people who want to measure the speed of cars in their neighborhood.”

Uhan, along with Scoutee’s chief marketing officer Majda Dodevska, have been touring the United States since early September to spread the word about the product. Scoutee has made appearances at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Hardware Alley, and will be present at this week’s Hashtag Sports Fest. Scoutee is also making contacts with companies interesting in importing Scoutee measurements into their existing apps (though Dodevska wouldn’t mention any specific organizations at this time).

“We’re definitely open to any type of cooperation,” Dodevska said. “If anyone wants to talk to us about anything, we’re here.”

Any down time the team has is spent meeting with coaches, scouts, players, and parents, demonstrating their product and collecting feedback. Uhan said prospective users are always surprised when first introduced to the technology.

“It seemed really strange that if it is technically possible then nobody has done it before, and that’s what we heard over the last 12 months,” Uhan said. “Everybody we talked to and we showed our prototype was like, ‘Okay, you must be kidding me right? This thing exists already,’ and we’re like, ‘No! No!'”

Uhan’s moment of inspiration was a long time coming. His first introduction to baseball came on a 1997 trip to the United States, when he went with his family to a game at Jacobs Field. That was the Indians team that lost in Game 7 to the Florida Marlins, facing a Mariners team that included Alex Rodriguez, Randy Johnson, Edgar Martinez, and Ken Griffey, Jr. Uhan pestered his American relatives with questions, and brought a love of the game back home with him.

“It was so, so nice to be there in the stadium and to watch the game and to experience that all,” he said.

Once back in Slovenia, Uhan began playing with a local team. Soon after, he was invited to join the national team (“You get noticed because there is not a lot of competition,” Uhan admitted) and became a pitcher. Within a year — and before he even understood all the rules of baseball — Uhan was traveling with the junior national team to a tournament in Switzerland.

By the time he was in high school, Uhan was sitting mid-80s, playing for the senior-level national team, and traveling with his coach to the MLB elite camps. One of his teammates played for a bit in the Mexican League, but Uhan wanted to play college ball in the U.S. He borrowed a directory of colleges from the American embassy and emailed every athletic department in the book. Of the thousands of emails he sent, only a handful got back to him. But the responses discouraged him further.

“Everybody said, ‘Yeah, sure, just send us some stats, send us some videos,'” Uhan said.

With no statistics available from his national team days, and no video or scouting reports available to him, Uhan couldn’t make an impression on his would-be college coaches. He ended up attending the University of Ljubjana in the Slovenian capital, and his baseball career ended. As a lecturer in the school’s faculty of economics, Uhan was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and found inspiration in his former passion. He soon after partnered with fellow faculty members who specialized in electrical engineering (especially radar systems), and they began developing what would become Scoutee.

“Because we don’t have a technical background, we contacted some people who we knew in Slovenia that had the hardware knowledge,” Uhan said. “It was a challenge, but if it wasn’t a challenge then probably somebody would have done it before.”

Uhan recalled that, in his playing days, the radar gun was a rare sight. The only one available to the national team was old and on its last legs, so Uhan and his fellow pitchers didn’t have many opportunities to measure their progress. Scoutee’s goal is to make these sorts of metrics accessible to anyone with a smartphone, with the hope of growing baseball in fledgling markets like Slovenia.

“We’re actually crowdsourcing the scouting process, that’s the idea,” Uhan said.

We all know about StatCast and all the amazing data it (usually) collects. We’re still in a bit of a honeymoon period with this new system. We realize the importance of it, but we’re not quite sure what to do with the data. We don’t yet know what a good route efficiency rating actually is. We don’t know how fast outfielders or infielders should be throwing the ball, or what an optimal speed while base running is. This information is all very new. In ten years, we’ll almost certainly be laughing at how little we knew about the relevance of these numbers. While we sort all this out, however, MLB is working on new uses for StatCast that has more direct relevance to fans and perhaps even the game itself.

Amazon recently held their AWS re:Invent conference for developers that utilize the Amazon Web Services platform. AWS is a very powerful tool, and is a big driver in making Amazon actually profitable. Developers utilize Amazon’s plethora of computing and storage power to run their web sites, data processing, and file storage through AWS. It powers Netflix. It powers Spotify. And, if you’ve watched any modicum of baseball on television, you’ll know that it powers MLB’s StatCast product.

