MPAA Wants BitTorrent Sites Shut Down
Wired is reporting Hollywood Wants BitTorrent Dead and that Hollywood movie studios launched new legal action against the operators of BitTorrent and eDonkey sites.
BitTorrent megasite suprnova.org is not down at the time of this posting.
NFL and NFLPA Ink Exclusive Deal with EA Sports
ESPN is carrying the story about EA Sports signing an exclusive rights deal with the NFL and NFLPA. What this means is that team names, logos, uniforms and stadiums along with player names and likenesses are EA Sports-only now. Contrary to what some are writing it doesn’t mean it’s Madden-only, just EA-only, as EA Sports also makes NFL Street (under “EA Sports Big”).
Personally, I’ve always been a Madden fan. I skipped last season for the first time in a long time, but now that EA added support for Xbox Live and all of my friends picked it up, so did I. The game has some nice improvements over two seasons ago in all aspects of the game, but it’s hard to say it was all self-motivated.
Sega and ESPN teamed up to make a rival game a couple of seasons ago and has put together a solid product that rivals Madden in all reviews. Madden carried brand name, like Coca-Cola outselling a supermarket brand cola, and dominated the marketplace for years. ESPN wisely slashed the price of all their sports games this season in order to compete with EA. $20 compared to $50 was obviously enough of a difference to start making a dent in EA’s marketshare and EA slashed the price of Madden to $30 early in November. So now they have a rival gamemaker dipping into their sales and putting out a competitive according to most reviews. Instead of dropping price on the game permanently EA was able to slash ESPN’s jugular in regards to marketability by getting the NFL (and the NFLPA) to sign an exclusive deal for all things NFL.
Anyone familiar with the NFL is familiar with their exclusive deals. Visa, Pepsi (along with Pepsi product Gatorade) and DirecTV are all exclusive NFL partners. Anyone in a large metro area with no possibility of satellite or just anyone who prefers cable over satellite knows how irritating the DirecTV deal is. You’re a consumer with no options. It’s DirecTV or nothing (but broadcast and ESPN games). Not good for the out-of-market fan or the guy who wants to invite all his friends over each weekend.
So what good can come of this for the football video game fan? Probably nothing. I don’t think EA is suddenly going to scale back development on it’s Madden football product (or NFL Street, although with Midway not releasing a new NFL Blitz, there’s no current product comparison anyway); but without competition burning the speed of development can certainly slow down with little worry of a superior game coming out. Innovations in a competing product won’t appear for EA to mimic (and vice versa, as it could have been).
ESPN meanwhile is left to ponder whether or not they’ll even release a new football game. If they do decide to continue they’ll have to change the franchise name. “NFL” obviously needs to be dropped from it. Look for some nickname to appear in the title, like Pigskin 2K6. Phrases don’t fit well in titles and can misrepresent the game. For example, you can’t name a realistic football game “Two Minute Drill” unless you want everyone to think the game is all about the long passing game and speeding through your plays.
ESPN would then have to make up 32 team names, shouldn’t be too hard, just pick some “tough” names and some animals not used by NFL teams (example: how many times did you see the NY Knights in a generic sports video game?). Player names aren’t too hard either - but you do have to make sure that your generic Johnson on your made up Tampa team doesn’t accidentally match a position played by a Johnson on the Bucs, whether it’s Brad or Dexter.
What you do need to have, in order to have any hope of competing, is a fully customizable game, including at least these features:
- Stadium names and attributes (dome, no cover, movable roof, turf, grass, capacity, etc.)
- Player names and attributes (besides skillset, the look of the player)
- Team names and attributes (logos, uniforms, possible history)
However - that’s not the complete selling point of it - the ability to share your customizations has to be. This means you can put it on a memory card or swap with a friend online or even possibly allow people to set up spaces online to download from. Don’t worry - someone will do it. It’s the nature of sports fans. You might even see a loyal ESPN fan base split up the work and each swap a team or two until someone’s compiled all the correct NFL teams and rosters to allow others to download from.
