With the NFL season kicking off tomorrow, MLB in the middle of the playoff hunt, and of course college football and other sports already going on, it’s time to kick off a monthly series highlighting some of the best cost efficient ways of catching sports broadcasts and more. From set-top boxes to HDMI dongles to consoles, count on seeing an updated list here at TechGraphs every month. As more and more devices and channels are released, count on this list changing, especially as we approach the holiday season. It feels weird saying “holiday season” in September, but some of my local stores are already posting Black Friday store hours.

There is no shortage of options available, but I’ll be limiting the list by two criteria: they have to be available in the United States, and there has to be separate hardware involved (I’m looking at you, SlingTV, Pluto and Plex). I’ve also specifically chosen Google’s Nexus Player, though there are many more other Android TV boxes. Some streaming options such as WatchESPN, HBO Go and NBC Sports Live Extra require a cable subscription, however all devices can be more than adequate for those looking to cut the cord. Given the rising demand of streaming, particularly among Millenials, all of these devices can play in a role in fulfilling your entertainment needs, be it sports or other stream options.

*Amazon Prime price
**Best Buy Online price
†Coming soon
Also of note, the Amazon Fire TV is currently off of the market apparently due to selling the entirety of the stock. There is speculation it could be relaunched in a 4K resolution shortly.

With the national mean cable bill at nearly $100 per month according to Leitchman Research Group, up 39 percent from 2010. The soaring recurring costs of TV make one-time payments for top boxes and streaming services such as MLBtv or NBA League Pass more and more enticing. Between my MLBtv and Fox Soccer 2 Go via Chromecast (plus Netflix and Amazon Prime), I’m personally spending less than the near $1,200 per year that I might with cable. I’m admittedly in the minority as a cord cutter, but our numbers are rising, and for good and simple reason. It makes sense.

(Header image screencapped from my season 2 DVD of The Simpsons, specifically episode 13, Homer vs. Lisa and the 8th Commandment)

America’s appetite for football is insatiable.  Between fantasy rosters, office pools, betting the point spread or the purity of football fandom, the NFL continues to attract more and more eyeballs to its product. According to Zap2It, the shield grabbed 202 million viewers in 2014, 80 percent of all television homes and 68 percent of potential viewers in the U.S. It was the second-most watched season of average viewers (17.6 million) behind 2010’s mark of 17.9 million. In the last ten years, viewership has increased 25 percent by almost 4 million viewers. Thursday Night football increased 53 percent in one season.

For many, three free Sunday games, one Monday and one Thursday night game aren’t enough to feed one’s football fix. And for them, there’s DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket. But at the Max package, which includes the Red Zone Channel, a fantasy zone channel and the ability to stream to another device, one’s per-month cost (the season is four months long) is $88.49/month. To put it in perspective, Major League Baseball charges $129.99 for its premium MLB.TV package and the NBA League Pass costs $199.99. Those amounts cover the entire six-month season of each league.

For those without such comfy disposable incomes that still want to suck in every breath of the NFL this season, here are some other options.

Go to a Bar

The obvious alternative is to find a bar with the games on that you want to watch. But is this cost efficient compared to slapping Sunday Ticket Max on your Visa and living off of ramen until spring?

Rudy’s Pub and Grill is a popular spot to watch football in Newport Beach, Calif. Considering a three-and-a-half hour game, I priced out what may be a typical, if not a tad aggressive, bar bill.

$9.95 – Bacon/jalapeno wings

$11.95 – Pub hoagie

$20 – Four domestic beers at $5 a pop

After tax and tip, you’ve just spent $53.57, or 61 percent of the monthly cost for Sunday Ticket Max. And this is for one, maybe two games on one Sunday. It’s a fun day, but not cost efficient.

There are cheaper bar options. One of my favorite hang outs is an Irish bar in downtown Orange, where I grew up. It’s not a sports bar, but they do draw a football crowd on Sundays and it’s a more affordable way to enjoy several hours of football.

At O’Hara’s, a domestic pitcher typically costs $7. Just next door is a tasty, fast Mexican food joint, a sandwich shop and a pizza place. O’Hara’s has no issues bringing food in to the bar, as they don’t provide food themselves. Since we’re going cheap, we’ll give ourselves a $10 limit.

$14 – Two domestic pitchers

$3 – Tip

Food from next door  – $10

Total – $27

At half the cost of a Sunday Funday at Rudy’s Pub and Grill, a day at O’Hara’s still is 31 percent of that damn DirecTV product. For 16 weeks (a couple Sundays away from the bar and attending a family member’s birthday), you’ve just spent $432 to watch Sunday football, or, $78.06 more than it would’ve cost Sunday Ticket Max for the season.

Of course, skipping O’Hara’s would mean missing out on the sciatica caused by the stiff booths. And since you have an actual lock on your bathroom door at home, there’s no chance of a stranger walking in on you peeing. That’s what the extra $78 buys you. Experiences!

