Friday, February 4, 2011

Streaming the Super Bowl




Never before have there been so many opportunities to have the "Super Bowl experience" than this year's Super Bowl taking place in Dallas. Live video streaming services, social networking and radio have given us images that we usually don't see often which is pretty exciting.


UStream, by far, has been the leader in Super Bowl coverage. Fox Sports and Yahoo Sports offered streams throughout the week that included panels of analysts analyzing all aspects of the game. Many local radio stations also put up UStream feeds including my local station WNST, but the shining star definetly was SportsRadio 1310 The Ticket in Dallas. They were one of the 1st radio stations to pioneer the concept of live streaming online and took full advantage of the "home field advantage" by bringing on the best variety of guests out of all of the radio stations offering streams.


The NFL Players Association has also used UStream to it's advantage by streaming red carpet events, the Pulse awards (which awards players helping out in the community), their Super Bowl party and even their flag football competition. Sportce.com launched their operations this week by broadcasting the NFL Alumni Players Awards which awarded the best players of the year. Gatorade offered a stream with experiments from some of the NFL's top players as well as chats for fans to ask questions. DipDive (owned by Will.I.am) and Bud Light also streamed their Super Bowl parties, giving the fans an inside look at the "celeb life" during SB weekend.



NBC Sports' ProFootballTalk offered a live show every afternoon as did Fox Sports Radio, both providing video of interviews with some of the hot commodities at Radio Row. ESPN3 carried the Madden Bowl which featured celeb interviews and players competing in Madden 11. OCNN, Chad Ochocinco's "news organization" featured Ochocinco, Gerald McCoy and Darrelle Revis covering and tweeting from the NFL's media events and SB parties; Chad asked the commish in his state of the NFL address what the timetable was for the lockout to be over which caused a lot of media buzz throughout the weekend.


Livestream has also done a great job of streaming Super Bowl events. They streamed ESPN The Magazine's "NEXT" event hosted by Snoop Dog and Nelly and will be streaming DirecTV's Celebrity Beach Bowl which is a celebrity all-star flag football game that has taken place for the past 5 yrs. Nike Football used Facebook to stream a football discussion panel featuring some of their big dogs like Tim Tebow and Marshall Faulk. The NFL even offered streams of their own from media day to press conferences and more.


As we can see, live streaming is the next big thing in the world of sports and it's effects are already being felt this Super Bowl week.

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