It’s a bit of an odd dichotomy to be a sports fan living in Minnesota and not know anything about hockey. My excuse is that I grew up in Wisconsin, where football is king, and never even had a chance to play hockey in school. But I moved to Minnesota over 10 years ago. They air high school hockey games on the regional sports network here. I should have learned a little by osmosis at least.

I was too busy going to baseball games in the summer and pretending to care about the NFL in the winter to ever give hockey a try. It’s a shame really, because I found that the more of the sport I caught, the more I enjoyed it. So last year, when the NFL finally pulled enough BS to make me quit it pretty much entirely, I thought I’d give hockey a try. The only problem with that plan revolved around that fact that I didn’t really know anything about hockey. I’m not talking about not remembering what player played on what team. I barely knew the rules. So, like any enterprising 30-something with disposable income would do, I tried to solve my problems with video games.

Let’s preface this by saying, with the exception of simply knowing the name of some of the game’s biggest stars (Ovechkin, Crosby, Kane, etc.) essentially everything I knew about hockey came from whatever I ingested by watching The Mighty Ducks 50 times as a child. As it turns out, regular hockey is WAY LESS exciting than movie hockey, and movie hockey isn’t very good at explaining rules, strategy, or really even giving a general sense of the flow of the game. Needless to say, when I fired up NHL 15 last year, I had a steep hill to climb.

NHL 15 had its flaws, certainly, but the gameplay was always spot on for me. The graphics were great, the controls were responsive, and I had the ability to tailor the game in a myriad of ways. I could make my games easy or hard, fast or slow, and even get granular with how I wanted things like puck handling and passing accuracy to behave. I didn’t play much with these in the beginning, however, because I was too busy getting my butt handed to me.

Playing a video game based on sport you know nothing about is like driving a car in a country where the traffic laws are totally foreign. You have a good understanding of the mechanics of the whole thing, but not quite sure how to put it all together. Here’s how those first few days went:

1. Start game
2. Immediately get scored on
3. Check replay to see why
4. Glean nothing from replay
5. Get back into game
6. Get called for a penalty/violation
7. Pause game
8. Google said penalty/violation on my phone
9. Return to step 2.

I didn’t know what the blue lines were for. I didn’t understand offside or icing or interference of delays of game penalties. I didn’t know that if you shot the puck at the opponent’s net after an offside was called, the other team takes umbrage with it at a fairly aggressive level. I didn’t know that my goalie could be checked if he was out of the crease, because I mostly didn’t know what the crease was.

But soon enough, after enough failings and enough Googling, I understood the basic ins and outs of hockey. The hockey I watched on TV started to make more sense. When I watched the playoffs, I could understand a little more of what Doc Emrick was saying. It was some solid progress.

That was last winter, and I came into this season looking to understand a little more about strategy and basic fundamental gameplay. So instead of a general season playing as one team, I waded into the waters of creating my own player via the Be a Pro feature. I was about to go to school. NHL 15 taught me about how hockey was played. NHL 16 taught me how to play hockey.

OK, that last sentence may have been a bit of an overstatement. I’m not saying I’m ready to lace up and bang against some other out-of-shape dudes in a rec league or anything, but playing a season as a single player helped me better understand what everybody did and where they were supposed to go.

I think I’m on my seventh created player. The first six didn’t last very long. I tried playing as a center, but that didn’t do it for me. I tried a right winger but I made him right handed which isn’t the best idea because of the bad forehand angles (something I learned like three games in). I made some guys too big or too small for their position or juiced all the wrong attributes during creation, but finally I settled on a very solid player.

His name is Jacques Jacques. I wanted to make him have just one name like Pele or Cher, but the game wouldn’t let me. Regardless, Jacques was a last name prerecorded by the announcers, so it kind of sounds like they’re just using his one name. I even create a backstory for Jacques. Basically, he’s from somewhere outside Yellowknife, and he was discovered as a 17-year-old competing in unsanctioned MMA fights. He’d never played hockey because he was too busy logging or drilling for oil. But a scout found him and convinced him to learn hockey. It’s basically a mix between the plot of The Air Up There and Wolverine’s backstory from the first X-Men movie.

Anyway, I played a whole minor league season with Jacques and ended up being the first overall pick. I was an Edmonton Oiler. The game, however, did not adjust the rest of the draft after that, so the Oilers still ended up with Connor McDavid. Needless to say, the Oilers are doing pretty well.

It’s kind of hard to explain everything I learned while trying to make my way through a digital hockey career, but the progress has been substantial.

