Floppyhead – Digital Media and Streaming

Fantasy sports, especially fantasy football, has exploded in the last couple of years. According to BusinessWeek, which published an article on the popularity of fantasy football:

Fantasy football fans are flooding the Net, lured by blogs, message boards, and a host of other social-networking capabilities that let people research, build teams, and debate topics from who’s the best running back to which fantasy player has the best strategy, Ambrosius says. In July alone, Yahoo Fantasy Sports drew 3.1 million users, compared to 952,000 at ESPN’s fantasy site and 929,000 who used Sportsline’s fantasy site, says comScore Media Metrix.

Over 15 million Americans play some type of fantasy sport. I would bet that a large percentage of males who play fantasy sports also own or rent a digital video recorder. Most people I know who play fantasy football verge almost on obsession in tracking their teams while watching games. They talk about teams and players all the time and they constantly check their team’s results. It is not uncommon for someone to sit with a laptop getting the latest stats on their fantasy team while watching a football game on TV.

Fantasy football has the potential to be a driving force in the adoption of media centers and home theater computers (HTPCs). HTPCs have the ability to merge sports statistics and live TV, a simple yet revolutionary idea. Most fantasy football sites offer real time updates of football statistics. To leverage these updates with live TV using an HTPC seems like a simple concept, but no one has stepped up to the plate.

Yahoo has recently offered a fantasy football plugin for Windows MCE for Viiv computers (yes, I guess Viiv is still alive). I thought this was an interesting choice for Yahoo since they offer a competing product to Windows MCE called Yahoo! Go TV. I would love to test the plugin but I do not have a Viiv computer, nor am I planning to buy one. This seems like a convoluted solution to simple issue.

Sports statistics should be provided as an overlay to live TV. With the click of a remote, I want to be able to access how the stats of all NFL games and the stats of my fantasy team. These stats do not necessarily need to be linked to what I am watching on TV though I would love to have a pop-up balloon on the bottom of the screen tell me when a player has scored points for my team.

The one thing I know about people who play fantasy sports is that they love to talk about fantasy sports. Voice over IP or Skype, if integrated well into a front-end, could add another dimension to TV viewing. Sports are a social event. People love to talk about their teams. Offering people to do so while a game is going on makes a lot of sense. The success of You Tube shows that while content is important, social interaction is king. A media center PC could make TV viewing a social event.

My ideas in this article should not be seen as too difficult to implement. In many ways, there already have been attempts to do exactly what I have said. They just have not been done well.