Fellow video game enthusiasts, today is a magical day! The annual Steam Holiday Sale went live today, putting hundreds of games on sale. Steam, the game distribution system designed by the Valve Corporation, is free to download, and many games themselves are also free. While these games are limited to PC/Mac/Linux (sorry console gamers), the Holiday Sale is a great time to make bulk purchases to last you all of next year. Most titles are on sale, however two of the three most played games are free to download and play, in Defense of the Ancients 2 — more commonly referred to as DotA 2 — and Team Fortress 2. For sports related titles, Football Manager 2015 is the fourth highest played title thus far today.

In Football Manager 2015 you are tasked with building a competitive soccer club and juggling things from scouting and trades to developing a strong youth program. While the 2015 version is not on sale, the full price is $49.99, the 2014 version is discounted to down to $14.99. Rugby Manager 2015 is marked down to just $9.99.

If you prefer to take the pitch yourself rather than run the operations behind the scenes, Pro Evolution Soccer 2015 — winner of the gamescom Best Sports Game 2014 — is 15% off, costing $33.99 right now. For those who would rather take to the court rather than a soccer field, NBA 2K15 is also 17% off sticker price, going for $49.79

Released not even four months ago, The Golf Club is a solid golf experience in lieu of actually stepping onto the fairway. For me, golf is only available about half the year, thanks to the lovely Michigan snowfall. The Golf Club offers tournament and league play, as well as an option to challenge your friends on existing courses or even build your own. Thanks to the Holiday Sale, one can pick up this title for $24.99, 30% off the regular price.

Possibly the best sports simulations games is Out of the Park Baseball 2015, and of course it is being discounted. On sale for $14.99, OOTP was already given a detailed review by the handsome and brilliant Bradley Woodrum. If you’re looking for a game for a baseball enthusiast, do them a favor and grab OOTP while it is on sale.

In addition to the titles highlighted here, Steam also has dozens of racing games from F1 2014 (half off at 24.99) to Nascar 14 (going for $7.99). Given the fact that Steam is free to download, as are 170 different games, if you’re scrambling for a holiday gift, Steam’s free-to-play games, as well as their sale, make for a great option.

(Header image via Steam)

Fan networking just got easier with Fancred’s latest update. Fancred, a free app specifically designed for fan interactions, now allows users to create albums of photos, videos, posts and updates seamlessly. Community pages for various teams will even display content automatically to present the users with fan-created content.

Picking which team to follow is easy with a simple search function. Yes, I know the teams I root for are…interesting. Once you join a team community to follow their updates, your timeline will be shown other user’s content if tagged with your team.

Uploading pictures of ticket stubs, selfies at the game or stadium shots can now be placed in separate folders or together, depending on if you’d prefer to group things chronologically or categorically.

In a similar vein to Reddit, on any given post you can upvote or downvote, repost within Fancred or share directly to Twitter and Facebook.

Fancred is a growing social network geared specifically for sports fans and has already secured $3 million in startup money to continue their growth. The app is currently available for both iOS and Android devices and simply requires an email login. While already impressive, the app does lack things such as a hashtag search or a way to tweak feeds. For example, rather than get flooded in the wee hours on Premier League or Bundesliga moves, it would be great to stop push notifications on things like comments for my Queens Park Rangers and Leverkusen, while still getting them for the Oakland A’s. Still a work in progress, Fancred has nonetheless shown enough to have earned a place on my phone.

Word is the Google Cardboard toy — which started as a gimmick, is now a toy, and will soon be a tool, I suspect — now has over 500,000 users.

This got me thinking: We already have mini-cameras we can embed in the ground; we have 360° camera technology; and now we have cheap, accessible virtual reality (VR).

Isn’t it time for 360° MLB.tv? Perhaps a camera embedded neatly in front of home plate or the pitcher’s mound. Maybe on the back of the mound to watch closeup up as the shortstop flips a double-play ball to the second baseman.

Or what about mounting a 3D camera on the cable-tugged NFL sky view cameras? Allow fans to watch the play unfold while focusing on just their fantasy wide receiver, finally giving them the vindication to scream at the quarterback, “He’s wide open! Throw it to James Jones already!”