I now understand things like general positioning — where the left winger should be in a given offensive formation. In the past, line changes always seemed so random to me, but now that I actually skate to the bench to rest, I’m starting to pick the best times to do so given where the puck, my teammates, and the opposing players are. I’m starting to decipher the fine lines surrounding what is and isn’t boarding and what is and isn’t interference. Whenever a goal is scored, I go to the replay to try and find out how. Where were the weaknesses in the defense? Who made a good play to get open? Was the goalie beat or was it a fluke deflection?

I see articles all the time about how schools are using games like Minecraft to teach kids things about teamwork and geometry and even basic computer programming. Educators have long used games as a teaching tool. And a silly as it sounds, NHL 15 and 16 honestly helped me learn about hockey. I now have a GameCenter subscription. I watch the Oilers and my hometown Wild or any other game that I find interesting. I’m understanding more and more why certain players or teams are really good.

I still have a lot of learning to do, but I can at least hold my own in a conversation with a hockey fan. I can detect a good play or a misstep when watching on live TV. I now have opinions that I yell at the TV.

Anyone can mindlessly play Madden or FIFA for hours on end. I’m not saying there isn’t value in that. But if one wants to really dig into the specifics and the minutiae of the sport, video games can actually be great for that too. I now know some stuff about hockey, which isn’t something I could have said two years ago. Now I just need to acquire a taste for lutefisk, and I’ll be a true Minnesotan.

Welcome back, fair TechGraphs readers. Here’s hoping your fantasy football wishes turned into caviar dreams and you all made your respective playoffs. Unless you play DFS, in which case this week was less important — if you don’t live in New York state, that is. More on that later. In the meantime, here are the sports-tech stories we found interesting this week.

We might as well start with the big news of the week. A while back, New York’s attorney general said that daily fantasy sites — most notably DraftKings and FanDuel — constituted gambling. Since gambling is still illegal, said attorney general  took DFS to trial. On Friday, the judge granted the injunction. Then, the appellate judge overturned that ruling. The overruling doesn’t put DFS in the clear in New York forever, they are just allowed to continue doing business until the legality of their operations are further discussed. Nothing is certain yet, but it’s some temporary good news for DFS players in New York.

Polygon goes over some of the HUGE numbers that October’s League of Legends tournament drew in terms of online viewers.

EA appears to see the writing on the wall, as they recently announced that they have opened an esports division.

While netting isn’t necessarily the cutting edge of technology, they can play a big role in keeping fans safe. Because of this, MLB has recommended that all teams increase their use of netting to increase the safety of spectators in the stands.

New Balance is working on a very cool idea that allows runners to 3D print the soles of their shoes to better fit their specific feet and running style. It’s still in R&D at this point, but it’s an excellent use of the emerging technology.

Yahoo has released a new app that serves as a sort of TV Guide for Internet streaming. While it doesn’t include sports yet, it’s fairly easy to see that getting implemented soon enough (or another company picking up where Yahoo is leaving off).

The Cowboys ran into a little bit of tech trouble on Monday Night Football. Because of the way NFL rules work, this in turn (and fairly) meant the Washington Professional Football Team also had tech trouble.

Showtime is trying to get people to watch boxing in a VR environment. You yourself can try it for free. The bout already happened, but the it seems that just showing off the technology is the main point of the demonstration.

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

The NBA is really good at making their brand as visible as possible on the Internet. They have been for some time, actually. Whenever I have discussions online or in person about what sports leagues can do to make online engagement better, I have long used the NBA as the high watermark. It’s probably true that basketball as a sport is slightly more akin to displaying highlights, in general. Dunks and half-court threes and buzzer-beaters only take a handful of seconds compared to a a touchdown pass or even an impressive deke leading to a goal. Nevertheless, the NBA hasn’t been resting on its sport’s inherent excitement. It’s making big pushes to engage current fans and win over new ones.

Leagues like the NFL have always held a firm grip on their property when it comes to things like highlights, and the MLB has currently upped their actions against people posting GIFs of what they consider to be their property. The NBA, conversely, gives fans and creators carte blanche when it comes to posting videos online. The NBA has their own YouTube channel where it posts plenty of highlights and videos itself, but one can also find tons of dunk compilations, replays of old All-Star games, or even the goofy one-off things that happen in any given game.

But they’re not stopping there. They just recently partnered with a company called AVGEN. And AVGEN’s software does some really cool things. From The Verge:

On a basic level, AVGEN is software that automates the video editing process that creates highlight reels. According to Aviv Arnon, WSC’s VP of business development, “We analyze the video itself to figure out where the players are on the court, where movement is, [and] do audio analysis to figure out the perfect ins and outs for every moment.” That means analyzing fans screaming in the stands and color commentary, as well as player stats to determine what plays meant for the game as a whole. Most importantly, the software uses image recognition to also identify players and the types of plays being made. So if an outlet wanted to create a highlight reel of DeAndre Jordan’s slam dunks, they’d simply need to specify those terms in AVGEN before getting a clip minutes later. That clip can then be shared to the waiting eyes on YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter on the fly, ready for easy consumption. Which is great, since the NBA has 3 billion cumulative views on YouTube alone.