During the re:Invent conference, Amazon held a keynote address that featured some of the new uses of the platform as well as some words from some of their biggest clients. The last presenter (and the most relevant to sports fans) was MLB Advanced Media. You can see MLBAM’s presentation here, but much of it is a rehash of what StatCast actually does — the data it collects, the uses for it, etc. However, Joe Inzerillo, EVP and CTO of MLBAM, did take some time to show off some future updates coming to StatCast.

The first featured using StatCast to enhance the MLB At Bat app. At Bat and its Gameday feature is great in a pinch — if you want to see pitch-by-pitch results of a baseball game, but can’t catch it live or on TV. It’s a pretty neat service that is offered for free for anyone with the At Bat app or online via a web browser. But for all it’s usefulness, Gameday hasn’t changed much since its inception. The graphics are a little better, and features like box scores and play summaries have been added over the years, but it’s still basically a picture of a batter and a strike zone with text-based updates regarding the results of the play. Now that StatCast is being brought into the fold, MLBAM is hoping to up the Gameday experience.

Inzerillo hinted at some new ways Gameday will be able to integrate StatCast data into both the visual representation of the play and the corresponding statistics. Now, rather than seeing a simple “In play, run(s)” update, fans will be able to see the flight and location of the hit, its speed off the bat, and all the other numbers that StatCast tracks.

The exact integration of this feature has yet to be announced, and perhaps yet to be determined. Will these graphics just show up in the Gameday feed or will they be separate videos? Will this be a significant hit to people’s data limits if they’re watching on their phones? These new Gameday features certainly seem promising, but proper implementation will be key for fans to get the most out of the experience.

Another StatCast implementation has more to do with the video presentation. MLBAM is planning on ways to incorporate 3D camera technology to get a better look at plays in the field.

Every regional sports network has their own instant replay system, of course, but MLBAM is hoping to enhance that by giving their view on close plays. The example from the keynote is a little vanilla, but this could have big ramifications for plays at the plate, out/safe calls on the base paths, and even trap calls in the outfield.

This might also be a huge boon to the instant replay system. Right now, umpires are tied to using TV broadcast footage to review plays. If MLBAM had their 3D system in place in every stadium, they could leverage that system to better help umpires get the view of close plays from every possible angle. It might not be the silver bullet that totally redeems the maligned system, but it shows promise as a very solid feature addition.

MLBAM hints that some of this tech might be ready for the 2016 season, though I personally am not holding my breath. Regardless, it shows that MLBAM is committed to leveraging StatCast to do more than just present fancy numbers that we don’t understand or enhancing a few choice highlights. If they continue this push to utilize their technology to create a better presentation of the game, we may soon wonder how we watched baseball without it.

(Big shout out to MK for the link to the video)

Not so long ago (read: last year), fans who didn’t  feel like ponying up for a NFL Sunday Ticket TV package to follow their favorite out-of-market teams had an option to listen to radio streams from around the country via a service called NFL Audio Pass. The idea was similar to what MLB offers with their Gameday Audio package — pay a nominal fee (NFL Audio Pass was thirty bucks for the season) and get the ability to listen to the football team of your choosing via the web or an app. Things have changed a bit this year, but a third party service is stepping in to provide affordable NFL audio streams.

NFL Audio Pass was killed off this season, instead being rolled into a new service called NFL Game Pass. Game Pass costs $99.99 and allows subscribers to stream television feeds of all NFL teams as soon as their games conclude. It also gives access to games from previous seasons and includes audio streaming features that Audio Pass used to provide. Depending on one’s level of fandom, Game Pass could be a good deal. But for those wanting just the audio streams are left with a pretty serious price hike. There is no “official NFL” option to just stream radio feeds. Tweets and emails to NFL media customer support regarding what other options fans might have all went unanswered.

Enter TuneIn, the Internet radio service. TuneIn allows users to stream real radio stations from all over, including local stations. A premium subscription brings other features, including access to 600+ commercial-free music stations, MLB baseball and Premier League soccer, and even audiobooks. And now, TuneIn has brought the NFL into the fold. For $7.99 a month, users get (along with previously-mentioned features) access to both home and away radio broadcasts of all the NFL teams, Spanish language broadcasts, and a dedicated NFL channel devoted to news and talk shows. A look-in show, a la Red Zone, is also coming. Per the press release:

Starting in November, TuneIn Premium subscribers will have access to a seven-hour-long Sunday broadcast that will feature live analysis, stats, and drop-ins of local radio coverage for all Sunday games airing in-progress. The live look-in show will be live Sundays from 1pm ET – 8pm ET.

