For NFL fans, DirecTV is the television provider you gotta have. I’m sure many appreciate the expansion of the Red Zone channel to other pay TV services, but mine (Cox) isn’t one of them. Not to mention, given the Twitter buzz, Comcast’s implementation was lacking in many markets. No HD?!
DirecTV’s Sunday Ticket Super Fan package isn’t inexpensive – we’re talking like $400. But it’s hard to argue with the coverage. Access to pretty much every game – on television, PC, and iPhone. Including the Red Zone channel and a Player Tracker overlay to keep an eye on your fantasy team. (Mine’s not very good, although the Seattle QB+TE tandem paid dividends.)
I’m pretty sure my buddy Tim was mocking my lack of access when he sent pics of the Adobe Air Supercast (top) and iPod Touch (below) video streaming apps. However, even though I’m stuck with just the “local” games at home, my new wing place is also a Super Fan. And we managed to catch the Eagles while someone else cleaned up after us.
It was a smart move by DTV to give away the Week 1 games free to non-Sunday Ticket subscribers. I really enjoyed checking out the RZC and all the other fun onscreen features. It’s still too expensive though, didn’t anybody tell them that we’re in a recession?
Just call up and “ask” about the pricing, and play dumb about Red Zone, and act like you think HD comes with the standard package, and then say “wait how many payments?”
So far, I’ve had it two years. I paid $99 the first year and $120 the second year including the Red Zone. They’ll cut a deal.
I enjoy football very much, but all the down time with commercials is frustrating and I am getting it for free. I can’t imagine paying $400 for more games with more commercials. I guess I am not a “crazy” enough fan.
DirecTV is alawys dealing on ST and Super Fan, most people do end up getting some sort of deal on SF if they want it.
There were some issues this year with Super Fan on some phones. Many Win Mobile users kept getting this annoying voice “the URL you’re trying to access is invalid…” Sounded to me like an Indian tryign to speak English. But, I had no issues using both the computer version and set top box version of ST.
I think D* is really onto something with having the online rights to the NFL as well as the mobile rights. Remember D* is testing an online only version of ST in the Manhattan area this year (you have to have no LOS for D* to get it online).
Wow the quality on the iPhone looks great. It even retains that 16:9 HD perspective.
Actually, that’s an iPod Touch using my home 802.11n WiFi connection, which I can imagine is going to be better quality than on the iPhone on a 3G network. The quality on the PC on a WiFi connection was comparable to low-res Youtube videos. Definitely viewable, but only if you have to.
You can tell the NFL is beginning to realize the value in separating the online/mobile access from the broadcast access. The former should not be solely an extra contingent on the latter.
MLB is surprisingly the best at this IMO.
The first crack in the dam is the non-DirecTV RedZone–although it sounds like a pale comparison at this point, since it’s missing HD and the audio is satellite radio whip-around, rather than having a host. DirecTV’s RZC is the biggest improvement to Sunday Ticket since it’s inception (HD quality not withstanding).
I expect the NFL to try to leverage back the online/mobile access from DirecTV when contract time comes around.
That won’t be good for DirecTV as I suspect a lot of people will give up their $300-$400 TV package of every game, for a $150-$250 package they can get on a laptop next to their one big TV.
Filed under… Apple?
It’s my understanding that DirecTV has the contract until 2014 (I think) for both the TV and Online versions. DirecTV gave agreed to let the NFL take the Red Zone Channel and sell it to other providers, but it wasn’t to be the exact same channel.
Glenn, I did that given the iPod Touch streaming element. However, for several months I’ve been thinking about dropping ‘categories’ from the theme/presentation. The WordPress folks kind of abandoned them for ‘tags’ a few years back. Categories are nice in that you can organize higher level topics, but the info is not added to the meta data in the HTML which would be helpful for the search engines. And hopefully our titles and content are clear enough to figure out what the story is about. Also, our archives are currently organized by date and the built-in WordPress search is pretty good. So there may be no reason to use categories at all.
The WordPress folks kind of abandoned them for ‘tags’ a few years back
WP folks didn’t abandon categories – they introduced tags at a similar level of importance. Two different tools for two different jobs. They’re no less relevant than they’ve ever been.
but the info is not added to the meta data in the HTML which would be helpful for the search engines.
That’s entirely a matter of how your theme is constructed, nothing to do with anything WordPress does or doesn’t do. If you want category metadata in your theme, put it in!
Use Categories for high-level taxonomy, and tags for finer-grained, ad-hoc taxonomy.
From my perspective, I disagree and feel that tags superseded categories when they became popular. However, as you say, they can fill different roles and are not mutually exclusive. Agreed on my theme and that not being on WordPress, if I were more into hacking themes. Most pre-configured themes and plugins I’ve come across use tag data in this way, but not categories.
I watch people coming into my site via categories daily. If you’ve ever used Woopra you can watch the google searches in real-time that bring in users. I find Google returns people by category regularly. In fact I don’t think they return by tags. But I also use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin which I presume is what is drawing users in via categories.
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