This process takes away the labor and time needed for interns to comb through video, edit it down, and post it online. It’s been streamlined and automated, as it should be. AVGEN’s process takes away the biggest problem of MLB’s recent GIF crackdown. MLB says it doesn’t want people posting GIFs or videos of cool highlights on Twitter because that highlight is property of MLB. But MLB has a long history of, well, taking a good amount of time to actually post that material online. It’s way less fun to share something when it happened 20 minutes ago. The NBA never cared about highlight sharing the way MLB did, but event then they made the process smoother by letting a machine do the posting for them. They cut out the middle man that no one was avoiding in the first place. That’s progressive thinking.

Now that they’ve made consumption easier, the NBA has turned to increasing the ease in which fans can actually contribute — most notably in terms of All-Star voting. Certainly, the NBA has long allowed fans to vote for their favorite players online and via mobile, All-Star voting has now been ported to a platform that people have already baked into their daily online activities — searching crap on Google. The NBA and Google have entered a partnership in which fans can vote for the All-Star game right from Google in their desktop or mobile browser. All one needs is a Google account and the ability to search for “NBA All Star voting.” They’re then presented with an embeded voting platform right in their current screen.

Again, the middle man is being cut out here. The barrier of entry is lowered. Nobody knows that actual URL to vote for the All-Star game, so they’re just going to Google it anyway. With this new partnership, fans don’t even need to leave their search engine to do what they sought out. No Tweets are necessary, no SMS messages need to be sent.

The NBA isn’t reinventing the way fans engage with its league online. They are simply making it easier and more convenient. These are incremental improvements — improvements that any other league could easily make. The NBA — like any other league — is not without its problems. But they are hands down leading the charge when it comes to proliferating their brand online. And when sports are competing with a seemingly infinite amount of other entertainment streams on the web, every little bit helps.

Imagine there’s no ESPN.
It’s easy if you try.
No broadcast partner intermediaries to charge us,
above us only direct access to sporting events live.
Imagine all the cord-cutters
living for today[, a day without ESPN].

Today, and for at least the past twenty years, it is difficult to imagine four letters more associated with sports in America than ESPN. Heck, as of 2006, there were at least four kids named ESPN, according to ESPN.com. The network invented the concept of a twenty-four-hour sports television channel at a time when ninety-three percent of the television audience restricted its viewing to ABC, CBS, and NBC, all of which still were signing off entirely each night. Part of the invention included SportsCenter, of course, but the network first established its national reputation when it broadcast the entire 1980 NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

While ESPN is thirty-six years old and living the starkly corporate lifestyle these days, its teenage years were wild, at least by broadcast television standards. In the 1990s, the network’s comparatively brash attitude provided it with a cultural identity that existed almost independent of sports. It may be difficult to remember this now, but it’s true: ESPN used to be cool. A selective timeline:

• 1992: Keith Olbermann joins SportsCenter to host “the big show” alongside Dan Patrick
• 1993: ESPN2 launches with Olbermann, Suzy Kolber, Stuart Scott, and, later, Jim Rome and Kenny Mayne, who would also work as a SportsCenter anchor; Craig Kilborn joins ESPN as a SportsCenter anchor; the modern era of College GameDay begins; ESPN.com launches
• 1994: ESPN Presents: Jock Rock Vol. 1 is released, beginning a series of Jock Rock and Jock Jams audio CD releases that featured popular sports-related pump-up songs interspersed with clips of SportsCenter personalities like Patrick and Chris Berman dishing out their catchphrases
• 1995: ESPN hosts the first X Games
• 1996: Rich Eisen joins ESPN to host SportsCenter with Scott
• 1998: The first ESPN Zone opens, in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor; Norm Macdonald hosts the ESPYs
• 2000: Page 2 launches on ESPN.com, an alternative site that would feature the bylines of Ralph Wiley, Hunter Thompson, Scoop Jackson, and, of course, Bill Simmons
• 2001: Pardon the Interruption debuts on ESPN
• 2003: ESPN debuts Playmakers, the network’s first original drama series, about a fictional professional football team

Playmakers was a blend of Friday Night Lights, Entourage, and Hard Knocks, and, aside from the Sunday night NFL game and Saturday afternoon college football games, it was the most-viewed program on ESPN. Despite its wild popularity, the show was on the air for less than three months. Under pressure from then-NFL Commissioner Paul Taglibue, ESPN first restricted promotion of the show and then cancelled it. The NFL didn’t care for the way Playmakers portrayed NFL players — too realistic, it seems — and wanted the show off the air. Mark Shapiro, then the executive vice president of ESPN, defended the network’s decision to adhere to the NFL’s wishes: ”It’s our opinion that we’re not in the business of antagonizing our partner . . . . To bring it back would be rubbing it in our partner’s face.”

