DirecTV Launches French Open Tennis, GameSearch Applications

Satellite TV provider, DirecTV, recently offered an interactive TV
application to accompany its coverage of the French Open tennis
tournament. Dubbed French Open Interactive and available from May
25th through June 1st, the application was developed by DirecTV in
partnership with the Tennis Channel and ESPN2. It offered complete
coverage of play on five courts during the tournament's first six days,
and eight hours of coverage on Saturday, May 31st and Sunday, June
1st: according to DirecTV, the service offered a total of 350 hours of
tournament coverage. At the core of the service was a "mix" channel
that allowed viewers to watch up to six live matches simultaneously,
including the match being broadcast on the Tennis Channel or ESPN2:
as has been the case with DirecTV's other mix channels, viewers could
select one of the mix channel's thumbnail screens to listen to its audio
feed or to switch to full-screen mode.

In addition, a number of interactive services could be accessed through
each of the mix channel's five screens of additional tournament
coverage, and through ESPN2 and the Tennis Channel: "Matches On
Now," which provided, on the lower third of the screen, constantly
updated scores of all the currently televised matches and which allowed
viewers to tune directly to each of those matches by pressing the
"select" button on their remote; "Matches On Later," which provided a
constantly updated schedule of upcoming matches on each of the court
channels (it presented viewers with approximate start times and the
complete order of play); and "Instant Results," which provided viewers
with real-time scores from all French Open matches in progress, and
allowed them to see scores for matches that had been completed that
day and the day before, and to view upcoming matches--all without
interrupting their viewing of the tournament. "DirecTV adds to our
high-definition tournament telecast by letting viewers select the courts
and players they want to watch, when they want to watch them--an
opportunity tailor-made for tennis and its many simultaneous matches
during Grand Slam competitions," Victoria Quoss, EVP of
programming and network strategy at the Tennis Channel, said in a
prepared statement. "Our audiences will be able to take advantage of
this interactive service throughout the day, with shared coverage from
Tennis Channel and ESPN."

DirecTV claims to have broadcast over 5,000 hours of live interactive
sports programming last year, and says that nearly 2 million homes
accessed its interactive sports applications, and that those applications
were accessed more than 171 million times in the course of the year. It
also claims that viewers who used those interactive applications during
broadcasts typically watched the broadcasts they were associated with
longer than did other viewers.

In other DirecTV news: The company has launched a search-engine
application, called GameSearch, that helps viewers to find other
broadcasts of a game when the game broadcast on the channel they
were watching is blacked out (note: in the US, sporting events are
occasionally not televised in a particular market, in order to protect the
financial interests of the teams, the sports leagues and the stations in
that market that are the rights-holders to the game broadcast). When a
DirecTV set-top box is tuned to a channel with a blacked-out game, the
GameSearch application automatically recognizes the blackout and
immediately scans the DirecTV channel line-up to see if the game is
available on another channel. Then, if a non-blacked-out broadcast of
the game is found, the application displays a message on the screen,
giving the viewer the option to tune to the channel where the game is
being broadcast. When a game is scheduled to be recorded on a DVR,
the application finds a non-blacked-out broadcast and automatically
records it. The service, which is free of charge to DirecTV subscribers,
is currently available to subscribers equipped with DirecTV's high-end
HR20 and HR21 HD DVR's, as well as the company's recently released
R22 SD DVR. Later this year, the company says, it will be rolled out to
customers equipped with the lower-end R15 and R16 DVR's, and next
year to customers with the H20 and H21 HD receivers.