Interactive television looks set to change the life of sports fans forever
David Shapshak
For the vast majority of sports fans television is the main medium by which they practise their fervent devotion to their team. It may be debatable how much of that dedication is left after watching our national cricket team sink to its worst-ever defeat last weekend against Australia, but the fans will be back next time, glued to their screens nonetheless.
TV is still the entertainment king despite advances of other platforms, such as computer gaming and it is a medium they are particularly comfortable with.
Sports fans are a special breed of viewer, much beloved by sponsors and broadcasters.
In the flesh they may tend to be a drunken, patriotic mass but they are, in today’s lexicon, a faithful, loyal and supportive consumer market. They’ll buy their team’s shirts, read the sports pages first, buy niche market sports magazines, even buy the game (either for PC or PlayStation). They are likely to be more brand-loyal than today’s brand-conscious teenagers; and are as prone to have downloaded their team’s logo as their cellphone screen icon. In short, they are a safe bet for everyone from marketers to retailers.
In Japan the TV manufacturers and channels are even looking to sports fans to buy the latest screens for an enhanced viewing experience and thereby kickstart the sluggish television micro-economy.
The Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association has even dubbed 2002 the “Year of Sports”, according to J@pan Inc Magazine. “The industry group predicts a 45% year-on-year rise in production of liquid crystal display (LCD) TVs in 2002 because of strong demand fuelled by the Olympics, the World Cup and other sports events,” writes the magazine’s Bruce Rutledge.
Other favourite are the large, rear-projection screens. Samsung South Africa says sales of its massive 104cm televisions have grown from an average of 15 a month last year to more than a 100. The trend in Asian countries, they say, is away from the curved screens towards flatter screens, especially the thinner LCDs and the larger but more expensive plasma screens. The latter can be viewed from much more acute angles than LCDs and have superior clarity.
But television is still what the technology industry calls a “push” medium. A signal is sent out by the broadcaster and received by the set, there is little interaction between the consumers and what they see which is limited to their choice of channels.
This is all slowly changing though. There is a range of new functionality called “Interactive TV” that is filtering its way down to the TV set and will change the life of a sports fan forever.
Simply put, interactive TV is a godsend to the Saturday afternoon couch potato. TV is the medium through which most sports fans watch their teams in action, through which they live that vicarious approximation of being at the live event.
However, if you miss the crucial Glenn McGrath ball that bowls Gary Kirsten, you have to wait for the replay. The same is true if you want to know the scorecard or bowling statistics, or if you need to resolve an argument over what Kirsten’s batting average in Tests is.
Although eclipsed by all the bad news, SuperSport launched their first offerings in this interactive TV realm to coincide with the first test against the Australians last weekend.
While visual replays on demand are still a little down the road, text-based information is now on hand. Using a navigation not unlike that of most websites (a left hand main menu, divided up into sport or major events such as the Australian tour) and the navigation system used by the DStv decoder, you can access a range of useful information.
“Interactive TV has been our focus,” says Rob Moore, general manager of the channel’s interactive arm, SuperSport Zone, which runs both this service and its bouquet of sports websites.
“TV is very much a push technology. If you miss something, you can’t go get it. We’re saying, whatever environment you’re in, stay there. Don’t go to the PC in your study to check.”
Last weekend was hardly a good demonstration when all but a few local batsmen hit awful scores, but with a few clicks you can now access batsmen or bowler career stats. Their current information is also updated very quickly, as a scorecard of Bloody Sunday’s woeful batting showed.
For a group of people who enjoy statistics (allegedly as much as the sportswriters who use them) the double century Adam Gilchrist scored was more than the entire team in a single day some of them went in to bat twice (181 runs for 16 wickets).
The latter was a statistic mentioned on that old faithful medium, TV, by Tony Greig, the most famous ex-schoolboy from Queens College in Queenstown, whose other sporting alumni include Darryl Cullinan, Robbie Kempson and Charl van Rensburg.
