TechGraphs News Roundup: 7/6/2015

The FanGraphs family took July 3rd off, so the News Roundup is appearing on your screens a little later than usual today. Here are some of the most interesting sports-tech tidbits we found this week.

Valve’s biggest DOTA 2 tournament, known as The International, announced that it will be offering $15 million in prize pool money. A challenging and leveling system being employed means that the total could actually go higher. This is where I would insert some overdone joke about nerds needing to do their hand stretches, but I feel like $15 million is an amount of money that prohibits me from making these comments anymore. Get that money, dorks.

Speaking of gamers, they will now be able to share their favorite frags and long-range, no-scope headshots to mobile YouTube users in their beloved 60fps format. This feature has been available on the desktop for a bit of time, but now anyone with a modern iOS or Android device can enjoy the carnage (or Minecraft videos) in their preferred frame rate.

Kansas City’s Kaufmann Stadium got a major WiFi network upgrade during the end of last season, and just in time to see the baseball club take the World Series to seven games. That postseason traffic proved to be a great test, it seems, and the Royals are seeing the benefits this season. Promotion of the new network is going strong, and new features like a parking payment system have been added.

Dish’s new Sling TV platform showed signs of promise when we saw it at CES, and the potential to be a real disruptor is still there. However, if more major outages keep happening, Dish will start having customer retention issues before their platform is even fully off the ground.

This technically counts as sports-tech news because tennis is a sport and slow-motion video utilizes technology, but I mostly just want to make sure all of you see what really happens to a tennis ball when a racket hits it.

The San Antonio Spurs’ Matt Bonner thinks he gave himself tennis elbow by upgrading to the iPhone 6 Plus. Seriously.

GoPro has announced their newest offering, the Hero 4 Session, and it looks pretty rad. It’s basically a waterproof cube camera that packs many of the features a modern GoPro has, but in a much smaller and lighter package. Gizmodo had a chance to play with an early-release version, and the reviews and results seem quite positive.

That’s it for this (last week). We’ll have another news roundup on Friday to get back on the regular schedule. Until then, be excellent to each other.