Action speaks louder than words, and the cancellation of Playmakers signaled a turning point for ESPN, which began to purge itself of the people and programs that had built its unique identity in the decade from 1993 to 2003. From the viewers’ perspective, it became clear that ESPN was removing anybody whose name had become bigger than the network’s.

That represents an interesting notion of network cohesion, but there really is one explanation for the shift that ESPN executed in the period beginning with the cancellation of Playmakers and running through the termination of Simmons earlier this year: the prioritization of live-sports broadcast rights. Beginning with the 1980 NCAA tournament (and its early agreements with smaller conferences like the Big East), and running through whichever Monday Night Football or SEC volleyball game you just watched, ESPN’s core programming is live sporting events. The network’s adolescent dalliance with original content and individual personalities a thing of the past (what are they doing with Mayne these days?), that live-sports core is almost all ESPN is in late 2015, the remainder largely consisting of an internal #hottake-generating echo chamber.

Live sports is what national sports networks are supposed to be all about, though, right? So where’s the problem? Yes, ESPN has competition now, but FS1, CBSSN, and NBCSN aren’t serious threats to the Worldwide Leader, at least for the moment. Each rival network has tried different approaches, with Dan O’Toole and Jay Onrait’s Olbermann/Patrick Big Show sendup on FS1, and CBSSN and NBCSN attempting to steal ESPN on-air talent (only to see that talent eventually return to the Mothership). But the organizing principle remains unchanged: for a rival to mount a legitimate challenge to ESPN, the accepted view is that those other national sports networks need more live sporting events, and right now, nobody beats ESPN in that department. By both inventing the medium and controlling the market for so long, ESPN has been able to raise the barriers to entry by gobbling up live sports broadcasting rights, starving its competitors of the programming they need to draw eyes to their channels (or the TV Guide to even find their channels) in the first place.

ESPN spends a boatload to make sure its collection of channels remain the go-to destination for live sports events, which are among the most valuable properties in all of television. That’s long been true, but it’s even more true today with the proliferation of advertisement-avoiding DVR technology. In 2015, it’s not unreasonable to begin binge-watching the entirety of The Good Wife, a drama that debuted in 2009, but nobody’s going to start catching up on all of the Vanderbilt baseball games they saved from back in the spring, championship-caliber MLB feeder program that the Commodores are. People watch games live or not at all. That’s why ESPN has unloaded billions of dollars for the right to broadcast live sporting events on their channels. The estimated numbers from FY 2015 provide an illuminating snapshot:

* – ESPN splits SEC Network profits with the conference. The SEC received $150 million from ESPN’s primary rights deal, plus approximately $77 million from SEC Network for the 2014-15 season.

By leveraging its capitalization to corner the market on live-sports broadcasting rights, ESPN has insulated itself against serious competition from FS1 and the other national sports networks, to which are left the scraps. Think bull riding, arena football, and auto racing series you’ve never heard of. (Long live SPEED!) In the course of ensuring a low ceiling for its rival national sports networks, however, ESPN has become exposed to competition from another quarter. Rather than worry about its would-be peers, ESPN’s biggest threat now may be its own broadcast partners.

As we have been noting in our regular news roundups here, ESPN has been losing subscribers as a result of cord-cutting, people ditching traditional cable and satellite television providers, and now we have a number: seven million subscribers lost in the past two years. According to parent company Disney, ESPN now is down to 92 million subscribers. Cord-cutting is an obvious problem for the network because of its cost relative to other channels on viewers’ cable and satellite bills. ESPN relies on cost-spreading– everybody with a cable or satellite subscription pays for ESPN regardless of whether they watch it– to make its price more palatable to its actual users, and it relies on its robust portfolio of live sporting events to make itself so in-demand that everyone continues to pay those costs. The other side of that coin, of course, is that ESPN needs all of those subscriber fees to be able to afford its obligations under its broadcast-rights agreements. So far, it’s a model that’s worked very well for ESPN. But what if they lost those broadcast rights that make them a must-have component of every cable and satellite subscription?

ESPN’s programming portfolio, and those of its fellow national sports networks, is increasingly one-dimensional. Is The Doug Gottlieb Show really appointment viewing? Is Scott Van Pelt’s “midnight” SportsCenter? (what time does it start, exactly?) Nah. We’re all tuning in to watch the games. And without the games, would the remnant husks of networks be able to survive?

