Last week, sports news was more active—and interactive—than usual. Consider these events: The World Cup semifinals and finals, the LeBron James “Decision,” and, um, the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest.
I suspect there were a few old-timers who were watching these events without taking frequent glances at their laptop or mobile devices to chat with friends, read stories related to the events, view live blogs, or look for related video content. For the rest of us, though, it was one eye on the screen, one eye on… well, some other screen. Horror of horrors, for some it might even have meant walking back and forth to a whole-‘nother room to do so!
All of this got me to thinking about a cloud-based platform (I’m a marketer so repeat after me: “like CloudTV from ActiveVideo”) could enrich the viewing experience by giving us all the sports content and applications we’re looking for on a single screen. Some examples:
• If you’re a serious Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest viewer, then you were watching it in full HD on ESPN and you knew that six-time champ Takeru Kobayashi was embroiled in a contract dispute with the organizers. (Over hot dogs. Go figure.) ESPN couldn’t cut the mustard when it came to showing video of Kobi trying to crash the stage and getting hauled away by the NYPD, but you could have relished every moment if you’d been connected to the cloud. Your RSS feed would have delivered Deadspin’s video of the arrest as soon as it was available. You wouldn’t even need to look for it; it would be right on your TV, just waiting for you to press “play”.
• As a marketing bigshot, I was fascinated by all three rings of the LeBron James circus. But wouldn’t it have been great if the blogging and commentary and tweets around “The Decision” had been delivered to your TV screen, as the event happened? With a cloud-enabled TV, you wouldn’t even need to have toggled between apps. Your personalized apps—your social networks, your favorite blogs and news sites, your chat network, and of course, the ESPN show itself—would be right there on your TV screen.
• Same with the World Cup. There’d have been a red card or two if your kids had been toggling between TV apps just as Iniesta connected on Sunday. With the cloud, there would be access to a whole world of video, conversation, opinion, shopping and more—without interrupting the game itself.
The common thread: This isn’t “the Internet on your TV.” This isn’t a PC-like or browser-like experience on your TV. Rather, this is the Internet delivering content to your TV and becoming the coolest TV network ever.