And doesn’t NASCAR already have cameras mounted on every vehicle? Would it be any more difficult to swap in a 360 model?

The technology is probably not a point just yet where a 360 camera can be safely embedded into a soccer pitch or — certainly not — a basketball court or hockey rink. But goal post cross bars, tops of basketball backboards and jumbotrons dangling from stadium roofs could all be reasonable and fun locations for VR watchers.

Think about it, sports execs. Because it would be awesome.

For an organization known more recently for its spotty human rights record than forward thinking, the IOC surprised many last week, including its own president, Thomas Bach, when they adopted the 40-point “Olympic Agenda 2020” program proposed by the IOC president.

Included in the series of reforms is a plan to develop an over-the-top digital TV channel to begin broadcasting as early as 2015. The AP reported that the channel will cost around $600 million to create, with the hope that the IOC would recoup their investment after 10 years. The channel’s programming won’t interfere with the Universal Sports Network in the US, which already provides round-the-clock coverage of the Olympic games, including live events, to more than 60 million cable subscribers. Said to be based on the National Geographic Channel model, the channel will broadcast from the archives of past Olympic games, as well as provide Olympic news and other non-Olympic sporting events.

It remains to be seen how much interest there will be for the channel, given that the network will be unable to broadcast live events due to previous agreements with networks like NBC. Recent sports networks like NBA TV, the NFL Network, and the Pac-12 Network have all started with the archives and news format, but included live broadcasts to draw in initial viewers. There is also a concern that a 24-7 Olympics network will lessen the novelty for games that are held once every four years. But for an organization that has been much maligned recently, the new channel is a worthwhile bet to recapture some of its lost relevance, especially with a younger audience that is accustomed to this type of programming.

(Header image via adrian8_8)

Before logging on to Amazon to wrap up your Christmas shopping, you’ll want to flip through The Art of Negotiation. It could save you a few bucks.

Last week Amazon unveiled “Make an Offer,” a new feature which allows customers to negotiate lower prices with more than 150,000 items. For the initial rollout, Amazon has limited the experience mainly to collectibles – sports, entertainment, coins, history and political memorabilia – and fine art.

The sports category easily lists the most items featuring the Make an Offer opportunity. Photographs, uniforms, balls and trading cards are some of the most abundant memorabilia available, with Major League Baseball and the National Football League represented the most.  There’s even a pair of wrestling trunks signed by Hulk Hogan.

First, the seller must enable the option on an item’s listing. The customer can then either purchase the listed item at the available price or click the Make an Offer button and enter an offer. Amazon sends an email to the seller, who then responds within 72 hours. The seller can accept the offer, reject it or submit a counter offer. Now, this is when that copy of The Art of Negotiation comes in handy. Because now it’s on. Negotiations continue via email. Should the customer pull off their best Donald Trump impersonation and the seller accepts an offer, the item is placed in to the customer’s shopping cart at the negotiated price for checkout and purchase.

For example, check out this Derek Jeter clubhouse chair listed by Steiner Sports, used August 24 when the New York Yankees hosted the Chicago White Sox. The Yankees won 7-4 and Jeter went 0-for-5. It’s listed at $2,500. Now, I’m not a Yankees fan, and while I respect The Captain, I’m not obsessed with him, and I certainly don’t have a disposable income that would allow for such a purchase, though I do need a new office chair. So I made an Arte Moreno-esque take-it-or-leave-it offer of $500 with the ultimatum that my offer will stand for 72 hours. I can’t imagine Steiner Sports accepts my low-ball offer, which is 80 percent off the asking price. But if they do, I think I can sell it to the wife, seeing as I was ready to drop $175 on an office chair from Ikea. Knowing her, she’ll use Lysol wipes to clean off any Hall of Fame lingering germs and drop the value of the chair by 40 percent.

Steiner Sports is looking forward to a better shopping experience between customers and sellers utilizing the Make an Offer service.

“The ‘Make an Offer’ experience gives customers more control and better deals than they may have received prior to this program,” said Steven Costello, Executive Vice President of Steiner Sports Memorabilia, Inc. “The negotiation experience will hopefully get more communication between us and our customers to help us better gauge the price for certain items. We love the ‘Make and Offer’ program, and it is only going to get bigger. Once customers know this is an available feature more offers will come, leading to more sales.”