Perhaps a better question: why are sports leagues still selling off their broadcast rights? The NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL all have their own television channels. (Some collegiate athletic conferences also have networks, although these tend to be more akin to partnerships between the conferences and existing television networks like ESPN and Fox, rather than independent media entities.)  They all have well-developed web platforms, and they all exercise control over the use and sharing of their content online, some more stringently than others. Yes, the NFL received a $1.9 billion check from ESPN last year for the right to broadcast Monday Night Football, but ESPN only cut that check because it knew that its broadcast of that event would allow it to make even more money. Why can’t the leagues eliminate these intermediary networks and realize an even greater portion of the value of their own broadcast rights?

This already is occurring to some extent. There are regular-season NFL games that appear only on NFL Network, and some MLB playoff games have appeared only on MLB Network. Cutting ESPN et al. out of the picture completely would require a not-insignificant capital investment, of course, to expand the leagues’ broadcast capabilities, but the issue merely is one of scale. It isn’t as difficult to create and operate MLB2 when MLB Network’s already up and running. The model exists and is replicable, as the national sports networks themselves have demonstrated. Most importantly, the leagues hold the most valuable asset in the equation. Their products essentially market themselves, and distribution follows demand, which, as everyone agrees, follows the games themselves.

That said, there are reasons why each of the leagues might hold differing views of such a large-scale shift.  For example, while NFL football games may be sufficiently popular on a national level to justify a move to NFL Network-exclusive broadcasting, the NHL might find that its 1,230 games per season are only nationally marketable when bundled with other sports and therefore decide to remain with its regional sports network-based broadcast infrastructure. Still, even if leagues like the NHL and MLB, which have long seasons full of many games that draw only regional interest, wouldn’t be good fits to go 100% national, we still could see them bringing marquee matchups, Winter Classics, and All-Star and postseason games exclusively onto the leagues’ own channels.

Are these the End Times for ESPN? Unless the leagues suddenly and rapidly retrench onto their own platforms, probably not. And if the thought of Roger Goodell, Rob Manfred, Adam Silver, and Gary Bettman executing any changes in their respective leagues that might be described as “sudden” or “rapid” made you laugh, it’s probably because you know that these leagues are conservative institutions that change slowly, if at all. In the end, maybe what ESPN & co. offer the leagues is a product-delivery method that, while not necessarily superior to or more profitable on a transaction-by-transaction basis than a league-owned channel, insulates the risk-adverse leagues from the shifting vagaries of the market, politics, and public opinion, all of which affect the sensitivities of the advertisers and corporate and civic sponsors who ultimately fund the leagues. So viva ESPN, the Worldwide Leader in sports-media insurance coverage.

Greetings, fair TechGraphs readers. I hope everyone had a pleasurable Thanksgiving holiday. We took a little time off here at TechGraphs, but we’ll back in full force next week. In the meantime, here’s a look at the sports-tech stories we found interesting this week.

Remember that time that one of sports’ most iconic figures announced his long-rumored retirement on a blog? That was weird.

ESPN is always into using social media to promote games that they broadcast, such as Monday Night Football. The problems come when the game they have to promote promises to be a garbage fire. The game actually turned out to be fairly exciting for everyone who isn’t a Cleveland fan.

On the topic of ESPN, it appears cord-cutters are costing them a not-insignificant number of customers. I don’t know how losing TV subscribers means you should lay off a bunch of great web writers, but what do I know?

For those of you who think HD just isn’t HD enough anymore, you’ll be pleased to learn that DirecTV is planning on carrying 4K content in 2016. No word yet as to which channels will be offered, but since DirecTV still up-charges for basic HD programming, rest assured that 4K will cost even more money on top of the regular bill.

I don’t much at all about esports, but I do know that beefs always help a brand, so keep at it, nerds.

Lots of ESPN news this week, but they have integrated their WatchESPN feature (for those with qualifying cable/satellite subscriptions, of course) with their ESPN app. The idea is that if you are using the ESPN app to check on a score, you’ll be able to just tap a button to pull up the live video of the game. As ESPN carries a lot college basketball on WatchESPN, the addition is timely.

Google is immensely brilliant, interesting, and terrifying company. They seemingly do something incredibly cool and incredibly creepy every day. I would chalk up patenting a blood-sucking smartwatch under both categories.

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

Greetings, fair readers. We’ve been taking a bit of a mini hiatus here at TechGraphs, but luckily, not a whole lot of news has broken in the world of sports tech. Oh, I mean besides that an entire billion dollar fantasy industry is in complete legal limbo, but, you know … other than that. Anyway, while we all cash out our DFS accounts, here are the stories we found interesting this week.

