Items tagged with Sports
The big event of the weekend was certainly the boxing match last night between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and UFC champ Conor McGregor. The fight was a spectacle during the promotion and many people shelled out $99.99 to watch the fight via pay-per-view (PPV). However, for some fans, the crushing demand for the fight streams led to trouble watching what they paid for. During the event both the UFC and Showtime PPV were having issues due to intense network load, leaving some who paid unable to watch the fight. As you can imagine. fans who had waited months to watch the fight, and coughed up their $100 weren't happy. The UFC tweeted that overwhelming traffic was making it hard for users to log into the...
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Are you ready for some football? Amazon sure is—the online retailer has inked a one-year agreement with the National Football League (NFL) to stream 10 Thursday night games to its Prime subscribers. It is paying $50 million for the privilege, which is 500 percent more than the NFL's prior agreement with Twitter over streaming rights, and for the same number of games.Twitter got off to a fast start last year when nearly a quarter of a million viewers tuned into its first streamed NFL game featuring the New York Jets and Buffalo Bills. Sure, that was a drop in the bucket compared to the 15.4 million that watched the same game through CBS, but for a first shot on social media, the number of viewers...
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You can expect to see more canned content and less of the interesting stuff from the professional football teams you follow on social media. That's because the NFL, or No Fun League National Football League, has issued new rules to teams that prevent them from posting certain content such as animated GIFs, lest they be hit with a fine of up to $100,000. Image Source: Flickr (Josh Hallett) All 32 NFL teams received a pair of memos outlining the new policies. Starting on Wednesday, teams will no longer be allowed to record video inside the stadium during the game and post it to Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media account. They're also barred from streaming live video within the stadium,...
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If you're without a cable TV subscription and have no access to legal sports streams online, chances are (probably) pretty good that you stumbled over to Twitter on Thursday night. That's where you would have found the NFL match-up between the New York Jets and Buffalo Bills. Or, perhaps you were simply on Twitter and happened to notice it in the side-bar. Reuters is reporting that some 243,000 viewers tuned into the game through the tweeting social network, with viewers heaping praise onto it. And while 243K is a drop in the bucket compared to the 15.4 million that tuned in through CBS, for a first go, the numbers are impressive nonetheless. Consider this: people who can watch through...
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Think you're fast enough to beat Usain Bolt on the track? It's one thing to haul out a stopwatch, but it's another to race his time against a real-life ghost. That ghost in this case is Puma's "BeatBot", a shoebox-sized robot that helps runners continually improve by allowing them to race against a competitor as much as they please. At this point, the world is chock-full of wearables, whether they be smartwatches, eye glasses, or even clothing. That makes BeatBot a little refreshing; it doesn't require a wearable at all. Instead, all the user needs to manipulate the BeatBot is a smartphone, which they will use to input the time they'd like to beat. Users can either use BeatBot to best their own...
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Did you know that racing drones is a thing? Well it is, and it's captured the attention of ESPN. The sports media outlet inked a multi-year media distribution deal with the International Drone Racing Association (yes, that exists too) to bring the new sport of drone racing to a global audience with ambitious expectations. ESPN and IDRA view drone racing as the next big thing in the racing category alongside the likes of NASCAR and Formula 1. That's big company to be in, with NASCAR alone a multi-billion dollar sport with a huge spectator following, particularly in the United States. It seems like a stretch (to us) that remote controlled drones will attract the same buzz, but time will tell. "Drone...
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One of the biggest signings in Major League Baseball this year isn't a pitcher with a wicked fast ball or a slugger who specializes in smashing the ball over the fence, but Apple and it's 12.9-inch iPad Pro tablet. Taking a page from Microsoft with its NFL deal, Apple inked a multi-year agreement to supply every MLB team with iPad Pro tablets to help coaches and statisticians evaluate performance data in real-time. Number crunching is a big deal in sports these days. As portrayed in the 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game and subsequent 2011 biographical sports drama Moneyball, former baseball player and current front office executive Billy Beane helped popularize the practice...