Cheaper Sunday Ticket Options

Regular Sunday Ticket, which doesn’t include the Red Zone channel or other perks, runs $62.99 a month ($251.94 total). For college students, that cost drops to $24.99 a month, or $99 total.

Order the Sunday Ticket To Go, which streams only to a tablet, phone or laptop, and the monthly charge is $49.99.

Cost Sharing

Sunday Ticket without the Red Zone Channel is like Nevada without Las Vegas – what’s the point? So grab some friends and split the cost of the Max package. For three of you, the cost is $29.50 for a month ($117.98 for season). Add in one more and you’re at $22.13 a month ($88.49 a season).

Watching football is fun. Watching football with a friend is more fun. And watching football with multiple friends is even more fun. So not only do you save some cash, but you’re having more fun. It’s science. And you don’t have to worry about tipping your server at 40 percent because you’re smitten by her blue eyes and dimpled cheeks.

NFL Game Pass

There’s two ways to go about Game Pass. For $24.75 a month ($99 for the season) you can watch every game, not including the Sunday night game. The kicker is the games won’t unlock until after the last game of the afternoon has finished. But you do get access to the All 22 camera and you can block scores from other games. And maybe brunch with the in-laws, church with grandma or spending time with your kids is a healthy and productive thing.

If you live outside the U.S., however, you can use Game Pass for live viewing. This is great for fans who had to move for work or family, but still want to watch NFL games live at some ungodly hour. Of course, the more nefarious can use this option and couple it with an IP spoofing service or VPN and watch live streaming in the good old U.S.A., but that will take a little more research on your part. And any VPN service that offers decent streaming bandwidth is going to cost, adding to the monthly fee.

Stream Illegally

It’s the internet. This is what the internet does. Google search or hunt around Reddit and you’ll find what you’re looking for.

So, the breakdown:

If you’re looking for the best value, get three friends together, split the cost of DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket Max package and persuade the friend with the best TV to accommodate. Don’t leave a mess and toss in a six-pack once a month for the host. After all, he’s cleaning up your urine on the toilet seat.

Image courtesy of Mike Reynolds 

The Easton Power Sensor, produced through the partnership between wearable sensor manufacturer Blast Motion and baseball equipment manufacturer Easton, was recently released. The sensor was the result of a collaboration first announced in January 2014, and has been in the works since before the official launch of the Blast Baseball Replay.

The product, which will go on the market this fall, is largely a re-branding of the existing Blast Baseball Replay sensor. For the first time, however, Blast will expand its offerings to support Android devices. Donovan Prostrollo, Blast Motion’s senior director of marketing, says that current users will also benefit from future software changes that will come out of this partnership.

“There has been a lot of infrastructure work that has gone on behind the scenes,” Prostrollo said. “We will be providing a free software upgrade to Blast Baseball Replay customers, allowing them to gain all the benefits of the Easton Power Sensor and the new features that are on the way.”

Now that the sensor has been officially released, Easton plans to incorporate it into its traveling Hit Lab, which combines video capture and Trackman radar systems to help players learn more about their swings.

“[The Hit Lab] offers an unmatched opportunity for players to experience the science of hitting,” said Henry Fitzgerald, a member of Easton’s performance sports group. “The Easton Power Sensor will have a central role in this.”

Plans to further improve sensor performance are currently being discussed, but Fitzgerald was understandably reluctant to divulge specific improvements.

“Our R&D department is always searching for ways to improve our bats and any relevant technology,” Fitzgerald said.

The announcement coincided with the start of the 2015 Little League World Series, which ended this past Sunday. As the official equipment sponsor of the event, Easton brought the Power Sensor to Williamsport (shown above) to demonstrate its capabilities for the second straight year.

“It’s exciting to see the kids when they get their hands on the sensor and see their metrics,” Prostrollo said. “By combining the science of hitting with innovative technology, we’re able to give players of all ages and skill levels the insights they need to improve their swing.”

Like Major League Baseball, Little League Baseball currently does not allow wearable senors like the Easton Power Sensor on the field during competitions. But Fitzpatrick says Easton has been lobbying for these groups to lift this ban.

“The sensor as it is today does not offer any sort of performance advantage,” he said. “It’s simply an attachment.”

Like the Blast Baseball Replay, the Easton Power sensor is driven by a “tactical-grade” inertial measurement unit (IMU), which combines more precise sensors, more processing power, and on-the-fly calibration to improves the device’s accuracy and consistency. Both the Blast and Easton apps revolve around video, typically captured by setting the device on a tripod and automatically clipped so that only the events of interest are included. Users can view their swings in adaptive slow-motion, which automatically adjusts the playback speed around key moments in the swing. In an earlier interview, Prostrollo said Blast Motion’s focus on video allows Blast’s Baseball Replay — now re-branded as the Easton Power Sensor — to give users insights into more than just bat path alone.

