{"id":684,"date":"2022-04-10T09:54:22","date_gmt":"2022-04-10T14:54:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/?p=684"},"modified":"2022-04-10T10:00:20","modified_gmt":"2022-04-10T15:00:20","slug":"friday-night-baseball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/2022\/friday-night-baseball\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday Night Baseball"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I watched a bit of the first &#8220;Friday Night Baseball&#8221; &#8211; Mets at Nationals. I&#8217;m generally a Tigers fan, but the Mets are my adopted team, as I was taught from a young age to dislike the Yankees.<\/p>\n<p>I gave FNB a short review on Twitter: &#8220;Good production value, high quality, but several technical glitches, which is very Apple. I love hearing women\u2019s voices for commentary. I wonder what\u2019s powering the graphics, which are clearly Apple-styled.&#8221;<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">I watched a bit of Apple\u2019s Friday Night Baseball last night. Good production value, high quality, but several technical glitches, which is very Apple. I love hearing women\u2019s voices for commentary. I wonder what\u2019s powering the graphics, which are clearly Apple-styled.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Paul DeLeeuw (@pauld) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/pauld\/status\/1512782470416056320?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">April 9, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Troll<\/h2>\n<p>The reply I got, fairly quickly, was a derogatory and predictable. Some &#8220;Real Texan&#8221; believes that women have no place calling Major League Baseball games. Maybe Real Texan feels threatened by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mlb.com\/news\/women-in-baseball-mlb-network-conversation\">the involvement of women at every level of the game<\/a>? I don&#8217;t know. Trolls are gonna troll.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/2013\/pesky-freedom-of-speech\/\">You have the freedom of speech, Troll McTexas, but you don&#8217;t have a right to be heard.<\/a> Let&#8217;s move on.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Technical Review<\/h2>\n<p>I&#8217;ll just quickly credential myself a little &#8211; I&#8217;ve never worked in the Major Leagues, but I moonlight with the local university&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gvsu.edu\/ucomm\/\">News and Information Department<\/a> working live sports production. I&#8217;m primarily a replay machine operator for football, baseball, basketball, soccer, and other sports. Productions I&#8217;ve been a part of have streamed on ESPN3 \/ ESPN+, broadcast on our local PBS affiliate, and been picked up regionally by Comcast, at various points in the last 15 years. I&#8217;ve been working in live productions for over 20 years at this point (uhhhhh I&#8217;m getting old).<\/p>\n<p>The game itself had a handful of technical glitches. I was very impressed, actually, that there weren&#8217;t more issues simply loading and streaming the game itself &#8211; live video streaming takes quite a bit of infrastructure, and it&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/launch-directv-now-went-pretty-200135449.html\">common<\/a> to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.yahoo.com\/entertainment\/disney-experiences-problems-streaming-launch-140314216.html\">get it wrong<\/a>. I noticed just a handful of things:<\/p>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>The stream popped right up for me, and started streaming in nearly full-resolution at the start. Compared with DirecTV Now (my OTT live tv provider), this is pretty impressive. Surfing channels on streaming services is basically exposing yourself to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tomshardware.com\/reviews\/video-guide-part-3,130-7.html\">macro blocks<\/a> until you finally settle on a channel for a bit. I&#8217;d actually call this a pretty big launch-day-win for Apple.<\/li>\n<li>There were multiple replay glitches that I spotted. At one point, it looked like there was a cut sequence of replay sample cards. It happens.<\/li>\n<li>There were a handful of time-skips, where it appeared something had gotten behind and then the broadcast jumped forward 5-10 seconds. That&#8217;s not entirely surprising, but I&#8217;m not sure where the actual time was lost. Perhaps in commercial break, or perhaps there was just streaming delays. I may have been seeing the stream jump from one broadcast server to another based on bandwidth availability. (I have gig fiber, but you&#8217;re only as fast as all the interconnects between.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Graphics<\/h2>\n<p>This feels like the most interesting part of the broadcast to me. The graphics are so Apple-styled, that it would be easy to look at them as UI. The score bug, for example, looks like it got pulled right out of Apple Fitness+. They looked like interactive widgets to the point where I attempted to use the remote to highlight them and see if they&#8217;d expand or change.<\/p>\n<p>They don&#8217;t interact, but they look closer to UI widgets than burned-in graphics. And I suspect that eventually that&#8217;s where Apple would like to go. If anything, it&#8217;s just another argument that Apple should add just a little more decoration to things that really <em>do<\/em> interact: the flat design UI harms usability when you start thinking that any piece of graphical information could be a button or a menu.<\/p>\n<p>I really like the look. I also love that there&#8217;s no always-up ticker; one of the things I like the least about watching sports elsewhere is the inescapable news feed at the bottom of the screen. I don&#8217;t need scores from other games. I can&#8217;t believe that before TVs were 45+ inches and 16:9 aspect ratio as a matter of course that we ever tolerated so much screen space eaten by tiny moving words and numbers.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, if Apple starts adding more sports and covering more live events, I can&#8217;t help but feel like they will cave in and and add a running sports news ticker of some kind. I sincerely hope they don&#8217;t. It&#8217;s just clutter.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Basketball Please<\/h2>\n<p>I do enjoy a good baseball game in person, but I can&#8217;t help but find it a bit boring to watch on TV. Will I watch more Friday Night Baseball? Probably for the couple of games that the Tigers play.<\/p>\n<p>But I would <em>love<\/em> for Apple to add Basketball. I know it&#8217;s a pipe dream to wish for Hockey, but I&#8217;d love that too.<\/p>\n<p>I suspect that the actual next sport they&#8217;ll add will be (American) Football. Football is a sport that is practically engineered for television; the play stops every 30ish seconds, instant replays work their way in between, there&#8217;s lots of opportunities for advertising, and there&#8217;s always interpersonal drama to cover.<\/p>\n<p>I hope to see more, and I would love to see interactivity become a part of the experience. Play on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I watched a bit of the first &#8220;Friday Night Baseball&#8221; &#8211; Mets at Nationals. I&#8217;m generally a Tigers fan, but the Mets are my adopted team, as I was taught from a young age to dislike the Yankees. I gave &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/2022\/friday-night-baseball\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,31,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fun","category-mac","category-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=684"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":697,"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions\/697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}