Despite all this, it would still be tough to sell a game with generic teams and players. Besides having to do a little work to actually get the real ones in there, even if it’s just downloading them from a website, ESPN would likely need to fall back on to the generic rosters to keep online gaming fair.
In the end, fans do have to wonder about what will come from new Madden games over the next five seasons, and what they would have been like with some real competition.
RSS Feed Considerations
My biggest question right now has been whether or not to add feeds to hockeyfights.com.
I set up the first feeds over a year ago, but never released them. At the time I was trying to decide between formats. RSS/Atom, and if RSS, which version? I was planning on putting out static versions of multiple feeds in multiple formats. After observing for a year and seeing that most use RSS 2.0 - and that seemingly all readers support it, I’ve decided I can start with just that and probably run into no problems.
There are three major RSS feeds I’d be posting: articles (which should see an increase in frequency), news (which can be slow or very active depending on the day), and a forums feed for new hockey threads (should be some pretty good activity there as well).
My issues with these all revolve around traffic. hockeyfights.com receives a good amount of traffic and RSS traffic concerns are becoming more and more well known. There are too many readers out there that all schedule to ping at the same time and some people configure their own to ping non-stop. I have little desire to waste tons of bandwidth and server resources to test out RSS services (something which I do not want to take away once I add, unless the technology progresses to something different).
My issues are these:
- Should I only produce static files? My assumption is yes. No reason to have dynamic feeds and waste the resources for it.
- Should I have “smart urls” for the feeds? In other words - should I do what I do now with the rest of the main site in having the urls be extensionless? The benefit of it is being able to change site structure and feed extension without changing the url. Example: USA Today uses a flat xml file (or at least appears to be, as you can always change the extension to use a scripting language): http://www.usatoday.com/repurposing/NHLRss.xml ESPN uses a “smart” url: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/nhl/news The problem with having a smart url is that my server needs to process it. While it’s super fast and doesn’t consume many resources now - that can change if I start getting pinged by tons of people.
- Do I have the type of audience that will actually use these feeds? The largest demographic for the site is the coveted tv audience - males 18-35; stereotypically you’d think they’d be up on technology, but I’d say the crowd is pretty mixed in terms of tech-savviness.
- Do I circumvent this problem by using a service such as FeedBurner? I’m always hesitant to use outside services. Besides the possible non-professional appearance depending on how you view using domain names other than your own on your site (I’m never a fan of it for anything outside of a personal site); things like up-time are never guaranteed and I have no idea about the direction of the service. Will it remain free? If not, will there be ads in my feed or will I have the option to pay and remove them? And if that cost is more than the bandwidth I’d use hosting it on my own machine, could I move it back and have the FeedBurner url pointed to my site correctly?
Other considerations of mine:
- Currently I plan on having “teaser feeds” - that is not putting the full text into the feed. The idea of these feeds is to have people come to the site when interested. Along with that, I should point out I do not plan on having any ads in a feed such as that.
- I’m considering having the forums feed be members-only.
- If I could swing it, and make sure login security is tight, I’d like to have full-text feeds for premium members.
- Having an XML feed for team and player fighting major leaders along with a feed for the last few fights. If a site is interested, I could always design a premium (read: cost) feed for them. This would be useful to a bunch of sites out there, although I wonder how well some would be able to translate the XML and how much I would have to do to support it.
In the end it’s just trying to figure out how many subscribers and visitors I would get from the feeds compared to the cost of the feeds (and compare that to the cost of a “normal” visitor).
I’ll update with whatever decisions I come to, and if you’ve had any experiences where you’ve had to make similar decisions I’d love to hear them.
Finally Bombed
I was comment-spam-bombed yesterday. Fun stuff. Glad I’m quick with a sql statement.
I suppose I could be flattered, but I know it’s just about finding a new target, not caring how many read it, just wanting Google to crawl and help bump up their search engine listing.
