Fantasy sports meets new tech
I’m not a big fantasy sports enthusiast but I usually participate in fantasy baseball and football every season. Anyone that plays, or has played, fantasy sports is that one thing you crave is real-time player news and stats. If your players are currently involved in a game you want to know exactly how they’re performing in that game, and if they’re not in a game, you want to know if there’s any injury updates or other news that might affect their future performance.
Most people use the Web to satisfy this hunger for player information. That often means watching the game on TV with a laptop in your hands or if your out at the mall shopping, it means running into the Apple store and checking the latest fantasy stats. Well, the good news is that technology is soon going to be making the life of a fantasy player easier.
Sprint NFL Mobile
A few weeks ago, Sprint launched a free application for their Vision and Power Vision (that’s what they call their data plan add-on for phones and it costs $15/mo for unlimited data) called NFL Mobile. Here are some screenshots of NFL Mobile running on a Samsung A900:
I tried it out yesterday and I can happily say it rocks. You fire up the application and you instantly get the latest NFL scores and news. The coolest feature is that you can personalize the application by adding any number of players to a “My Players” list. Whenever you view “My Players”, it shows you the latest fantasy stats for those players. Now, whenever I’m on the go, in just a few seconds, I can fire up NFL Mobile on my phone and see how my players are doing. This is an application that I honestly would have expected a mobile carrier to charge a couple dollars a month for. For Sprint to offer it free is very cool.
Yahoo! Sports for TV
Now for a real glimpse into the future. As I said earlier, a common sight for the typical fantasy player is to be on the sofa, laptop in hand, watching the game. What’s the natural evolution of this? Fantasy stats on your TV screen while you’re watching the game. How badass is that?! Well check out this screenshot of Yahoo! Sports for TV that Yahoo’s Digital Home team is launching this morning:
The features of this are the ones you would expect and is very similar to the Sprint app: league scores, fantasy stats of your own personalized list of players, and a live gametracker. Now that I have you all excited, here’s the cooler: you need a new “entertainment PC” that is Intel Viiv enabled. From this Wikipedia article
Viiv is a particular combination of CPU, mainboard chipset, software, Digital Rights Management and network card. It is intended for primary use as an in-home media and desktop platform with the ability to operate as a normal PC or as a hardware media player/centre – running applications, playing DVDs, CDs, MP3, photographs and games as well as subscription based (partially DRM protected) content such as ILoveFilm, Napster and SKY
. I didn’t spend a lot of time figuring out exactly what’s up with Viiv, but because of some DRM issues, it seems like you probably won’t be able to take any Windows MCE system and make it work. An example of a Viiv-based PC is the new Dell XPS 410.
Since the marriage of TV and Web content is inevitable, I’m going to bet that many more solutions like the new Yahoo! Sports for TV are on their way. Kudos to Yahoo! for making the first leap even if most people, including me, won’t be able to enjoy it just yet.