Let’s get straight to the point, and talk a little daily fantasy:

• New York state’s attorney general has suspended daily fantasy operations while they investigate the game’s legality.
• DraftKings and FanDuel are sued said attorney general.
• That didn’t work, so FanDuel is suspending operations in NY for a while.
• Oh, it’s also running a bit behind in paying back its players.
• Meanwhile, Massachusetts has instituted some new regulations regarding DFS.
• Because of all this, the TV networks might be in trouble as far as ad money goes.
  • DraftKings is trying to suspend its advertising on TV, for example.
• If you want a British guy to explain everything to you, check here.

OK, now that we’ve sifted through that:

Good news! MLB and Fox have announced that they will offer in-market streaming! Bad news! It doesn’t work for Comcast customers, and only those who already pay to watch the games on TV will have access!

We talked about the controversy circling new styles of curling brooms (because we’re hip like that), and now it looks like the World Curling Federation (yes, that’s a real thing) has put a temporary ban on the brooms while it sorts all this stuff out.

The folks behind Bauer hockey products has unveiled a new collar that they think will help prevent athletes’ brains from bouncing around in their skulls — i.e. concussions.

With the help of Facebook’s 360-degree video technology, GoPro has released a new video to with a panoramic view of what it’s like to carve some waves (is that surfing lingo? I feel like that’s surfing lingo.)

The video game Fallout 4 was released to much fanfare. The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic Boston, so some enterprising fan decided to mod the game to allow the game’s character to look like Red Sox slugger David Ortiz (albeit a right-handed version). It was a fun/lighthearted thing, so naturally MLB got butt-hurt about it.

Speaking of sluggers, Jason Giambi took some time away from not sliding to partner up with a company that uses VR to help train hitters.

If you are a stadium/architecture nerd, Wired ran a couple of stories giving a look into the future of NFL venues.

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

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)

Hey, remember GoPros? You might have one sitting in a closet or a drawer somewhere. Perhaps some well-meaning friend or family member got you one as a gift thanks to a great Black Friday deal, or you did the same for someone on your gift list. I have one. I can see it right now from where I’m sitting. It has footage of golf and curling and probably my dogs on it, but I wouldn’t know. To know, I’d have to unload the video files off the SD card onto my computer. And then what would I do with it? Shove it onto a hard drive somewhere? Back it up to the cloud where it will live a sad and lonely existence? Put it on YouTube? Much like the footage I’ve shot with my camera, GoPro is being left for dead.

Herein lies the problem with GoPro. It’s a great piece of hardware that provides output of limited value. It’s like if Gutenberg invented the printing press, but it was only capable of producing copies of Fifty Shades of Grey. A GoPro is one of things that seems like a good idea when you get it, like a wok or a pair of snowshoes. Any maybe you do use it for a time, but the novelty eventually wears off. It’s not GoPro’s fault. Its draw is the same as a wok or some snowshoes — GoPro isn’t just selling a product, it’s selling the idea of what your life could be like with that product. I’m gonna get my snowboard out of the garage and hook this thing up to it! I’m gonna strap this to my bike helmet and finally try navigating those trails! This is some Don Draper-level stuff. And then, like so many things in life, our hobbies of fantasy are put on the shelf. And the sales drop off. And that’s where GoPro sits. On your shelf, and on the sales lists of investors.

Sure, some people use GoPros for legitimate and genuinely great stuff. Some use them in very creative and engaging ways. And those people are really the core market of GoPro. But that market is niche and limited. The rest of use schlubs barely use the things. Even if we do, the cameras are so durable that we hardly have a need to replace or upgrade the models we currently own. GoPro has become a victim of its own success, it seems. And this is why the market is so bearish on them. GoPro might have hit its maximum saturation already. Throw in a new lawsuit and things start to get even more dicey.

But we should not mourn GoPro just yet. They have one very important thing going for them right now — they make really solid products. Startups are a dime a dozen these days, but one thing remains true; hardware is hard. With all due respect to software developers — seriously, many of them do amazing things — an app or a website can be set up with, all things considered, somewhat-minimal investment. A few laptops and a server instance can lead to great things in software. Hardware, on the other hand, takes a good deal more capital. There’s R&D. There’s prototyping. There’s contracts to be hashed out with manufacturers overseas and quality control and component sourcing. So when a company can break through all those barriers and produce a quality product, it’s a big deal. GoPro has already done that. They’re just having a hard time convincing the market to buy more of them. All the legit and wannabe thrill seekers have already procured GoPro cameras. GoPro needs a new gig, a new way to inject themselves into our lives. That’s where another company with deep pockets can come in and utilize the superior hardware into a new application.

So, who has the resources and possible need for such a thing? Here are a few ideas.

It should go without saying, but this is pure speculation on the author’s part and does not constitute advanced knowledge of the situation nor investment advice.