Amazon emailed me confirmation of my offer within a few minutes. Other customers can still purchase the item at the current list price. So there is risk involved. However, if a customer is looking for value only in the Amazon market place, this shouldn’t be much of a concern.

Amazon said it plans to expand the number of Make an Offer eligible items in 2015. So there’s time to hone those negotiating skills.

Though the technology is a little outdated, GIFs are still the de facto method for sports fans and writers to share quick videos for entertainment and analysis. There is no shortage of methods to create GIFs, but it’s often a time-intensive process. Usually a minimum of two programs are needed to capture and convert the MP4 or FLV files. But now, online video giant YouTube is slowly pushing out a tool to help ease that process.

The tool is only available on a very select collection of videos at the moment. Clips on the PBS Idea Channel are some of the few to get the feature as of this writing. The tool is baked in right into the sharing function already found in YouTube. Right next to the direct link and embed options is one labeled GIF. The user can choose up to six (consecutive) seconds to be converted with some simple visual sliders. The option to add text to both the top and bottom of the image is also available.

If the feature gets adopted on a broader scale, it would obviously be great for those of us who love to bombard our friends with cat clips and Russian dash cam videos, but it could also be very useful for the sports fan. The NBA leads the way in YouTube compatibility with their laxer rules regarding fan postings and their own prolific uploading practices. This new YouTube option would make it much easier for folks to post monster dunks and buzzer beaters to Twitter or their own blog pages. The NFL and MLB are getting better about YouTube postings, though they seem to only tolerate the heavily-curated videos they post themselves. This may be less handy for the budding analysts out there, but it would still be great to be able to send around a snippet of, say, this amazing Bo Jackson clip:

GIFs will most likely be phased out in the coming years in leu of better technology, but the fact that the biggest player in online video is at least testing a way to better create the easily-sharable file is an interesting development.

(Header image via Rego Korosi)

The header above is just a sample of a recent and instant classic photograph. The raw file size was only 45.1 KB, but what if we could make that load even faster? If you’ve never heard of Fabrice Bellard, a mistake that can be forgiven, don’t be surprised if his name pops up more frequently in the near future. The brains behind QEMU — a way to run different operating systems on non-native hardware, e.g. a “hackintosh”  — as well as other projects, Bellard’s latest feat is a new format for photos which he dubs Better Portable Graphics or .BPG.

Bellard is aiming to replace the .JPEG file type — among others — as he claims the BPG format is smaller, offers lossless compression and can be supported by most browsers with merely a JavaScript decoder. Displayed below is a photo in both its standard format as well as in BPG. The size of each is displayed along the mouse cursor line. Note the massive difference in size versus the nearly identical image quality. For more photos to compare, go here.

Obviously the biggest gains here are for mobile users. Imagine using a convertor to replace a phone or tablet’s .JPEG or .PNG files with .BPG. Rather than using massive amounts of storage in one’s device, why not shrink the raw file size down and save space? The loading time on mobile devices not connected to Wi-Fi would be drastically reduced as well. Given the demand for iconic moments in sports and in life, the way we store our precious photos could be changed for the better.

(Header via the New York Giants Facebook page)

Working with fitness apparel giant Under Armour, NBCUniversal has launched their new Radius brand, a multi-platform workout regimen. As it stands, Radius is limited to iPhone and iPad users as a $10 monthly service, or the videos will be aired on from 6 am to 9 am Eastern Time each weekday on the NBCSN channel.

The mobile version of Radius will produce content in an on-demand format from the television show. For the workouts themselves, there are levels of fitness ranging from beginner to high intensity. As time for workouts — and free time in general — becomes a premium in our everyday lives, Radius also offers a series called “10acious” designed to give a full body workout in just 10 minutes. A recent study showed the significance of mixing a high intensity spurt into a normal workout, specifically even a short workout with a minute or two of sprint-esque action grants significant dividends.

For now the Radius app is cheaper than just about any local gym membership, however it is limited due to its iOS device restrictions. Undoubtedly, Android users will soon be able to join in the workouts though the idea of paying an additional sum to work out, even one backed by Under Armour and digital personal trainers, seems a bit foreign. With free apps such as the Scientific 7-Minute Workout already available for both Android and iOS users, forcing potential customer into spending more money may not be an ideal way to reach mobile users. For now, Radius offers promise. However, even with the offer of two free months with a purchase of a six month package or four free months with an annual subscription, it may not be enough.

