You're a baseball junkie. Your boss has told you to crank out your revenue projections, but it's the bottom of the ninth, the Giants are playing the Dodgers, and Barry Bonds has just stepped up to the plate. In the pre-Web world, you'd have been forced to stick your head out the window to catch cheers from the ballpark or tune in the game on AM radio. But with programmers taking full-advantage of Java, JavaScript, and Shockwave, the sports junkie can now follow the game while keeping an eye on the all-important spreadsheet.
With little fanfare, ESPN SportsZone launched its real-time game-delivery system in early August, just in time for the pennant races, the playoff's and Saturday's start of the World Series
GameCast is a Java-based box seat with all the trimmings; live scoreboards, pitch count, game history, and even dynamic stats (how has Barry been hitting against lefties?) Most importantly, this statistical stew is updated constantly and dynamically pushed to your desktop.
The stat-happy programmers at SportsZone understand that baseball is the most mathematical sport, and have wisely focused their attentions there.
"Baseball lends itself incredibly well to this kind of app," says Geoff Reiss, senior vice president of sports publishing at ESPN Internet Ventures. In choosing to develop GameCast for baseball, Reiss remarked, "It was a harmonic convergence of a lot of factors, including availability of rights."
Here's how it works: SportsZone amalgamates various data feeds - raw numbers from its own SportsTicker service, a situational stats feed from Stats Inc., and channels them into SportsZone's own proprietary databases. From there, Reiss relates, "one piece of info is kicked to a bunch of different portions of the product simultaneously," be it the front-page ticker, the text-based game update, or live box score. In GameCast's example, a graphical interface is slapped on, and the user is given a baseball diamond and thumbnails of current batters.
Yahoo's Major League Baseball section is another key player on the field. Employing the least tech-heavy solution, Yahoo relies on the meta refresh tag to prod users' browsers to update. Running alongside SportsZone's text-based Game Status feature, Yahoo tends to lag behind by at least half an inning.
Considering the pitfalls of the Web, Reiss says "Web developers shouldn't create inferior products that offer a basis of comparison to television." However, the Web can offer what TV can't - freedom from the predetermined camera angle, freedom from the commercial break, freedom from the inane chatter of a poor announcer. With the Web, and particularly with GameCast, a sports fan has the potential to be able to call up specific data on demand. This is quite a relief if you've ever tuned in to a TV game and had to wait for 15 minutes for the score.
These real-time games could very well be the first really popular application of the "push revolution." SportsZone's competition, like CBS Sportsline, realized this a year ago when they launched a real-time Shockwave piece that included animated players. Last fall, I remember huddling around an officemate's monitor as the two-dimensional players made their way around the base paths.
Patrick Keane, a Web content analyst for Jupiter Communications, disputes Sportszone's direction and says "the pie-in-the-sky is digital video, or video on demand." Keane says that right now, apps like GameCast are attracting attention because "there are a lot more computers in businesses than there are TVs." Calling them "interesting ideas that are unexciting for the user," Keane predicts that the content creators will leverage their offline relationships with TV networks in order to boost text-based content with video highlights.
While products may be in the works for Web-based representations of other sports, it's nice to know that a Yankees fan in Tokyo can be as in the loop as a diehard in the Bronx. All baseball fans need now is for someone to figure out how to route a steaming-hot BallPark Frank through the M-bone, and cheers will be heard 'round the world.
