Tag: Major League Baseball

I Should Have Gone To Yale

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know I really enjoy photography. As of tonight, “Clicky” has taken 24,123 shots. Obviously, I try and take pictures any time I can.

Tonight, I had my chance to shoot a basketball game. Yale was playing Columbia and I got a pass to sit on the baseline at the John J. Lee Amphitheater on the Yale Campus in New Haven.

It was Senior Night, which is nice. It was also the night of the Jones Brothers. Yale is coached by James Jones. Columbia is coached by his brother Joe.

I haven’t really shot a lot of sports. I’ve been to some Major League Baseball games, shooting from the stands, and stood on the sideline at the UCONN vs Army game a few years ago at Rentschler Field in Hartford. This was my first attempt at hoops. I am humbled.

Shooting basketball is much more difficult than I had imagined. it took about sixty seconds to come to that conclusion!

First, an observation I made after shooting the UCONN football game. Still photographers can get great shots, but they seldom get ‘the big play’ the way TV cameras do. Still photography doesn’t cover the field the same way. You often have to aim and wait for the play to get to you.

Basketball poses even more problems. It moves very quickly and is played in a relatively dimly lit gym. My lenses, fine lenses for an amateur like me, are just too ‘slow&#185’.

There were a few professional shooters at the game as well. I needed four to eight times as much light for the same shot!

I wanted to keep my shutter speed as fast as possible, so I compensated in other ways, which is why all the shots are very, very grainy. It might look like a nice artistic touch, but it wouldn’t be there if I had any choice.

In this game, Yale was blown out. Columbia was red hot. I haven’t seen the stats, but it seemed they just couldn’t miss a shot!

There was a a lot going on off the court. As with most colleges, Yale has a cheer squad They also have an unusual pep band, the Yale Precision Marching Band.

I didn’t see them march, though after the game they did play while crawling on their knees!

The YPMB also featured one guy wearing a “Harvard Sucks” t-shirt. At Yale, that sentiment is not an idle boast.

I felt very comfortable in these surroundings. It’s a shame I was so awful as a student growing up, because I would have fit well at Yale. And, my guess it’s, it’s much more prestigious to be thrown out of Yale than it was to be thrown out of Emerson College!

None of the shots from tonight will be printed. On the other hand, there is a little artistic merit there. I put a few of them in my gallery, if you’d like to take a look.

&#185 – When a photographer talks about a slow lens, it’s a lens that needs more light. The name comes from what you must do to compensate – slow down the shutter. The slower the shutter, the less sharp the action will be. It’s a vicious cycle.

Is Internet Access About To Change?

Last week I wrote about concerns Internet providers might some day change the unfettered access we currently have. You can understand their worry about providing me a workaround to services they’d like me to buy from them, like local telephone and pay-per-view video.

In the past Helaine and I bought Major League Baseball’s web package. It’s delivered by Comcast on my high speed Internet connection and competes with Comcast’s own video-on-demand service. Comcast is the passive carrier and gets nothing from this sale. My gain is Comcast’s loss – literally.

If you read this article from the Washington Post you can hear toes being stuck in the water. Bell South wants this to change. I’m sure they’re not alone.

Of course it makes sense for providers to try and monetize their service. But my selfish concern is me, not them. I want to be able to decide what I want, when I want it, and then get it with all the speed I’ve paid for.

Unless my ISP is currently holding back (and I don’t think it is), the only way to make some services faster is to throttle back the non-favored while allowing the others free access.

This is a very complex issue, as cable and phone companies watch their core businesses get cannabilized by ‘fat pipes’ they themselves provide!

You haven’t heard the last of this. The fact that it’s in the Washington Post as a news and not tech story, written by a staff writer, says it’s already on the mainstream radar.

Blogger’s note: I own a very small amount of Comcast stock as part of my retirement plan.

Someone, Please Explain This To Me

Helaine and I are Phillies fans. With the baseball season starting soon (it’s already started for the Yankees and Devil Rays – in Tokyo) I set out to buy the Major League Baseball online package. This is something we’ve done in the past.