Google

This one seems like cheating since Google has enough money to acquire almost any company, but there could be a fit. Since Google spun off into a subsidiary of Alphabet, it’s clear that they’re not just in the search/advertising game any more. They are branching out. They already have a hardware company under their umbrella in Nest, and they own the biggest platform for GoPro content in the form of YouTube. Perhaps Google can package the cameras with a free software suite that allows GoPro footage uploads to be faster and easier. Maybe footage shot with GoPros can hit higher in the search ranks or be featured in promoted content. Could Google figure out a good solution to actually use a GoPro as a webcam? They have the engineering talent. Maybe selling these cameras as the all-in-one solution to create user content is how it comes into the hands of consumers again. And don’t forget that Google and GoPro have already collaborated on a new rig that will allow 360-degree filming for VR purposes.

Facebook/Oculus

Facebook made a big and somewhat unexpected splash when it entered the hardware market by acquiring Oculus. Oculus may be best known for making VR gaming hardware and software, but there is no reason it can’t get into the content-producing game. Much like the Google offering, Oculus could concoct a filming rig to produce content for their upcoming headsets, making it easier (and perhaps cheaper) for creators to create a VR environment. Why stop at gaming when the future of news and entertainment could hinge on the VR world?

Some other camera company

The analog company Fossil just got into the wearables game when it acquired Misfit. What’s to say an old-school camera company can’t make a similar push into the video field with GoPro? Canon and Nikon already are neck deep in the digital photography and video world. There are good reasons for bringing GoPro into the fold, either to bring the durable cameras into their product line or integrate GoPro tech to make SLR cameras more feature-rich. A hyper-durable SLR that can shoot HD video with the push of a button? Not a bad market to get into.

Samsung

Samsung has been trying to introduce their own ecosystem to rival Apple’s with limited success. They have their own VR division, of course, and everything they make seems to tie into the Galaxy family of products. If they could offer a piece of dedicated hardware that paired with both the consumption and production of VR content and have it specifically tie into the Galaxy line of products, they could bring another bargaining chip to the table when trying to covert iPhone users. Yeah, the iPhone camera might be good, but check out what you can make when you pair a Galaxy GoPro with a a Galaxy phone! Samsung has the capital and engineering chops to make a partnership like this work, if they chose to.

I don’t see the GoPro going extinct any time soon. I do see it becoming a product offering for another company, however. GoPro did all the heavy lifting here. It made the rock-solid product that’s easy and fun to use. They just need a little help from another entity to make a better use case for their cameras. It may be one of the companies mentioned above, it could be another entirely. But hardware is still hard. When an outlier like GoPro comes along, it doesn’t die a quick death. Like their cameras, GoPro can take a beating and still end up in great shape. Exactly who ends up with the final say in that shape they will take remains to be seen.

You know technology is a pervasive force in sports if the seemingly-tranquil game of curling is getting involved. Yes, it seems as if the roaring game is mired in its own back and forth over technological advances. No, no one has installed remote controls in the rocks, but — at least according to some people — recent changes in the sport mean that comparison isn’t too far off.

To explain the scientific changes going on in the sport, one must first understand the science behind curling itself. If you are a veteran of the sport, please forgive my high-level overview.

I won’t go into the intricacies of scoring in curling, but suffice it to say that the point of it is for the person delivering the stone to get it to stop exactly where they want on the other side of the ice. That ice is covered in tinier bumps of ice called pebble. Essentially, a watering can of sorts sprays droplets on a flat surface of ice. Those droplets freeze to the surface and create a bumpy texture. It’s this bumpy texture that allows the curling stone to move as far as it does. The stone glides along those bumps, rather than on a flat sheet of ice. If curling were played on hockey ice, the stone would barely move as the concave bottom of the stone would create a suction. The pebble is also how the sweeping comes into play, and that’s what everyone is up in arms about.

If you’ve ever seen a picture or video of curling, you may have noticed two people flanking the rock while holding weird looking brooms. The person throwing the rock has the most influence on what happens, but the sweepers are there for the fine tuning. Sweeping the pebble momentarily melts it. This allows the stone to move farther down the ice while also decreasing its rate of curl. Sweeping makes stones go farther and straighter.

Way back when, the sweeping was done with good old-fashioned corn brooms — you know, the kinds witches ride around on. But in the last quarter of the 20th century, broom technology began to see upgrades. The handles went from wood to fiberglass to carbonfiber. The broom heads went from corn to horse hair to synthetic fabric stretched over a type of cushion. Brooms got lighter and more effective, meaning sweepers could influence the stone more and more. But for the most part, the changes were incremental. Things got better over a long period of time. Now, it’s an arms race.

Teams these days — and I’m talking about the tops teams that play for cash prizes and sponsorships in Canada — put a very strong emphasis on sweeping. While teams certainly still work on strategy and delivery, sweeping is now a big part of the game. The reigning men’s Olympic champion and 2015 Canadian National runner-up squad from Northern Ontario knows this. That’s why their front two players (those that sweep the most) look like this:

Technique and physical fitness are now part of a sweeper’s training regimen. Teams with great sweepers have an advantage. But fitness and technique can only take one so far. Eventually, the tool has to be upgraded.