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Gaming is often the focus when VR is brought up, and while that could be the "ultimate" use for the tech, other content can make it seem just as worthwhile. In time, we could see full-fledged movies available in VR, and right now, we can find a lot of "one-off" content including music videos. And for sports fans? Well, there are few things as cool as being placed right in the middle of the action. Over the past few months, we've taken the field with the New England Patriots, and were able to see what LeBron James is made of. Now, the folks at the PGA have done us a solid and invited us on the tour to see some of the action up close. With a series of four videos, the PGA takes us to...
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Technology isn't just about improving the speed of graphics cards to push more pixels on a display, nor is it limited to the pursuit of bigger and faster storage devices, though we're fans of such advancements. More than that, we're passionate about technology because of the wonderful things it can accomplish. Case in point, at the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil this year, the first kick will be made by a teenager who is paralyzed from the waist down. Say what? There's no voodoo magic involved, just awesome technology. The teen will use a mechanical exoskeleton that he'll control with his brain. Yes, it sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, but it's real, and it's going to happen very soon....
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As an avid basketball fan myself (with two torn ACLs and three knee surgeries to prove it), I'm highly intrigued by the 94Fifty sensor basketball, a new product from InfoMotion Sports Technologies. It's supposedly the first and most advanced digital sport product that measures basketball skills in real-time. It analyzes everything from ball-handling to shooting, and even athleticism. Sensors inside the 94Fifty basketball keep track of the ball's movement, and using "sophisticated counting algorithms," it's able to instantly measure over 6,000 pieces of data per second. InfoMotion Sports Technologies refers to these proprietary measurement technologies as Point of Force," and the idea is to provide...
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I'm a big fan of DirecTV, without which I'd have a harder time following my Boston sports teams now that I no longer live in the New England area. It's an expensive luxury, as all those sports packages quickly add up, and apparently DirecTV has found other ways of cashing in on the love of competition in America. The satellite provider has reportedly begun adding a surcharge for some new customers for local sports channels. Lest we blow this out of proportion, it's only a $3 per month surcharge, but it's still annoying. According to the Los Angeles Times, it applies to new customers who live in areas where there exists more than one regional sports network. Los Angeles, for example, has four,...
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Talk about a bold move, and a bold statement. The International Olympic Committee announced today that it will live stream the London 2012 Olympic Games in 64 territories on the IOC's channel on YouTube. Wondering why that's a bit deal? Because it'll be free. Most developed nations will have to turn to television (or at least have a pay-TV subscription to view online), but what about places like Africa, and locales that are far more remote? 64 erritories across Asia and Africa will be able to enjoy live coverage of the events as well as highlight clips on this digital platform free of charge; viewers from these territories will be able to watch the streams on the IOC's YouTube channel, accessible...
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"It's in the game." That's the slogan that EA Sports has harped on for years. But now, it's only in the game if you buy a game new, or if you cough up even more dough as a used game buyer. We don't necessarily cover too much of the video gaming space here at Hot Hardware, but this particular shift in business practice was simply too glaring (and frankly, important to the entire industry) to pass over. EA Sports has done to sporting franchise companies in the game space what Walmart has done to mom and pop groceries stores: made 'em hurt, bad. EA Sports is basically the only company still out there making AAA sports games, and consumers rarely think to look beyond the "Madden" football franchise...
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This is it. It's really happening. 3D is taking over our lives, and there's nothing we can do about it. But is it really such a bag thing? There's no question that consumers have yet to truly speak on their acceptance or rejection of 3D in the home, but if there's any programming that could really spearhead things, it's sports. Sports is arguably the main reason that HD took off so quickly, and we're guessing that quite a few major organizations are hoping that sports can do the same for 3D.Starting this June (that's just a few months away), DirecTV will begin to broadcast ESPN 3D. ESPN 3D is easily the flagship 3D channel, and at the moment, we can't think of another 3D channel with as much...
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