“Because we approached it from the natural motion capture side, we knew that it was going to be a lot more about what is your entire body doing,” Prostrollo said. “The metrics are really only half the story. You really need to put that in context, you need to make it personal.”

Concussions are bad.

Nobody has ever really disputed this, but over the last decade, it has become increasingly apparent that repetitive head injuries, seen particularly often in football, can lead to significant long-term medical effects.

The “concussion debate” has largely taken place on the professional stage, from the controversies generated by League of Denial to Will Smith’s forthcoming feature film Concussion and beyond. Yet the true impact is being felt across the nation, as schools and innovators work to protect the more than 1,000,000 young adults who play college and high school football each season.

This fall, new devices large and small are being tested to reduce the frequency and effect of football-related concussions.

The Dartmouth Dummy

Five years ago, the Dartmouth Big Green football program eliminated athlete-on-athlete tackling during practices. Cutting out these collisions in favor of tackle sleds and dummies cuts down on injuries and concussions–which makes sense–but made it harder to actually practice tackling against a moving target–which also makes sense.

Enter the MVP–the “Mobile Virtual Player”.

Designed by two Dartmouth engineering students, the MVP is a remote-controlled, human-sized dummy that resembles a cross between the Headless Horseman and a Weeble. Less bone-crushing than an actual human, the MVP allows for relatively realistic tackling simulations while significantly decreasing the risk of head and neck injuries.

Two MVPs were deployed in August, with a third on the way, and the experiment has received the attention of major media, tech blogs–and, reportedly, a few NFL teams.

New Helmets InSite

This doesn’t do much to prevent contact during games–and, as long as there’s tackling in football, there’s only so much you can do–but some new tools are being developed to limit the effects of major hits when they do happen.

The sporting company Riddell is in the process of bringing a new line of helmets to high schools around the country. The SpeedFlex helmets, equipped with Riddell’s InSite Impact Response System, use six built-in accelerometers to measure the individual and combined force of every impact a player receives. This data is sent live to a laptop on the sidelines, where trainers and staff can monitor players for potential danger signs.

As programs continue to adopt the system, one trainer says, this data will itself be useful for better understanding what leads to football brain injuries.

Watch Your Mouth

In fact, before long it might not even take a special helmet to easily detect potential concussions. Smithsonian reports on FITGuard, a mouth guard co-created by two Arizona State grads–one a veteran of the rugby team.

Like InSite, FITGuard uses sensors to measure hits to the head and can transfer data to a nearby computer. If FITGuard sees any signs of danger, though, it simply lights up the player’s mouth using LEDs. FITGuard is scheduled for release in early 2016.

These tools aren’t without their caveats. A recent Stanford study, for example, found that some currently existing concussion-measuring devices (particularly helmets) can significantly mismeasure the actual force of impact.

Nevertheless, with room for improvement and no end to the concussion crisis in sight, technology like this can still have great potential to help protect our next generation of football players.

(Featured Image via Dartmouth)

YouTube Gaming launched last Wednesday and after nearly a week of observations, the Google powered streaming service has left several big impressions. Before fully diving into the details, it should be noted that YTG represents the first real challenger (sorry, Major League Gaming TV) to the currently undisputed streaming service of Twitch.TV. Last year Amazon purchased Twitch after Google reportedly backed out despite tentatively agreeing to a price tag upwards of $1 billion. Amazon ended up paying approximately $970 million to acquire Twitch, representing an investment — and presumably a belief — in the continued success of streaming esports and video games.

Other than huge difference in viewership numbers, something not particularly unexpected given YTG is still in its infancy, there are some differences in the layout and execution of the two platforms. For the duration of this look-in, YTG will be on the left-hand side with Twitch being on the right. Pictured below is the same moment (as close as I could get) in a StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void beta game between two pairs of professional players that has been paused. The screenshot was a VOD (Video On Demand) rather than live as I couldn’t quite grab the right timing during each live broadcast. The match up took place at Red Bull Battlegrounds, something YTG labels in the upper left whereas Twitch does not during a full screen pause.

It isn’t a deal making feature for YouTube, however it is a nice feature that normal YouTube videos have that has carried over to the streaming side of things. Another big chip in YTG’s favor is their pausing the VODs. YouTube grants the ability to navigate away from a specific spot in a video and being able to hit the back button and go right to where the video was paused. Twitch on the other will send you back to the beginning of the VOD rather than save a spot. For anyone who’s ever played a video game for more than a few minutes, misclicks or the wrong hotkey being hit are bound to happen, so this pause-and-return feature is another great feature from standard YouTube.

The game search options for both options each leave much to be desired as both sport autocomplete options, but neither are particularly great.