You plunk down your money and get a subscription – either the radio play-by-play to all the games of one team, all the teams, or a video package. The amazing thing is watching or listening on your PC. The quality is quite good.

There are all sorts of pricing arrangements. If you go to the Major League Baseball website, the advertised price is $14.95 per month, or $79.95 for the season, for video (and not all games are available as video), or $19.95 per month and $99.95 per season for radio and TV.

So far, so good. MLB has the rights, and they can charge what they wish.

At the bottom of the page, next to a small MSN logo, is this text: “MSN Premium subscribers get MLB.com All Access with your subscription.”

I went to MSN’s website, and here’s what I found there: “All new or existing MSN Premium members receive MLB.com All Access, which includes MLB.TV and MLB.com Gameday Audio.” The price, $9.95 per month, with three months free!

This doesn’t make any sense to me, but I signed up anyway.

Quite honestly, I wouldn’t sign up for MSN if they gave it away free. There is some software in the deal and better access to some of Microsoft’s services, but nothing I really want.

I guess if I were a marketing major, or Bill Gates, a lightbulb would turn on above my head and the reason for this pricing arrangement would become crystal clear. I am neither… obviously.

The Future of TV

In today’s ShopTalk, a daily newletter for broadcast journalists (and those who sit in the same room with them), Alan Mendelson of KCAL wrote an interesting letter:

From: Alan Mendelson

MoneyLA@aol.com

We are only a few years away to find the reach and penetration of high-speed Internet access to be on par with Cable TV. And when that happens, perhaps in only five years, broadcast and Cable TV news will also be on par with Internet-TV News.

In that time, families will have a “video wall” with a handheld remote with which to choose TV, Cable, Satellite TV or Internet video.

And when that happens, companies will not pay hundreds of millions of dollars to buy a TV broadcast station (and along with it the limitations of government regulation) but they will be able to start up an Internet-TV station for the cost of a server — about $2,000. And unlike broadcast TV and Cable TV, Internet TV will have no geographical boundaries.

Alan Mendelson

KCAL-TV Money Reporter and www.moredeals.com

This is a subject I’ve thought about a lot. So, I responded:

I read, with great interest, Alan Mendelson’s letter concerning the future of Internet video. If it were only that simple.

Alan mentions the startup cost of $2,000 for a server. That’s a server without bandwidth. Unlike broadcasting, where one single transmission reaches out to anyone, current Internet technology requires a discreet, individual signal to each user.

That’s also a server without any viewers. Broadcast stations provide something an Internet start-up can’t (and here’s their real value) – a well known address. Don’t underestimate the value of prime real estate. It’s no surprise that when the same program is seen on both broadcast and cable channels, broadcast gets the higher audience share.

Even when Internet television finds an audience, it takes a lot of bandwidth to serve an audience. As far as I can tell, it’s a lot more expensive to transmit that many bits than with our current system of broadcasting.

I’m not saying that what Alan predicts won’t happen. It just won’t happen in the way he anticipates.

Internet television will be watched as the Internet is watched – very close to the screen. It will be watched as we browse and check email and do all those other things we do with computers… and will do with computers.

For the most part, Internet video programming will not be watched full screen. Certainly not for news and information programming. There is no need for it. Watching news, or even sports, in a small window on a computer desktop is perfectly satisfying and reduces the bandwidth cost greatly.

Already, here in Connecticut, University of Connecticut women’s basketball is streamed on a subscription basis by our local Public Television station. Major League Baseball does it too. In neither case is the service designed to be full screen viewing. In neither case would this be economically possible without a significant subscription fee, for what is a small amount of programming.

The good news for most of us is, Internet or broadcast, our skills will still be needed. The bad news is, increased dilution of the audience will lower margins and probably lower salaries.

My small town, a suburb in a medium sized market, might be served by a one man TV station, where a single person does every function from reporting to shooting to editing to anchoring to sales.

Will the cable companies, who provide a huge chunk of the broadband Internet access now available, try to control this use of bandwidth? They have a vested interest in seeing that they are the source of subscription programming, not a flat rate pipeline by which others profit… at their peril.

Whether change will be good or bad remains to be seen. What is unavoidable is, there will be change.