Head coach is expected to take top job at University of Michigan after finishing season with victory over Arizona Cardinals
Head coach Jim Harbaugh will leave the San Francisco 49ers, the NFL team announced shortly after their regular season finale on Sunday.
Harbaugh is widely expected to return the American college ranks and accept the head coaching position at the University of Michigan, which according to multiple media reports have offered him a six-year, $48m deal.
Everyone remembers how Napster sparked a collision between the music industry and the Internet that forever changed how people consume music. Buying a physical CD in-store quickly became a thing of the past, and today we stream music on-demand, over the air, from digital services like Spotify or Songza. A similar transition is happening in television. Platforms like Hulu and Roku are melding video with online distribution, disrupting traditional cable/broadcast consumption and making it faster and more convenient than ever before for viewers to watch their favorite shows. Most importantly, consumers are increasingly taking advantage of these new platforms. In the last 12 months, 1.8 million Americans have cut the cord and unsubscribed from cable TV, according to a recent study by research firm SNL Kagan. This represents a 3.1 percent drop in cable subscribers, and the trend continues to gain momentum despite the limited availability of premium sports or prime-time entertainment shows on digital platforms. As more of this content becomes available online, expect to see cable subscriber losses accelerate as consumers enjoy the benefits of a digital user experience combined with full access to their favorite shows and sports.
But it's not just a question of content availability. Online distribution actually represents a superior product from a user-experience standpoint. With content parity, there seems little doubt users would migrate to digital TV even faster. Traditionally, television has been a broadcast (one-to-many) medium. A station broadcasts a single show, at a specific time, with all viewers seeing the same content and ads simultaneously. By contrast, online video is a one-to-one medium. Each user connects individually; pulling in the specific content they want, where they want, when they want. Digital platforms enjoy far richer user interfaces, robust search, on-demand content accessibility and multi-device on-the-go access. As well as personalizing content, advertisers are also embracing this one-to-one relationship with viewers. This new, individualized experience enables ads to be delivered based on user preferences, search history and interests, enabling advertisers to reach consumers in a far more targeted (and hence relevant/effective) way. Eventually, this may even reduce the numbers of ads viewers are subjected to, as advertisers get more efficient at targeting only the most relevant audiences for their products. All this was impossible in the old broadcast world.
With so many benefits to Internet delivery, one would wonder why all TV isn't delivered this way. The challenge has far less to do with technology, and far more to do with existing business relationships and commercial interests. Existing broadcasters, cable companies and content producers enjoy the status quo ... the TV business is good, why rock the boat? Affiliate fees (the revenue share on viewer subscriptions paid by cable companies to the content owners) are a $32 billion income source, and are the primary revenue stream that funds TV content development. Thanks to bundling, content owners like Disney and Viacom are able to make more money than if consumers cherry-picked individual channels or shows. The TV industry, at all costs, wants to avoid a repeat of the iTunes model - one in which consumers can purchase individual songs a la carte, eliminating the need to purchase the full album.
Additionally, because of the scale of these relationships, it's almost impossible for new companies to enter the market with competing services. Each year, DirecTV pays the NFL $1 billion for exclusive rights needed for its NFL Sunday Ticket package. But, with more than 20 million subscribers and $30 billion of annual revenue, it's a price DirecTV can afford to keep its subscribers loyal. The fact that it also erects a substantial barrier to entry for any new digital-MSO competitor is a much-appreciated secondary consequence. Even if a startup could create a more intuitive, on-demand IP-based service, would subscribers migrate if the content they wanted were not available? A handful of digital-native companies have the deep pockets needed to take the plunge and buy the content rights needed, but they will face many years of substantial losses on content as they build their subscriber bases.
The prize will be substantial for the company that can overcome these challenges and launch a successful IP television business. By combining the world's best content with an intuitive digital user experience, companies will bring television into the 21st century. In the last month alone, we've seen more than a dozen major steps taken by large media companies to fulfill this vision:
Each week, there appears to be a new story hitting the press about the ways in which the Internet is reshaping the future of television; making it one of the most exciting, but potentially challenging, periods in the history of the TV industry. Unlike music and newspapers before it, the television industry has been able to benefit from the lessons learned by those who faced the Internet challenge. While those lessons from history may ease the transition, they don't lessen the deep impact that IP distribution is having. TV networks are faced with the challenge of adapting to new ways of distributing content to their consumers and building new, more direct relationships with their viewers; all without destroying strategic business relationships that provide the essential revenue they need to operate and invest in new content development. While this challenge is no doubt fraught with risk and complexity, the outcome at this point seems inevitable. Consumers want the benefit of access to content on demand anytime and anywhere, advertisers value the precision targeting and measurement of digital, and even MSOs are beginning to see the benefit of delivering more interactive, engaging experiences to their subscribers. The digital endgame has taken a long time to arrive, but it's now closer to a reality than ever before.
Mark Trefgarne is chief executive officer and co-founder of LiveRail.
With the NFL season just a week away, fans are poring over stats, trash talking their friends, and gearing up for the real season: fantasy football. The national phenomenon has spawned five seasons of a TV show, The League, has NFL teams refitting their stadiums so that fans can track their teams more closely, and costs businesses billions of dollars a year due to distracted employees.
So, easily distracted employees, here are the coolest and most useful places to play fantasy football out there-from the household names like ESPN to a small startup that's doing fantasy exclusively on your phone. I didn't rank them because a lot of deciding "which one is best" depends on what type of player you are and what fits you.