After clicking the game, in this case Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Twitch welcomes you to a page featuring the top streams rated by current viewership sortable by specific maps. This is a big contrast from the generic YouTube landing page where it shows a video from a year ago as its top result and zero live streams. After browsing the various YTG videos, most turned out to be previously uploaded videos rather than live stream VODs. As it gains a more extensive VOD library I expect this to change, but it’s somewhat surprising to see two of the top six YTG search results be from more than four months ago.

Another issue I routinely saw with YouTube that I’m willing to chalk up to it still being new is the lack of moderators for the stream chats. Of the two dozen or so YTG streams I was in, the chat was running rampant with a mix of memes, ASCII characters and the like. Obviously Twitch chat is nothing to brag about, but at least a majority of the ridiculous fluff was removed by mods in the Twitch channels I frequent. To be honest, my friends have nicknamed Twitch chat — and by extension most stream chats — as YouTube comments in real time, something that is not a compliment to anyone who has delved into the depths of said comments.

Despite the flaws, I remain optimistic YouTube Gaming will get up to speed and soon give Twitch a real live streaming threat in the esports realm. As someone who has dealt with streaming issues since Justin.TV and an esports fan who grows weary of Twitch issues — specifically video stuttering or freezing and frame-rate drops despite a strong internet connection and computer — hopefully the competition YTG brings to the table will bring out the best in themselves and in Twitch, resulting in the best possible outcomes for the users. While I remain unimpressed with YouTube Gaming at the moment, I’m eager to see what the coming months brings for their viewer options. I can’t see this becoming Google Glass or Google+; this is one project that seems incredibly likely to succeed if for no other reason than that the market and demand is already in place.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Header image via Nicolas Raymond)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the Excel features that I feel too many people ignore is the “Format as a Table” tool. Let’s say we’ve got this data, 2014 team defense data from Pro-Football-Reference.com. I’ve cleaned it up a little — gotten rid of the totals at the bottom and consolidated the headers into one row — but it should still be a fairly recognizable table.

File -> PFR2014.csv

The process of formatting data as a table is really stupidly simple. Click anywhere within the table’s data (so anywhere from A1 to Z33). Now choose “Format as a Table” from the Home tab:

I am going to select the third from the top red design because red is the greatest color. When I do pick that design, I get a popup and a blinking border around my data:

Presto magnifico, I have a table!

“But Bradley, you had a table all along.”

Shut up, and yes, I did — but this one is better. Lemme show you why.

The first thing I like to do is enable “Wrap Text” on the header row (select the top row, then Home > Wrap Text). It allows me to see the whole table much better. (This is a simple operation, but if you’re confused, Professor Google should have a plethora of resources on the matter.)

The second thing I like to do is rename this table — especially if I’m going to do work with multiple tables. To rename the table, head to Formulas > Name Manager. The name manager popup window should have only one table in it — Table1. Double click that line, and a subsequent pop up will enable us to edit the name:

Once you choose a name, click OK then Close. Now when we select all the data in the table, it will highlight the name “Defense” in a names drop-down menu:

Of course, we can name a table without it being formatted through the “Format as Table” function. But what’s nice about the “Format” table is that if I add a row or a column, the named table “Defense” automatically expands. Let’s try this out.

Go to cell AA1 and type “Pass – Rush AVG” (we’re going to create a new column). Excel will automatically create and format a new column, like this:

Now, I’m going to type a new formula into it:

=[Passing NY/A]-[Rushing Y/A]

Whoa! That’s not a normal Excel formula! That’s right. It’s a table formula. Now that we have a named table, we can use the column names to complete formulas within (and without) the table. More on that in a second.

Depending on your settings, the formula may have automatically filled to the bottom of the spreadsheet. If it didn’t, just click on the autofill icon that appeared at the bottom left corner, and choose to allow the formula to overwrite the contents of the column:

And hey, remember that strange formula we made a second ago? Let’s do something similar on a different tab. I’m going to add another sheet, Sheet2, and type into any cell:

=AVERAGE(Defense[Pass - Rush AVG])

That’s a basic =AVERAGE formula, but because of the named table “Defense” and the named column “Pass – Rush AVG,” I’m able to write the formula without using the mouse or worrying about cells moving or data changing. In fact, I can go back and change the name of that column to “Net Pass AVG” and guess what happens to my formula? It changes automatically to:

=AVERAGE(Defense[Net Pass AVG])

One of the biggest advantages to using named tables (and editing those table names) is that when formula get REALLY complicated, you can read something that’s close to English, not a collection of meaningless cell references (“Wait, was A1:D22 the running data? Or was that in F2:Y54?” as opposed to “Oh, I have Running[AVG] not Running[Data] selected. Oops!”).