The information takes 10 to 15 seconds to reach your satellite decoder, says development manager Gary Willemse. This is all done on the interactive channel 20 on the satellite decoder, which features a news feed of the top 10 sports stories that scroll every 10 seconds. An “OK” symbol flashes on screen and is the path you use to access these menus. Once in the interactive menus, the live action is framed in the top right corner, so you can carry on watching the actual game.
The system uses the remote control’s arrow keys to move up or down the menu, the “OK” button to select and the “exit” button to move backwards. To get out of the system completely, you can either scroll up by the channel keys or enter the number of the channel you want to go to.
This interactive channel offers coverage of all the sports as well as a list of the day’s live events.
Under either rugby or soccer, for instance, you can view the fixtures, results and the log of that particular tournament. About 10 minutes after each Super 12 game, these are updated. The service is available for PSL soccer, the FA Premiership, Formula One racing and local cycling.
The leaders in interactive TV are clearly the Sky network in the United Kingdom, which Moore says SuperSport is following in terms of global trends.
It is a very consumer-friendly way of “repurposing content”, to use the phrase so popular a few years back when newspapers began publishing stories on their websites.
Indeed, all the blow-by-blow reports, stats and data used in the SuperSport sites are sitting in a database and can easily be converted. This is done with XML, the default language used for publishing from a database to many platforms, including the Internet, mobile phones (via WAP) or handheld computers. Down the line, there are plans for delivering this kind of content to these devices. SMS information is already available and there is also a speech service that will “read” reports to you.
All this is taking place against the backdrop of a massive shift in the “entertainment industry”. TV is set to be one of the new platforms where computing and technology companies will fight for supremacy. The prize? The means to deliver all your home entertainment be it movies, music or games through some kind of device that piggybacks off the TV’s centrality.
Microsoft is looking up from the computer desktop now that it dominates that market and has clearly set its sights on the burgeoning gaming industry. It is using its Xbox game console as a kind of loss leader to claim the market share in an arena already owned by Sony through its PlayStation. Amazingly, Microsoft is selling the Xbox which is due in South Africa this November, a year after it was launched in the United States for $100 less than it costs them to make it.
Gamers may appear to be the obvious target, but the strategy for both is to convert the game console into the entertainment hub. PlayStation2 already plays DVDs, while the Xbox needs a plug-in. Both are expected to expand their offerings with built-in hard drives and Internet connections.
Sony and Microsoft will slug it out for many years, both bringing their own strengths to the party. Bill Gates announced two new computing devices earlier this year aimed at integrating computing with the TV. One is similar to a detachable laptop monitor and the other a super- remote control device.
On another front, in the same war, there is the personal video recorder (PVR). It is the synthesis of a satellite decoder and some computing functionality, essentially its own hard drive. This lets you save films or programmes in the same digital quality they are broadcast, but can skip advertising when you watch them later.
Also coming are pay-per-view movies, which will be “trickled down” to the PVR by the broadcaster during the wee hours of the morning and be available to watch at your leisure. Leisure in fact will increasingly revolve around the TV and its add-ons.
While this battle is between competing devices although only available in the US and Europe, South Africans can expect only one PVR option from Multichoice sometime next year it has drawn the entertainment producers themselves into the fray.
Early versions of PVRs are already sending shockwaves through the US film and TV industry. The ReplayTV 4000 allows you to save movies in digital format and share them with other users of the device via its broadband modem.
What’s more, while Napster’s music file sharing service was shut down by the music industry last year it is believed to have caused the first decline in CD sales in more than a decade a range of similar services has emerged. These allow the transfer of digital versions of popular films and TV programme episodes that users can swap online.
One of them, Morpheus, has Hollywood in a tizz, especially as an estimated 11-million Americans are using it to watch, amongst others, episodes of Sex in the City on their computers for free, instead of subscribing to pay-channel HBO. This is being challenged in the courts.
Sports fans obviously feature highly in any plans to revolutionise the home entertainment industry, although it is unlikely we will ever want to see any repeats of last weekend’s tragic under-performances.