Saturday, January 29, 2005
ESPN Broadband Remade Into ESPN 360
ESPN Broadband has been renamed ESPN 360 (non-download version here).
PJ at Sharkspage informs us we can watch last night’s SEL Farjestad vs Modo matchup.
This is another free preview weekend from ESPN’s broadband “channel”. ESPN 360 hasn’t changed from ESPN Broadband’s model of having the ISP be the one that needs to subscribe to the service, not the user. They’re hoping the free previews push enough users to contact their ISPs I’m guessing, but it doesn’t seem like they’re pushing the preview enough for that, so perhaps it’s only for some testing and feedback at this time.
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Video Search Semi-wanted
Google’s made some news lately, this time by introducing Google Video, a tv search engine. Google searches TV shows, mostly broadcast shows with closed-captioning text. Neat idea, useful to some I’m sure.
There are other video searches on the net though: here’s one from Yahoo and one from AOL’s Singing Fish.
Yahoo links to the page with the video. Singing Fish links to the main website, and then directly to the video.
While these two may be nice for the average user, I can’t see many webmasters being thrilled about this - especially about Singing Fish, who are basically helping suck the bandwidth (currently, still a huge cost) from websites. This may not matter to some corporate types, or people who are just hosting on free accounts; but the common webmaster running a small to medium-size website with just one popular video clip may eventually suffer if Singing Fish ever became popular.
There are methods to prevent hotlinking, but nothing’s currently foolproof. Luckily, these services are currently all from big corporations and all are properly recognizing robots.txt files. Yahoo, Singing Fish. Believe it or not, not all webmasters are aware of how to properly write a robots.txt file, so some may not discover this solution until after they receive a large bill from their host. I’m sure whenever Google moves away from just TV and starts including web video searches they’ll do the same in regards to a robots.txt file. The problem will come when another not-so-respectable engine emerges, and it’d be foolish to think it won’t happen.
Saturday, January 22, 2005
Escape from the Universe
If you can get past the gloominess of the end of the universe, Prospect magazine has a very interesting article about how a possible future advanced civilization could Escape from the Universe before it ends. It relies on the theory that other universes, or parallel universes, exist, and that current physics and scientific theories allow for some sort of travel between here and there, wherever that is. Bon voyage.
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
EA Signs Deal With ESPN
Darren Rovell on espn.com is reporting that EA, ESPN announce 15-year gaming partnership. This comes a little over a month after EA signed an exclusive rights deal with the NFL and NFLPA (CNN Money’s Game Over article about the deal).
The EA-ESPN deal starts in 2006 (there is one year left on the deal between ESPN and Sega) and is for all of EA’s sports titles.
While ESPN branding certainly isn’t as powerful as exclusive rights, it certainly can’t hurt EA and is leaving Sega in a very tough spot for future games. Visual Concepts, Sega’s sports studio, did not return calls to Rovell.
Sports gamers are now left waiting to see if any real competition will exist in the sports gaming marketplace in two years. The future looks bleak for football games (which outsell baseball and basketball games combined) and with now having to re-brand its games Sega could be in a very rough spot.
Let’s look at the video games from the other three major team sports, with the criteria being it’s licensed from the league and union (real teams and players), is available on at least one major console (PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube):
Baseball:
MVP Baseball (EA)
ESPN Major League Baseball 2K5 (Sega, soon to be sans ESPN)
MLB 2006 (Sony’s 989 Studios, only available on the PS2)
MLB SlugFest: Loaded (Midway; no announcement of new game for this season, Slugfest came out mid-season last year)
All-Star Baseball from Acclaim is dead (Acclaim went bankrupt)
Basketball:
NBA Live 2005 (EA)
NBA Street V3 (EA)
ESPN NBA 2K5 (Sega…)
NCAA March Madness 2005 (EA)
ESPN College Hoops 2K5 (Sega…)
NBA Ballers (Midway; and this was released towards the end of last season, there doesn’t appear to be a new title for this season)
Hockey:
NHL 2005 (EA)
ESPN NHL 2K5 (Sega…)
Gretzky NHL 2005 (989 Studios, PS2-only)
My guess is this list may thin out over the next couple of years. Sure, there are PC simulators, and handheld and mobile games coming out, but the consoles are where the market is.
Update (Jan 19th): From gamesindustry.biz - Publisher Take Two, whose plans for its sports game franchise have been hard hit by a string of exclusive license deals announced by rival Electronic Arts, may be in talks to sign a similar exclusive with Major League Baseball.
Friday, January 07, 2005
Vaporware Awards
Wired has published the annual Vaporware awards - a countdown of the top products that never came to be over the course of the past year.
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Ugliest NFL Unis
3martini lists the 10 Ugliest Uniforms in the NFL with some entertaining commentary (found via Eric at Off Wing).
If you’re looking for a multi-sport uniform review, check out Paul Lukas’ Uniforms, the year in review on espn.com’s page 2.
Day Moving Too Fast
Just when you thought you could be imagining things, Wired is reporting that a NASA scientist says the devastating Dec. 26 earthquake off Sumatra may have caused the planet to spin 3 millionths of a second faster and wobble about an inch on its axis. Ok, so it’s not an excuse for not getting something done, but it’s an interesting fact nonetheless. The article also notes that scientists don’t think such tiny shifts will have long-term effects, but planetary scientists must add a “leap second” to the end of the year, something that has not been done in many years.
Doing Your Research
There seem to be too many articles nowadays about a journalist who didn’t check the sources for a piece and ran it without any fact-checking, only to find out later that it’s completely, or partially false. There is a discussion going on in the forums at hockeyfights.com about Gordie Howe. Most who really know about the game know a lot of the stuff about him and fighting is myth. He was a tough player, no doubt, but he was very dirty, and that helped opponents stay away from him more than his fighting skills. Someone was disagreeing and posted about stories from his grandfather and that Howe fought a ton in the minors for the Omaha Knights (and well, putting guys in the hospital). So another poster, who goes by “Deadman”, found the phone number of Gary Anderson, who wrote a well-respected book about that minor league team, and called him up and spoke to him about Howe and his fighting frequency to clear up the situation (Howe didn’t fight that much down there either according to Anderson, in case you’re interested). Absolutely great research - and just for a thread on a message board - why can’t journalists be so thorough?
Saturday, January 01, 2005
Halting the March
During the Rose Bowl halftime the Michigan Marching Band was performing. ABC gave them some coverage but insisted on changing the camera angle every few seconds. There’s absolutely no reason to do this. I’m barely interested in a marching band and if I was annoyed that I couldn’t see the synchronized marching and what shapes and such they’re making, I can only imagine how pissed off those who care about this kind of stuff feel. I’m sure that the dozen or so kids that go their close-ups are happy, and that there are some giddy friends and family out there, but overzealous direction and some wannabe MTV angles really took the steam out of the show.