Time Warner Cable has launched a Fantasy Baseball Tracker application in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and says that it will also roll out the app in Austin, Texas; Columbia, South Carolina; and San Antonio, Texas. The application, which is being offered free of charge and which is powered by technologies from Plano, Texas-based BIAP Systems (note: the latter, whose name is an acronym for "Broadband Interactive Applications," was founded in 1998 by a group of former NASA scientists who had met while working on the Space Station), allows viewers who are fantasy baseball enthusiasts to use their remote to input and track their personal team roster, and to receive continually updated statistics just for their fantasy team while they are watching regular television: viewers have the option of accessing this information as a scrolling ticker, or in more detail as a 3/4-screen or full-screen display. The application is based on the BIAP-powered Fantasy Football Tracker application that Time Warner Cable launched in Green Bay last fall. "The Green Bay Fantasy Football test proved this type of feature provides value to digital cable customers, and we expect this new Fantasy application to be as popular and convenient a feature for baseball fans," Joan Gillman, Time Warner Cable's VP of interactive television and advanced advertising, said in a prepared statement (note: Gillman was the recipient of a 2006 [itvt] Award for Leadership in Interactive Television. "Customers can expect continual enhancements to our popular ITV applications like the 'Scoring Alert' feature that sends live on-screen updates to participants when a player on their fantasy team has accomplished something of importance."
Features of the new Fantasy Baseball Tracker application include:
- "The Stats Center," a 3/4-screen overlay that provides game scores, leaderboards, roster updates and player news.
- "The Stats Line," a single-ticker view that provides personalized player stats and scoring alerts.
- "The Game Center," a full-screen scoreboard that shows scheduled, ongoing and completed games for the current day.
- Full-screen leaderboards, showcasing the top five pitching and top five hitting leaders by statistical category.
- "My Roster," a full-screen view, displaying daily, weekly and year-to-year player statistics.
- Scoring Alerts," an on-screen indicator which lights up in red whenever one of the players on a viewer's roster achieves a milestone, such as a home run, an RBI or a stolen base.
- A settings menu that allows viewers to personalize the app's start-up screen and to specify the kinds of scoring alerts they want to see.
BIAP, which has a long-standing relationship with Time Warner Cable, has developed a number of other interactive TV projects for the MSO, in addition to the Fantasy Baseball Tracker and Fantasy Football Tracker apps. These include:
- A service dubbed "PITV" (short for "Personalized Information Television") that has been deployed in a number of Time Warner Cable markets and that provides subscribers with personalizable local news, sports, traffic and weather information, local movie listings, financial news, lottery results, and information on local school districts.
- "eBay on TV," an interactive TV version of the eponymous online auction service, which has been deployed to DVR-equipped Time Warner Cable subscribers in Austin, Texas.
- "NBC Olympics NOW," a service which accompanied NBC's coverage of the recent Winter Olympics, and which was available to Time Warner digital subscribers in Columbia, South Carolina; Green Bay, Wisconsin; and Corpus Christi, El Paso, San Antonio and Waco, Texas. It allowed viewers to track the performance of the US Olympics team via constantly refreshed medal counts, event telecast schedules, news and athlete bios. Viewers could access the service by pressing "select" on their remotes while tuned to any of the NBC Universal channels that were covering the Olympics: the service would then appear in three-quarter-screen format, allowing viewers to continue to watch regular linear TV while they used it.
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