A Better Way to Watch Sports
By JOSHUA BRUSTEIN
NYT
One of the more odd aspects of the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, which starts this week, is how excited people will get about games they do not intend to watch for more than several minutes at a time.
In part this is because there is simply too much to take in. During a 36-hour stretch starting Thursday at noon there will be 32 games. But increasingly this is how people watch sports, by breaking games down and stripping them for parts.
Sports leagues, television networks and technology companies are adapting to these changing habits, finding novel ways to take apart games — showing only the most exciting bits or helping viewers focus on a single player or statistic which, while it may be important to their fantasy team, could be incidental to the outcome of the game on the court. These alternative forms of viewing may be changing the way we watch sports, or even why we watch.
The National Football League and ESPN both have channels that will show fans, for instance, only football games in which touchdowns seem imminent. Now a technology company based in Palo Alto, Calif., is trying to take this one step further, by developing a computer program that it says can tell fans when to begin watching a March tournament basketball game.
(More here.)
NYT
One of the more odd aspects of the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, which starts this week, is how excited people will get about games they do not intend to watch for more than several minutes at a time.
In part this is because there is simply too much to take in. During a 36-hour stretch starting Thursday at noon there will be 32 games. But increasingly this is how people watch sports, by breaking games down and stripping them for parts.
Sports leagues, television networks and technology companies are adapting to these changing habits, finding novel ways to take apart games — showing only the most exciting bits or helping viewers focus on a single player or statistic which, while it may be important to their fantasy team, could be incidental to the outcome of the game on the court. These alternative forms of viewing may be changing the way we watch sports, or even why we watch.
The National Football League and ESPN both have channels that will show fans, for instance, only football games in which touchdowns seem imminent. Now a technology company based in Palo Alto, Calif., is trying to take this one step further, by developing a computer program that it says can tell fans when to begin watching a March tournament basketball game.
(More here.)
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