With the death of Audio Pass, TuneIn provides the best option for those who only require the audio feed. SiriusXM has long provided NFL game streaming via car radios, online, and apps, but the cheapest package that includes such options is the All Access package, which runs $20 a month.

In the NFL, like with pretty much every sport, video is key. It’s the TV networks that are inking the big deals with teams. MLB.tv basically created MLB Advanced Media, or at least made it what it is today. People like watching sports. So maybe an audio-only option for the NFL isn’t the biggest of deals. But those that subscribed to Audio Pass probably did for a good reason. Either they were stuck in a car or office on Sundays, or the very high cost of NFL Sunday Ticket was too much to follow their favorite out-of-market teams. Blackout rules and streaming availability/costs have long been a point of contention for pretty much every major sport. While NFL Audio Pass wasn’t a perfect solution, it was at least some kind of solution.

Good on TuneIn for stepping in and adding NFL game audio to their repertoire. It’s a nice feature addition to current subscribers, and should bring in former Audio Pass subscribers as well.  And perhaps most importantly, it provides a not-expensive and not-illegal method for fans to stay up-to-date on the goings on in TV markets other than their own. It’s a bit of a shame that a third party had to step in to provide this access to the nation’s most popular sport, but TuneIn’s something is certainly better than nothing.

(Image via Keith Allison)

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)

Apple’s release of iOS 9 and its ability to allow content blocking on Safari has once again sparked conversation about blocking online advertising. Every now and again, the topic of ad blocker use crops up in the tech news circles. There are arguments made, grandiose solutions proposed, and villains identified. It’s the sites’ fault for allowing such terrible ads. It’s the ad networks’ fault for presenting such hideous and annoying material. It’s Google’s fault, it’s Apple’s fault, it’s Facebook’s fault. There are a lot of reasonable solutions out there — a switch back to native advertising, a rise in reader contributions, more reliance on direct partnerships — and what eventually shakes out will be some combination of those and some other things and it will only work for a little while. It’s a war of attrition between ad networks, content producers, and readers. But while we all contemplate the Future Of Online Publishing, let us not forget the actions we take today and how they affect the sites we use on a regular basis.

In fairness to the reader, it should be noted that these words will be a little biased. It’s always sticky for writers to opine on the mechanisms that directly affect their pocketbooks. Also, many of the sites I mention are staffed by acquaintances of mine, have paid me money to do things for them, or are just places I respect. Considering the audience, most of this is probably understood, but it should be mentioned.

The ad blockers you install on your browser are both simple and complex. The idea is simple. The blocker scans the code being loaded into the browser, identifies code (usually JavaScript or Flash) that has previously been identified as advertising, and disallows it from loading. The back end — the expanding database of advertising code — can be more complex, but the mechanism is fairly straight forward. These tools stop advertising code from loading. Advertising code can greatly increase the amount of tiem it takes a page to load. It can royally screw up readability and navigation of web pages. It can even install malicious code on your machine. It’s nasty and silly and annoying and nobody likes it. But, to overuse a common trope, it’s the cost of doing business.

Any “free” web site — a web site that does not charge a subscription fee to view its content — needs to make money to run. Bandwidth and server fees need to be covered. Writers have to (hopefully) be paid. Administrative fees have to be taken care of. It’s a business. In lieu of charging you directly, they allow advertisers to display content on their sites. The advertisers pay the web site for the right to do so.

Way back when, advertisers would make direct deals with web sites. Company X would call up Site Y and strike up a deal to advertise their products on the site. This took time and energy, and as the web became exponentially bigger and creating content became easier, this model became quite inefficient. This is where ad networks stepped in. Instead of Site Y working with Company X, Site Y did deals with Network A. Network A did tons of deals with all kinds of companies, and gave Site Y some JavaScript to insert into their code so that Network A could take care of all the rest. Network A would charge the companies, take a little off the top, and pay out Site Y. That’s pretty much where we stand now.

And as the web grew and grew, content expanded rapidly. This created more platforms for ad networks, and drove down the prices that those networks paid to content creators. These days, most sites get about $0.002 per impression or thereabouts. There are certainly other ways for sites to create revenue, but ads don’t pay as much as they used to, and they never paid a whole lot to begin with.