ESPN has been my go-to for years now. It has an awesome interface that's easy to use-especially the drafting tool, a great mobile app that it's improved this offseason, and solid player rankings. ESPN's Livecast, which shows you the scores of all the NFL games alongside your fantasy matchup in real time, is a godsend. ESPN is my personal favorite, and whether you're a fantasy rookie or a seasoned veteran, you really can't go wrong with it.
The old Yahoo fantasy football app was like watching the Oakland Raiders play. You could tell it was supposed to be (fantasy) football, but man it was awful.
The company redid their app this summer, and it's a huge improvement. One of my leagues just switched from ESPN to Yahoo, and I have to say the two are about even so far for me. Yahoo has a nice, easy to navigate mobile app, and had a really smooth drafting tool. Yahoo even gave out report cards for each team grading their drafts right after it concluded, which was a fun little feature. The app itself prominently displays links to Yahoo's other mobile apps, which is smart and may further Yahoo and CEO Marissa Mayer's refocused on the company's mobile apps.
Check out our new @YahooFantasy app - thanks @TIME for the rave review! http://t.co/ieA3VZdl1Q
- marissamayer (@marissamayer) July 30, 2013
In football, the flea flicker is a trick play where the running back takes the ball and runs towards the line before turning and pitching it back to the quarterback who then throws it downfield. Fleaflicker the site is anything but a trick play-more of a dive straight up the middle. The old school site hearkens back to a simpler time, before mobile apps and big ESPN and Yahoo sites with beautiful displays, when people drafted on big boards in their basements, adding up stats on pencil and paper.
Fleaflicker goes with a clean, simple spreadsheet look that does a good job of feeling like old school fantasy football, while still offering real-time scoring and other modern-day features. It's super customizable for the hardcore fans out there, but also has a really simple interface for the beginners.
Fanium has an interesting take on fantasy, going solely mobile. The interface is super simple, with very little information. But this is a double-edged sword, as there are few stats or insights to look up if you really want good info on your players.
I participated in a Fanium draft (8 teams, 16 player each), and each player was given up to eight hours to make their selection. The draft went from Thursday afternoon to Tuesday morning, as not everyone was right near their phones all the time. I had mixed feelings about the draft-it felt a lot like fantasy football for people who find fantasy to be a chore. I love gathering together and smack talking during a few hour-long draft.
In many ways, Fanium is the antithesis of Fleaflicker and My Fantasy League-it's not customizable, with rigid preset roster sizes, and is missing some of the classic elements of fantasy football, like kickers and defenses.
At first, I didn't like it. It felt like fantasy football for people who don't like fantasy football. But it is a really fast, lightweight app, which is awesome if you're out all day Sunday checking your fantasy team while watching the games. Fanium is a great intro to fantasy football, as it isn't much of a time commitment or too much to understand, but still maintains the key awesomeness of fantasy. It could also be a great accompanying app, with the more hardcore players using something like Yahoo or ESPN and the more casual fans using Fanium. We know Yahoo loves to make acquisitions, even fantasy football startups...
These three are fine places to play fantasy football. I just don't understand why you'd play on one of these sites when the experience you're looking for will be better on ESPN or Yahoo. All three have pretty good unique content and offer the typical fantasy settings and features that veteran players are used to. CBS and the NFL have nice mobile apps, but I strongly prefer Yahoo's and ESPN's. Fox doesn't even have a mobile app (seriously, what are you doing, FOX?) for their fantasy game.
Most of the smaller offerings out there are slight tweaks on the existing game. If a startup really wants to make an impact in this space, they need to make their core offering different. Several options immediately jump out:
Despite the comparable popularity in college football, no one has really cracked a good way to make fantasy football fun and engaging for college teams. The leagues are inherently very different, and current fantasy is largely based off of the NFL style-win as many games as you can to make the playoffs, keep your team healthy, then ride hot players and some luck to a championship (or so they tell me-being an Eagles fan, I can't confirm anything about winning championships). But the college game is very different-strengths of schedules and conference matter a lot more, and the goal is to go undefeated and land in the top two-err, four-spots to compete for a championship. Basing a league off of this would be an interesting departure from the typical NFL-centric leagues.
Most of the people I know who do play a version of college fantasy football have made their own systems for tracking and awarding points, as fans are left with very few options if they want to really customize their leagues. Give users an insane amount of options-essentially just the software and storage for whatever league they want to create-and you could grab a nice niche of fans who want to branch out and do their own thing.
And fantasy leagues have failed to capture the impact of individual defensive players on the game rather than merely defensive units. One running back typically has a much larger impact on a fantasy game than an entire defensive and special teams unit, which is obviously not how the actual games work. Offensive players are much easier to track, as their individual accomplishments can be recorded by how many yards and touchdowns they have, whereas solid defensive coverage or touchdown-saving tackles are harder to objectively measure. But sports statistics are getting more and more advanced, and someone will be able to figure this thing out sooner or later-might as well be the little guy or they have no shot in the long run against ESPN and Yahoo.
And as much as NFL Red Zone has attracted diehard fans who want to watch every touchdown, the bridge between fantasy football and watching games live leaves much to be desired. Whether its DirecTV and its Sunday NFL ticket package, ESPN and its potential web-based TV, or another company, users would go bonkers if their fantasy rosters were connected to live games on their TVs. Sportvision, the company that created the first down line for TV, is working on technology that would allow viewers to see their players highlighted on the field (you can see Sportvision's early mockup of this above).
Well, that about does it for me. Good luck out there, and don't draft Aaron Hernandez. Once you've picked a site to host your fantasy league, Eliza Brooke has you covered with six tools to help you dominate your opponents.
Images via: here, Boston.com, Tumblr, and Gawker.