Consider this formula from my Scoresheet dataset:

=IF(VLOOKUP(CONCATENATE([@firstName]," ",[@lastName]),FGDC,19,0)=0,"",VLOOKUP(CONCATENATE([@firstName]," ",[@lastName]),FGDC,19,0))

“FGDC” is data pulled from the FanGraphs Depth Charts leaderboard. I have that data on a separate tab. Here’s how the above formula would look without named sections:

=IF(VLOOKUP(CONCATENATE(Combined!G2:G1010," ",Combined!H2:H1010),'FG DC'!A2:X1141,19,0)=0,"",VLOOKUP(CONCATENATE(Combined!G2:G1010," ",Combined!H2:H1010),'FG DC'!A2:X1141,19,0))

Both formulas are unwieldy, but at least the first one is intrinsically sensible. I’m combining the column “firstName” with “lastName” and looking them up in table FGDC. If I don’t find them, then I want Excel to put nothing into the cell (i.e. print “”).

If you want to learn more about structured references, I recommend this rundown of the syntax and various uses of structured refs.

It’s also important to note a named table automatically adds filters and applies those filters even to new columns and rows.

Another small, but useful component of tables is that the jump shortcuts (e.g. CTRL+→) will jump to the end of the table, even if the row or column is empty. In other words, in the empty Sc% column, if we press CTRL+↓, the cursor will move to X33 instead of X1048576, which is where it would normally and uselessly end.

There’s a multitude of other little handy features when it comes to structured tables, like being able to neatly and easily select whole columns of data without also selecting the header and the empty cells beneath the data. But for now, I hope this is enough to get the Excel newbie started with exploring this surprisingly robust feature.

This is Part 2 of Seth’s look into VR and sports. If you missed Part 1, you can read it here.

The Gear

Before we dive in too much further, let’s take a quick look at the different rigs in the VR marketplace .

• Oculus Rift: Arriving 2016, Q1. The Rift plugs in to a computer’s DVI and USB ports. The latest version, the dev kit Crescent Bay, sells for $350. Oculus VR CEO Palmer Luckey estimates a $200-$400 cost. Microsoft and Oculus recently announced the Rift will ship with an Xbox One controller.
• Samsung Gear VR: Already available, this is a device powered by the Oculus Rift dev kit and uses a Samsung Galaxy phone, either a Note 4 or a Galaxy S6. The mobile device slots in front of the lenses, into a Micro USB dock and uses Super AMOLED display as the screen. It sells for $199, and of course the phone is needed to view content, which can be found on Samsung’s Milk VR service.
• Project Morpheus: Arriving 2016, Q2. The price is rumored to cost around $400-450, but his is only a rumor.
• HTC Vive: Arriving 2015, Q4. The Vive plugs into PC and works with Steam’s library of games.
• Carl Zeiss VR One: Already available and listed for $129, the Zeiss VR One accomodates the iPhone 6, Samsung Galaxy S4, S5, S6, Nexus 5 and LG-G3 smartphones. It also supports apps available from Google Play and the Apple Store.
• Avegant Glyph: Arriving 2015, Q3. This rig is limited to 45 degrees field of view, but it also is said to reduce motion sickness and eye fatigue. It fits like headphones and the screen pulls down in front of your face. The cost is $499.
• Google Cardboard: Our own Bradley Woodrum introduced you to this low-cost VR option back in December. Pop a smartphone into the cardboard container and bam, it’s VR time. As Wareable wrote, smartphones contain all the necessary gyroscopic sensors and positioning systems to accurately track head movements.

Broadcast

The most anticipated facet of VR in sports is how it will impact the way we view live sporting events. The NBA is an early adopter in VR broadcasts. The Association launched global marketing efforts years ago to establish new fanbases. While its efforts have succeeded, it’s left international fans, which can only watch games on television, hungry for an in-game experience. Fans in China and India will likely never go to a game. But what if they could in 2016? What if they could hear the squeaky sneakers, scan the jerseys hanging on the rafters and glance up at the scoreboard to see how many fouls Dwight Howard has? This is what the NBA wants to offer.

“When the day comes that 100 million or a billion people from mainland China can feel like they’re attending a Houston Rockets game courtside, that’s the dream. That’s the holy grail,” said Jeff Marsilio, the NBA’s associate vice president of global media distribution, in an interview with Fast Company. “That’s what we’re working toward.”

That work includes a partnership with Samsung’s Milk VR network. Marsilio hypothesized about the possibilities: offering perspectives from courtside during games, mid-court during team practices, in the locker room before a game, and maybe even sitting at the table with on-air commentators.

And while it may sound too good to be true initially, these are ideas that not only the NBA, but the NFL, MLB and NHL are all bouncing around.

In the conference room of an open-spaced, light-filled office in Laguna Beach, Calif., Brad Allen, executive chairman of NextVR, showed me the future. After popping his smartphone in to a Samsung Gear VR headset and helped strap it to my face, he rolled his company’s demo. I hovered above the ice during an Anaheim Ducks game at the Honda Center. I stood behind the pit crew of a Nascar event as they frantically worked to change tires and fuel up as fast as possible. When I turned around I saw the race’s leaderboard. With a 180 degree turn, I went from being on the track to a broadcast studio, and back. A goalie tracked down a ball right in front of me that went out of bounds as I looked up at him from the soccer pitch.

