It’s Time to Put on Our Baseball Apps

Baseball season is finally here, and people around the office here are particularly juiced (with no help from BALCO) about their World Champion San Francisco Giants returning to the diamond. Personally, I’m a Dodgers fan, so I’m glad we have a chance to regain our rightful place atop the NL West.As for the Oakland A’s fans among us, well, yeah, that club has returned to the Coliseum (ironically named, considering its state of decay). We won’t get totally geeked about the A’s until they’re allowed to move down here to San Jose.

Because everything on this earth makes me think of the cloud and TV apps, that got me thinking about sports TV in general.

When you hear talk of cable cord-cutting, it’s never coming from a sports nut. It’s extremely difficult—if not impossible—to watch live televised sports in your local market without a cable, telco or satellite connection.

In fact, for the sports nut, it’s not a question of cutting the cord. It’s a question of which cord to choose. Baseball, football, basketball and hockey fans are well served by their multichannel provider, through the combination of their regional sports networks, local broadcasts, ESPN, Versus, MLB Extra Innings, MLB Extra Extra Innings and…well, you get the idea.

But let’s put on our thinking caps (and jerseys), and imagine how much better the experience could be. Think sports TV meets TV apps, with access to stats, fantasy tracking, multiple camera views and audio tracks, on-demand instant replay, multi-device interactivity, multi-game video mosaics, social networking (send your distant friend an on-screen smack down), etc. Or for the less-is-more crowd, how about freeing up your view by toggling the scoreboard overlay off and on?

Let’s get the word out to everybody who can make this happen: Cable/satellite/telco operators, CE manufacturers, mobile carriers, advertisers and, of course, the sports programmers and Web developers. They can all join the cloud and use our CloudTV™ platform to bring the complete sports experience to any screen, anywhere, anytime.

So, take me out to the ballgame, take me out…with the cloud.