News Corp.-owned satellite TV provider, DirecTV, announced two sports-related interactive TV offerings over the past few weeks:
- It has added a menu of new interactive features to its NFL Sunday Ticket football programming package (note: the latter has featured ITV capabilities for some time now). The new features, for which there is no additional charge, provide subscribers to the package (provided they also have interactive TV-capable DirecTV receivers) with more team statistics, and also include an application, dubbed "Player Tracker," that is targeted at fantasy football players. The app allows subscribers to select up to nine NFL players from around the league, and then track their performance throughout the day via real-time on-screen alerts that appear on every NFL Sunday Ticket game channel, as well as on DirecTV's multiscreen channel, Game Mix, and on its Red Zone channel. The alerts appear whenever one of a subscriber's chosen players does anything of significance during a game. Subscribers can also use their remote controls to access a "My Players" overlay that lists cumulative statistics for their players. "With our new interactive features for this year's NFL Sunday Ticket, fantasy players no longer have to face the dilemma of tracking their fantasy team players and their opponents' players on their computer while watching the games themselves on TV," David Hill, president of DirecTV Entertainment, said in a prepared statement. "'Player Tracker' brings it all together. It's always been our mission to make NFL Sunday Ticket the ultimate destination for die-hard NFL fans and fantasy players every Sunday, and as their needs evolve, we intend to evolve with them." (Note: according to a 2005 survey by the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, over 13 million US adults play fantasy football.) DirecTV is also leveraging its platform's interactive TV capabilities (note: those capabilities are powered by the MediaHighway middleware of its News Corp.-stablemate, NDS) to offer a range of new team statistics in association with NFL Sunday Ticket: subscribers to the package can now use their remotes to access such team stats as first downs, third-down efficiency, interceptions/interception yards, and fumbles/fumbles lost. In addition, the package now offers ITV-enabled subscribers stat lines for the top four players on each team in rushing, passing, and receiving; as well as a "Today's Best" tab that features the top five players from the day's NFL Sunday Ticket games in each of those three categories.
- DirecTV also teamed with NBC Universal-owned USA Network and the US Tennis Association to offer a service, dubbed "US Open Interactive on USA," that enhanced USA Network's coverage of the first five days of the 2006 US Open. The service, which was available to DirecTV customers free of charge, allowed those customers to access five extra channels, each offering live coverage of a match not shown on USA Network's linear channel, or to view all five extra channels, together with USA Network's linear coverage of the US Open, simultaneously on a multiscreen "US Open Mix" channel. When tuned to the Mix channel, customers with ITV-enabled DirecTV receivers could use their remotes to switch between audio from the app's six feeds, and to view any one of the feeds in full-screen mode. The service also allowed ITV-enabled DirecTV customers to access statistics and other information (including results for the current and the previous day, as well as the next day's match-ups) on-demand: the information appeared as a half-screen overlay on the five supplemental channels and the Mix channel. According to DirecTV, the US Open service gave its customers access to around 300 hours of tournament coverage (including coverage of over 100 additional matches from the tournament's early rounds); the company says that, in order to produce content for the app, it utilized USA Network production resources at the US Open that are normally used for cutaways from matches featured during the channel's national coverage. "We're excited by the notion of combining USA Network's national coverage of the US Open with DirecTV's interactive television innovations to create the ultimate US Open experience for viewers," Bridget Baker, EVP of NBC Universal Cable, said in a prepared statement. "Each year, dramatic storylines unfold during early-round matches from many places at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, so it makes perfect sense to provide tennis fans access to as much of this drama as possible, as it occurs."
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