NextVR is a six-year-old company born to broadcast 3D television. Its founders worked with ESPN, TNT and in Hollywood. Co-founders DJ Roller shot the first live 3D sports broadcast at the 2007 NBA All-Star game and David Cole designed the first 3D HD video cameras, which were used in the blockbuster Avatar. They use Hollywood-level cameras that capture in 6K, are based on NextVR’s own compression technology, and can transmit in 4K — allowing live streaming VR on the internet. It all seems sort of Pied Piperish, sans Erlich Bachman’s bong.

In addition to its compression technology, what separates NextVR is its hardware. The cameras. Six RED Epic Dragon cameras operating form a rig to capture with each of three pairs of cameras capturing the stereoscopic image in front of them. The footage is combined with the NextVR software to produce a 360-degree composite video.

But the killer tech to live VR streaming is light field photography. Light field cameras capture information about the intensity of the light in a scene and the direction the light rays are traveling in space. NextVR announced its voyage into this awesomeness in March, which ideally, would allow the viewer to alter their point of view within the video, in any direction, with six degrees of freedom. It heightens the viewers sense of immersion. Want a better angle on a play happening on the other side from your current view point? You’ve got it. NextVR’s patented approach, which the company has researched and developed for three years, creates a 3D geometric model of the scene. No stitching of images needed, a rarity among VR content producers.

“Live transmission is really the killer app for virtual reality – enabling viewers to witness sporting events as they happen, live in VR and from locations beyond a front row seat ” said DJ Roller, co-founder of NextVR.

Experiencing VR for yourself is a must. While the cool factor is off the charts, what I experienced were just demos. The future Allen showed me – the future that filled me with more excitement than Charlie about to enter Willy Wonka’s factory – is about to become the present.

Allen painted a picture of being at a game. I get to choose my seat, whether it’s front row, behind home plate or behind an end zone. When I look behind me, I have access to my social media feeds. I can enter a team’s store and buy merchandise. My friends list shows me if my buddies are online, and if they’re watching the game. If there’s a few, we can create a luxury box and watch the game together. I can scroll through game stats, player stats and season stats. I really want to listen to Vin Scully call this game, so I include the broadcast overlay. In the bottom of the ninth with the Dodgers down a run and the bases loaded, I can turn off the broadcast and listen to, and become one of, the rabid fans.

It’s the ultimate second screen experience. You just don’t need the actual second screen.

Leagues are preparing how to implement VR into broadcasts, with the goal of enhancing fan engagement, Allen said. And he’d know. NextVR is working with leagues to develop best practices.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, NextVR has already tested its tech with the NBA, NHL and MLB. The company partnered with Fox Sports to deliver a live stream VR experience with multi-camera coverage of golf’s U.S. Open. Earlier in the year NextVR’s cameras grabbed footage in the pit of the Nascar Spring Cup Series in addition to actual racing, which Fox broadcasts. And as Road To VR reported in April, Fox boss Robert Murdoch reviewed NextVR’s content and apparently came away impressed, considering Fox’s progressive partnership with NextVR and testing of VR broadcasting abilities, like the U.S. Open.

“Our ongoing efforts with NextVR are exactly the kind of relationships we are exploring with our new Fox Lab platform,” John Entz, president of production at Fox Sports, in a statement. “Virtual reality is most certainly delivering a new level of excitement to next-generation production possibilities, and it will be great to gauge the reactions of the audiences who get to sample it at the U.S. Open.”

Peter Guber, Mandalay Entertainment CEO and co-owner of the Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Dodgers, put a few million dollars worth of his chips in to the pot, and is betting on NextVR. A friend of Allen’s, Guber invested an undisclosed amount in to the company and will serve as chair on the advisory board.

“You don’t have a director telling you where to look,” he told Recode.net. “Individual capture devices can be put in separate places, and you can move from courtside to the owner’s suite, looking down.”

NextVR is building a platform through its portal and app to host a large amount of content, which would allow sports fans to view channels of live and on-demand programming. As Sportsvideo.org noted following an interview with David Cramer, senior vice president of corporate strategy, their portal could also be linked to rightsholders’ own apps and websites.

“Some of the content could be accessible to all Fox viewers, or there could be a PPV or subscription model for premium content,” Cramer said. “Then there is also the opportunity for sponsorship or advertising and even e-commerce.”

Pricing would likely be pay-per-view or subscription based through the NextVR app.

Broadcast rights aside, there are other ways to watch live events in the VR realm. In February, for the first time in two decades, AltspaceVR CEO Eric Romo watched the Super Bowl from his Northern California home with his dad and brother, who live in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, respectively.

