I watch a lot of sports on my TiVo, but the best sport to watch on TiVo has to be football. By fast forwarding the dead spots in between plays I can turn a 3+ hour game into about 45 minutes. Frankly, I think that the NFL could sell these shorter games online under a highlight blitz package or something, but I don’t mind giving my TiVo remote a good work out if it means that I don’t have to sit through the advertisements or replays unless I want to see them.
What is a bit annoying about this method of watching sports though, is constantly going in and out of conversations about the game. At one moment John Madden is telling you that “the only yardstick for success our society has is being a champion,” the next he’s telling you that “the road to Easy Street goes through the sewer.” After going in and out of this for 45 minutes you feel like you’re going to go a bit crazy from the broken conversation.
I’ve pretty much just accepted the fragmented conversations as being the price I pay for having the luxury of being able to watch a game so quickly, but the Consumerist points to a hack that actually allows me to take the announcers out of sports programming.
When you are listening to sports in Dolby 5.1 on a home theater system, you can mute your front speakers and subwoofer and all that you are left with are the ambient sounds from the game. This lets you still hear the bone crushing hits, but you don’t have to hear Madden say stuff like “his helmet flew off…that’s the bad news. The good news is his head wasn’t in it.”
I don’t have any games on my TiVo right now, so I’ll need to wait to try this, but this sounds like a much better way to zap through a game and have it still feel like a continuous process.
Davis Freeberg is a technology enthusiast living in the Bay Area. He enjoys writing about movies, music & and the impact that digital technology is having on traditional media. You can read more of his coverage on technology at www.davisfreeberg.com. Davis owns shares of TiVo stock.
Football is definitely best suited to TiVo’s charms. You certainly can get a game in in about 45 minutes.
But, to enjoy a game, allocate about 35 min. for the first half and 45 for the second. There are certain parts of the game you want more detail on, especially at the end – barring a blow out.
To really enjoy a game, you might take that 1:20 up to about 1:45. You can hear more of the comments and enjoy the pace better. Snapping from play to play breaks the rhythm of the game which builds tension and provides its own enjoyment.
There is a dark side to TiVoed games. The temptation is to watch more games and watch in the entirety. Normal viewing often involves watching parts of a game, or flipping to that second or third game while watching the first primarily. What you miss is gone, and you catch up on the reports later. If you watch 5 games @ 1:20 instead of 2 games at 3:00 or less, you don’t come out ahead on time – but you get a lot more Football :)
Madden sounds just as disjointed if you watch the game all the way through. :-)
And, NFL Network IS showing games crunched down to about an hour. You weren’t the first to think of it! I love the idea.
The NFL does sell these .. via DirecTV. If you get the Sunday Ticket and it’s upgrade, SuperFan, you get all the games that are on Sunday Ticket, downloaded to your DirectTivo on Monday.
How I wish I could get DirecTV.
The superfan deal makes the compressed games available on Tuesday where they play them back to back on two channels. You can select to record the games you want or record them all (If you have ~8 hours of free space on your DirecTivo). As an added bonus, folks with newer DirecTV PVRs can set up a fantasy roster with you remote and you can overlay your fantasy scores on the the screen with a button press.