The rise in online advertising also meant that sellers had to do more to get their ads noticed. Ads got goofier, videos began auto-playing, cookies started tracking visitors’ traffic to help in delivering content the robots thought the reader would be interested in. It all culminated in the hot mess we know online advertising to be now. It’s no good, and it bothers almost everyone. And, at the time of this writing, we all need it.

Somewhere down the line — maybe it was the Napster craze, maybe it was the price of so many things getting driven down that the line between paid and free began to disappear — we all decided that it was OK for us to take things from sites and give them nothing in return. The old adage was that if you weren’t paying for a product, you were the product. Your Gmail address isn’t free. Your Facebook account certainly isn’t free. By joining these services, you were entering into a complicit agreement that these services could poke and prod your behavior and use that behavior for their own personal gain. But it’s all in the background. Perhaps this is what conditioned us to think that everything should be free. Online advertising was supposed to follow this model, too. You read something free of charge, and in return you had to see some junky ads. That is, until some smart people created tools that allowed readers to take away those ads, and money started leaking out of creators’ pockets.

When an ad blocker is used, the necessary script isn’t loaded. On the ad networks side, they never see the transaction, so it never gets logged. The site never gets credit for your eyes seeing its content. Bigger companies are affected slightly less. Views of articles on CNN.com, in theory, create brand recognition and increase the likelihood of you watching CNN on TV, where TV ads can be presented to you. For smaller (read: most) sites, this isn’t applicable. They need your eyes, and they need the advertisers to know that your eyes saw the content. Ad blockers stop this from happening.

Your favorite writers (sports or otherwise) need the advertisers to know this. Your favorite spots for opinions, statistics, or humor need this, as well. As someone who expects to consume content for no monetary cost, you agree to allow this. Or, you should. Many don’t. And if you allow ad blockers to prevent these sites from making money, you are, in affect, taking money away from them.

The nice thing about ad-supported content is that it democratizes the Internet. Beyond the cost to acquire Internet access, these sites can be viewed by anyone for free. There is no barrier to entry. Subscription sites aren’t a bad idea at all, but as soon as you do implement that model, you remove the right for some (i.e. lower-income or financially-strapped) readers from seeing your stuff. It’s a choice every creator has to make. But for those that choose to stay free, a horde of challenges await them.

Some of our favorite sites, like Sports Reference, offer ad-free subscriptions that charge a small fee to allow you to browse ad-free. It’s a great solution to the problem, and if you use Sports Reference even more than a little bit, you should consider it. It’s a way to keep ads out of your browser while simultaneously supporting the sites you like.

This site does not offer such subscriptions, nor does its parent site. There are content agreements in place, but ad money still makes up a big chunk of the [x]Graphs family’s revenue. It is a terrible contract that both sides have to enter, but it is necessary.

All of this, and I realize it had been a lot so far, is to say that if you enjoy a site’s content, white-list it from your ad blocker. Are ads annoying? You bet. Do we all wish there was a better way? Certainly. Have we come up with a better idea? Nope. And, until you yourself do, disable that ad blocker. This isn’t a “save our site” plea. This is a call to action to put your money where your mouth is. If you want to read something, suck it up and allow those sites to make money. It’s not pretty, it’s not fun, but it’s only fair.

Think about where we would be without Baseball Reference or Baseball Savant or VICE Sports or Deadspin or SB Nation. Your personal thoughts about these places aside, they helped and continue to help shape the landscape of the business. They aren’t needed on a purely utilitarian scale, but they help us research, enjoy, learn, and appreciate our favorite sports better than most sites can. A world without these sites is a world run solely by Disney, News Corp, and Viacom. Independent sites are good for everyone, regardless of subject matter.

Most independent and/or freelance sports writers on Twitter are pretty approachable. Ask them about the lavish lifestyle they lead as writers. It’s hard. Revenues are falling and therefor pay is falling. And never forget that the marketplace of writers is also growing. It sucks out there. Look at what happened to Sports on Earth. It was a pie in the sky idea that promoted quality writing over everything else and it failed. Money is hard to come by.

Will this ever be fixed? Who knows. Maybe the Golden Age of Internet Writing (if there ever was one) is dead. But until the bouncer kicks us out, let’s all work to make sure the people we like and and admire get as much as they can for all their work. If you use an ad blocker, white-list your go-to sites. If you don’t know how to, Google it. Google will gladly take your query and enter it into the ever-growing list of queries that you allowed it to capture by agreeing to use their service. The Internet is a grimy place full of trade offs. It’s not changing any time soon. Let’s at least support those crazy enough to try and make a living off of it.