“I got to hear Dad yell throw the damn ball over and over again,” Romo said.

Romo’s AltspaceVR hosted a Super Bowl viewing party for users with an Oculus Rift dev kit and an internet connection. Romo used the game to test his hardware, and beta testers sat in a gigantic virtual theater with the game shown on to a giant screen from NBC’s web stream. The playback of the game was synced so everyone viewed the same thing at the exact same time. For those that think VR is an isolating experience, AltpspaceVR’s vision disproves that notion. The company, which has raised $15.7 million in seed money, including a backing from Google Ventures, is banking on the social side of the technology.

“You look around and you’re in a crowded room full of people,” Romo said. If done right, it really feels like it. You’re with real humans and you feel a real connection with those people.”

AltspaceVR continues to hone it’s platform. Its beta access is now open on a continuous basis. Romo said that audio balancing continues to be a challenge. He doesn’t want viewers to have to shout over the audio on the screen.

“There’s a lot to learn about how to make our product a good experience,” Romo said.

On October 25th AltspaceVR will host a viewing party for the Buffalo Bills vs Jacksonville Jaguars in London, as the NFL tests its streaming capabilities. Other focuses for the company include making MLB.tv work and adding international sports for its clamoring global community.

Mary Spio, president of Next Galaxy, which develops content solutions and VR tech, echoed Allen and Romo. The former deep space engineer said she’s talked to a lot of sports teams and they’re most excited about selling tickets globally. It’s an untapped revenue stream. And as Romo highlighted the sociability of sports, Spio noted that there’s a reason Facebook bought Oculus – they saw that it can be a social thing.

“Most people think of games (when it comes to VR), but sports will completely eclipse what’s being done in games in virtual reality,” Spio said.

Next Galaxy put together a nifty promotional video, which I’ll embed, as it illustrates the possibilities of viewing live sports in VR.

Training

Last month the Dallas Cowboys signed a deal to have their quarterbacks use a VR headset for training purposes. Not only will it allow them to improve their decision making, but it allows back ups and injured players, who would not take physical snaps during practice, to speed up learning, all the while complying with strict guidelines prohibiting time with NFL coaches. Not only would the quarterbacks watch film. They’d be doing the drill tape.

StriVR Labs, the company working with the Cowboys, just kicked off its business venture in early January. But as Fox Sports thoroughly profiled earlier this year, it started much earlier. Derek Belch, a former Stanford kicker and special teams grad assistant for the 2014 squad and Jeremy Bailenson, communications professor and founding director of the university’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, brainstormed how virtual reality could be applied in football, and ultimately, that became Belch’s thesis master’s thesis.

Belch turned Stanford’s practice field in to his personal lab in 2014, thanks to head football coach David Shaw. As Fox Sports reported:

Shaw, who knew Bailenson because the professor’s virtual reality lab was a stop on the tour his staff would show Stanford football recruits, agreed to set aside five minutes of practice each week on Monday nights. Offensive coordinator Mike Bloomgren would scout out eight to 10 blitzes the upcoming opponent favored and scheme up some answers that the Cardinal scout team players would carry out as Belch and his video crew filmed. By Wednesdays, when the quarterbacks came into the football office, the Cardinal’s plan of attack was already loaded into VR and there for them once they strapped on the headsets. But the transition was hardly seamless.

The experiments lasted until November before Belch and his team worked out the kinks. Cardinal quarterback Kevin Hogan played so well in a 31-10 upset of No. 8 UCLA (16-for-19 in pass attempts, with two incomplete passes a result of drops) on November 28 that Bloomgren raved about the results and Shaw mandated all of his quarterbacks work with the StriVR Labs’s trainer weekly. Stanford stomped Maryland 45-21 in its bowl game and Belch turned his thesis in to a company. And ex-NFL quarterback and former Stanford teammate of Belch’s, Trent Edwards, wanted in. After two minutes with the headset, Edwards said he wanted to work with Belch.

Along with the Cowboys, StriVR will work with the Minnesota Vikings, and San Francisco 49’ers. Besides Stanford, StriVR has partnered with Arkansas, Auburn, Clemson, Vanderbilt and Dartmouth. Three college teams decided to work with Belch on the spot. And he said that no one has said no yet.

“Andrew Luck will probably be very interested in this,” Belch told me in April. And he was right. Luck told Indystar.com he thinks VR will have a big impact on football training.

In a space crowded with start-up companies trying to make a buck, Belch emphasized that StriVR Labs’s edge is that it knows football culture. It speaks the language that coaches speak. And that puts coaches at ease.

StriVR is working with its clients to develop customized content for the training programs, which will include more positions than just QB. It also plans to quicken its turnaround time from filming plays to editing the VR content for use, to one day. While Belch wouldn’t divulge the cameras used to film footage, he did say they’re using the Oculus Rift headset.