The synthetic brooms from even a few years ago were all pretty similar. They all had lightweight handles, and the pads were made of a sort of nylon material — not dissimilar from a boat canvas. It was durable and swept quickly and smoothly. Different companies made variations of course, but they were all fairly similar.

Then, about five years ago or so, a company called Hardline came out with a new kind of pad. They call it the icePad. It’s a little smaller, much thinner, and the material that covers it is much different than previous broom. Hardline broom material is more like something found used to make a tent or winter coat. It’s much thinner and the weave is much tighter. The broom as a whole is very light and easy to sweep.

In the past couple years, the use of Hardline brooms among top competitive teams has grown quite a bit. They can be seen in almost every major event. Hardline sponsors many teams in hopes that exposure will convince recreational curlers to buy their product. They are fine brooms that make sweeping easier and are competitively priced. And some people want them banned.

The controversy revolves around what’s now being called “directional fabric.” There’s a lot of bickering and conjecture involved, but here’s the gist. Hardline started making a serious dent in the curling industry. This, theoretically, cut into the profits of other equipment manufacturers like BalancePlus. This year, BalancePlus released their own version of a “directional” broom that can do some really amazing things to a curling stone. In case you’re interested, here are two videos put out by BalancePlus.

The first shows a BalancePlus broom essentially changing the curl direction of the stone:

The second shows a stone being held incredibly straight down the line:

Basically, BalancePlus took Hardline’s broom concept and cranked it to 11. Now, people are calling foul saying that these new brooms make the game too easy, that simple sweeping techniques and new brooms are taking the art of shotmaking out of the game all together. They debuted these brooms earlier this year, and some teams and fans got pretty peeved.

Now, some teams have agreed to a pact where they will not use any of the “directional” brooms in competition, including both the BalancePlus and Hardline brooms.

Hardline believes that BalancePlus is playing the part of a bully — making an absurd product to garner vitriol over all makes of these brooms in an attempt to get them banned. As of this writing, these brooms are legal. But if that were to change, teams would have to go back to using more traditional brooms. One of the biggest makers of traditional brooms? BalancePlus.

Hardline doesn’t make traditional brooms. They are a smaller company (they were even featured on the Canadian version of Shark Tank) with limited resources. These types of brooms are their bread and butter. They can’t go back to making other kinds without incurring significant costs. Even further, they claim their heads don’t even perform in a directional way — that their brooms aren’t even capable of the things the BalancePlus offerings are.

At some point, a committee will have to be set up to sort all this out. Some independent testing will have to be done and some rules will have to be put in place. But until then, what’s being dubbed as BroomGate (cue audible eye roll) will remain the talk of curling clubs all across the world — after the requisite drinking stories and dirty jokes, that is.

(Header image via RyAwesome)

A very happy and very spooky Friday to you, fair TechGraphs reader. As you get all your tricks and/or treats in order, feel free to check out all the sports-tech stories that we found interesting this week.

Public service announcement: NBA League Pass is available for free through November 3rd. If you are on the fence about subscribing, or if you just want to check out some out-of-market games this weekend, now’s your chance.

If you are a data wizard interested in breaking into the baseball world, the Astros are currently hiring a research and development analyst. For some, getting a job with any big-league club is a win, but jumping on with a stat-friendly team on the rise is an added bonus.

Yahoo! aired the first ever regular season NFL game over the Internet last weekend, which is a pretty big deal. Wired has a nice look at what went on behind the scenes. Everything seems to have gone pretty smoothly, even if not as many people watched as Yahoo! would have you believe. It makes sense that a bunch of people tuned in for at least a little bit of the game, considering how hard Yahoo! was pimping the thing.

On a similar note, the Golden State Warriors streamed their first game of the season via virtual reality. Anyone with a Samsung VR headset and compatible smartphone could tune in to experience the game in real time.

Remember how the two big names in daily fantasy (DraftKings and FanDuel) came under scrutiny for insider antics and general skullduggery? Well, it looks like a governing body is being set up to monitor these shenanigans going forward.

Speaking of, TechCrunch has an interesting take on how daily fantasy could be used to launder money.

FiveThirtyEight ran a great piece about how camera systems and machine learning is changing the sports landscape. Or, at least I think that’s what it was about. It’s pretty long.

Sports data startup Sportsradar got a big influx of money from investors that include both Mark Cuban and Michael Jordan. It looks like Sportsradar’s next push will be into the world of fantasy and gambling.

That’s all for this week. Have a fun and safe Halloween, and make sure to be excellent to each other.