(Image via Wikipedia)

Staying in good shape and good health is hard enough — though with the new year approaching we all get to hit the reset button on our diets and workout discipline — so anything to make it easier and a more enjoyable time is welcome. Cycling has become the go-to option for many health-minded folks and the makers behind COBI, are aiming to make road cycling enthusiasts not only more eager to maintain their routines, but safer, too.

Though still in Kickstarter phase, COBI offers an all-inclusive option and mounting system for navigation, music (including Spotify, podcasts, turn signals and braking lights all while charging your phone rather than running it down. Their Kickstarter page boasts of over 100 intelligent features to any bike and comes with a variety of mounting systems for different bikes and different phones.

Like many hardware/app combinations, COBI has the basics of tracking, popular routes as well as Buddy Radar, a way of locating nearby friends who are also working out. The brains of the system is controlled by a what is basically a directional pad with a center button that mounts on the handlebars, never making you take your hands off what is important.

What COBI does differently is packing so much into one clean package, from music to heart rate monitors and calories burned calculators to security features. The lock feature boasts motion sensitive alarms plus the system will only respond to your phone with plans for allowed friends and family to also unlock and share your bike.

The COBI system offers a built-in case/screen protector combination with an IPX6 certified rain and mud cover guard, allowing you to take to the streets or mountains in less than ideal weather. COBI integrates with bluetooth 4.1, ANT+ and CAN for making to taking calls while working out or even simply commuting to and from work. Already compatible with Google Fit and Apple Fit, COBI is aiming to hit the ground running in the second quarter of 2015.

The 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup groups will be drawn tomorrow at noon eastern on the Fox Sports 1 channel plus a live stream via Fox Sports Go. Joining the host nation of Canada is 23 other nations that qualified to make a run at the title of World Cup champion.

How to view the games themselves on television was decided years ago. FIFA gave all broadcasting rights in the United States from 2015 through 2022 for English TV and radio to Fox and their affiliates. Spanish TV rights went to Telemundo Media, owned by NBCUniversal. The Fox Soccer 2Go stream does not appear to have any streaming rights to the Women’s WC, however with a digital converter box, anyone with a TV — even without a cable subscription — should be able to see a limited number of fixtures. Lou D’Emilio of Fox Sports quoted World Cup Coordinator David Neal saying “Fox or Fox Sports 1 will carry all 52 WWC matches live in 2015.” Without a definite distinction of how the games will be split among the two channels, it remains unclear how many games a cord cutter will be able to see.

A possible option is the Fox Sports Go app is available for Windows, Android and iOS devices. Unfortunately Fox Sports Go currently depends on having a particular cable subscription. Despite producing a strong Fox Soccer 2Go app (where no TV packaged is necessary as it is a standalone price), the Fox Sports Go leaves much to be desired. One of the current issues is that despite having access to a Charter Communications login, complete with Fox Sports 1 and 2 in the channel lineup, Charter is not a selectable option. Given Charter services almost 28 million subscribers across 29 states and is the fourth largest cable provider in the nation based on revenue, one would assume compatibility with Fox Sports Go. Fox Sports Go is also not available to subscribers of either of the two major U.S. satellite providers — DirecTV and Dish. Apparently I am not missing much from not having access to the app, though. Among the three platforms, the highest rating is three stars on the Android version versus two on iOS and a 1.8 stars rating for Windows devices. Not to put faith in internet reviews, after asking around the only worse streaming platform than Fox Sports Go was the NBA’s League Pass, notorious for issues and bugs.

While the games are still over six months away, Canada will play its to-be-determined opponent on June 6, the accessibility of the matches is in doubt. This year’s men’s World Cup broadcasting rights was owned by ESPN and still have matches available to be re-watched via WatchESPN, though that does require a cable package. Whether or not Fox allows streams — both live or after the match — remains to be seen. Trusting major telecoms, let alone FIFA, to make the right decision for viewer accessibility is a nearly impossible dream.

(Header image via FIFA.com)