Ultimately, this is how StriVR Labs can benefit its clients, Belch emphasized. They are very sensitive to keeping the process simple, and not to overwhelm the player. They don’t want to strap bells and whistles to a player.

“If it doesn’t seem like a seamless, transparent experience, that athlete isn’t going to be interested,” Belch said. “We need to keep up with the speed of the athlete.”

Eon Sports VR is the other major player in this space. Current clients include UCLA, Ole Miss, Syracuse and Kansas, and CEO Brendan Reilly told Fortune that he expects to sign two NFL teams before the start of the 2015 season.

Reilly’s goal is to reach the youth with his technology, which can accelerate a player’s knowledge and experience without baking in the August sun at practices, increase repetitions and reduce mental mistakes.

“The VR experience is the same for an NFL player or a 10-year-old kid in Kansas,” Reilly said to Fortune.

Increasing VR abilities will only limit the risk, and likely amount, of injuries in youth and high school sports.

Bailenson agrees with Reilly’s vision. He said VR as a training tool holds unique value in amateur sports as those athletes don’t have fancy workout centers or daily full-team practices. In VR, digital scenes can be replicated for little to no cost. From the top athlete on the planet to a sandlot quarterback.

“Everyone can have access to ‘high end’ virtual training for very little cost,” Bailenson said.

But the virtual training doesn’t stop on the gridiron. Earlier this year, Silver told The Stanford Daily that, in addition to benefiting marketing outreach, VR could help in the training room.

“Players always tell us how they get better by repeating certain situations,” Silver said. “This could be ideal [in helping them elevate their games].”

And baseball? Jesse Wolfersberger shared his vision recently at The Hardball Times:

Imagine this scenario. You are a major league player who will face a pitcher for the first time tomorrow. You head to the batting cage, the team’s VR assistant loads up the program, and you slide on the headset. From your perspective, you are now standing in the batter’s box, in the stadium full of fans, looking at tomorrow’s starting pitcher on the mound. He winds up and throws, and it looks exactly like it will during the game tomorrow. You can virtually face that pitcher dozens of times, seeing every pitch in his arsenal at the exact speed and break that he throws it. Could there be any better preparation other than actually facing the pitcher himself?

Stay tuned for Part 3, discussing branding and marketing, coming soon.

(Header image via Sergey Golyonkin)

Over the past weekend we saw two titans of esports, League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, hold major tournaments. On Sunday the European and North American League of Legends Championship Series summer finals concluded with the Counter-Logic Gaming team taking first place for North America, $50,000 in prize money, and a ticket directly into the 2015 World Championship, and Fnatic taking home the trophy for Europe. Fans of CS:GO were entertained from Thursday to Sunday with the ESL One: Cologne tournament, a tournament partially sponsored by CS:GO developer Valve, with $100,000 going to the winning team and $250,000 overall up for grabs. The weekend was filled with teams from all over the world aiming to take the top prize.

Both esports events captured a huge number of fans, and CS:GO set a sixth month high for Twitch.tv view hours in a single day. Via Gamoloco, CS:GO averaged more than seven million hours per day across the for the four day event, peaking at 8.9 million view hours on Saturday. It should be noted the number of hours is likely skewed by users logging in with multiple CS:GO accounts in order to raise their chances to receive a free in-game item drop, so these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. The infographic below displays the game itself rather than the specific ESL One Twitch channel, which is to say there were other streams being watched for CS:GO and League of Legends beyond just the official ESL One and LCS streams.

By specific channels with each game, Gamoloco rates ESL One compiling 24.4 million hours (with another one million hours on the official “B Stream”) compared to Riot Games, developer of LoL, totaling just over five million hours over the past week. These numbers represent the English speaking channels only, with the Russian channel covering ESL One accumulating nearly three million hours, plus Polish and German broadcasts for each game.

The crowds at both live venues were impressive as well, with the League of Legends NA Summer tournament filling up Madison Square Garden with a reported 11,000 fans. Europe was no slouch either as ESL looking as though the Lanxess Arena drew a fair crowd as the header image would indicate, along with a large crowd at the EU LCS at Stockholm’s Hovet Arena. While it’s hard to compare a single tournament to the long grind of a sports season, the NA Summer event pulled a crowd comparable to the NHL’s Florida Panthers and more than the MLS’ Chivas USA, though both the Panthers and Chiva rank last in attendance for their respective leagues.

These impressive numbers aren’t even counting Dota 2’s yearly tournament, The International that was held from July 27 to August 8 to decide the world’s champion where we saw the single largest prize pool for an esports tournament. With the growing prize pool, interest level and time commitments being dedicated to esports — not to mention push notifications the ESPN app and score tickers (cap tip to HeyCJay from Reddit) and streams on ESPN 3 — it may be time to pick your favorite esports organization just the same as a football or baseball team. 

(Header image via ESL Twitter)