Get Some News
Tom over at The Media Drop is compiling a list of newspapers that have rss feeds.
Find some news for your feed reader (I’m still happily using Bloglines), or lend a hand if you know of a paper he’s missing.
Red Sox are Sportsmen of the Year
Thanks to Eric at Off Wing I found out the Red Sox won Sports Illustrated’s Sportsmen of the Year award. Oh, and their fans too, I guess.
I’m never a fan of the “team” win in awards like these. I’d rather see David Ortiz win than the Red Sox. This is similar to the Time Person of the Year last year, when it was “The American Soldier”. I respect the soldiers, but I’m looking for an individual to win these types of awards. The team win or the generalization just seems like a committee couldn’t make up their minds and took an easy out to try and appeal to the biggest amount of people possible.
It doesn’t make the Sox a bad pick - if you’re going to pick any team from this past year, I’d put them on the top of the list.
I can only assume now that if the White Sox or Cubs win the World Series they will win the award (along with their fans).
The Sox are the third team to win. The 1980 US Olympic hockey team wsa the first, and the other was the 1999 US women’s soccer team. Not that any of these were as big a cop-out as the “Athletes Who Care” of 1987.
Life Expectancy
Life expectancy is always a fun statistic for the media to throw out of nowhere to either scare you or make you feel safe. After all - what’s more reassuring than hearing your life expectancy is 76 when you’re 25? However, when you’re past “middle aged” they can give you a scenario that paints a very bleak picture.
Here’s a life expectancy calculator on MSN. But how accurate is that? An article on WebMD asks “Is Life Expectancy Overestimated?” The article is about a year old, but still relevant.
You don’t need me to tell you that you can live the healthiest life possible, and see a nice high life expectancy and then be hit by a bus.
Like the WebMD article mentions most of the numbers you see come from a “mortality life table”. That is, it’s not exactly the same formula they use to figure out life expectancy from birth, something I learned many moons ago in a statistics class in college that can return quite odd results as you get older. For example, you can receive a negative number once you reach a certain (very high) age.
Is there a point to any of this? Well, just try and live well, good or bad society-related numbers mean nothing to you, the individual.
Gambling Hedge Fund
Mark Cuban’s got an idea to start a gambling hedge fund. He makes a good number of comparisons between gambling and the stock market and points out how the two aren’t really all that different.
More importantly he’s reminded me to start putting up my hockey picks somewhere public and keep that record public. I do pretty well hockey-wise and hockey gambling information isn’t really as plentiful as other sports.
The reason I haven’t yet is two-fold: One, I wanted to script out a page with live odds. I’ve got that ready now, but of course, there’s no season. Two, I never wanted to “endorse” gambling. I think it’s fun, and I know there are plenty who do it, so I don’t shy away from putting up some ads or integrating the fake betting game I have into the forums on hockeyfights.com or KO Corner; but when you start posting your own picks, it brings it to another level, one I’ve never been sure I wanted to go to.
Still, it would be interesting to see how I do - and maybe pit myself against a couple of other fellow knowledgable hockey people and maybe a power ranking and prediction formula.
Thanks For the Bad Angle
Networks are always trying to add innovative new ways to present sports to the viewer. It’s not uncommon to see more and more camera angles during a game. While some may look nice if a play is normal, it’s also not uncommon to see them become useless fast. I’m currently watching the Colts-Lions game and after a Colts TD the Lions blocked the extra point kick. The camera was at such an angle that once the kick was block the ball was off-screen and we were left wondering what happened as the players just ran off-screen. While switching cameras mid-play like that is awkward, so is being left in the dark. Sometimes it’s easier to just stick with what works, especially when it’s a camera that can pan-out easily or follow the play. Did we miss anything? No, but it was irritating nonetheless.
Go to Mars Damnit
James Cameron writes an article for Wired Magazine about exploration and why we should not just be going into space, but to Mars and beyond.
I’m not one for heights, so I’ll probably stay here, but I would love some pictures and maybe a shotglass from the spaceport.