The Sports Media Thread

[The_Admiral]

It's like how ionospheric shifts make it so you can hear a New Orleans station clear as a bell in Boston. There must have been a tear in the time-space continuum that actually synced radio to TV.

[Digby]

I’ve occasionally figured it out and the key is streaming both the radio and TV, like radio on the smartphone or whatever, if you can pause both and use the back-15-sec. button and have a bit of trial and error. Of course, 2 or 3 times during the game you’ll deal with one of them buffering and you’ll have to mess around with it all again. Doing this in the analog days never worked perfectly either; maybe the cable I grew up with sucked.

[infrared41]

2 hours ago, the admiral said:

It's like how ionospheric shifts make it so you can hear a New Orleans station clear as a bell in Boston. There must have been a tear in the time-space continuum that actually synced radio to TV.

 

That's as good an explanation as any.

 

Side note: Speaking of weird station signal bounces, Cleveland's 50,000 watt clear channel AM used to do this thing on weekends where they'd ask for callers from all over the country. The caller from the furthest away won a coffee mug or something. One night when I was listening, this guy called in from Montana.

[BBTV]

4 hours ago, infrared41 said:

 

Of all the times I've tried syncing to radio, I was successful just once and I'm pretty sure it was pure luck.

 

The local FM radio station syncs itself to Xfinity, so if you're hardwired and not streaming, it's usually close-to-perfect by the first commercial break.  For FOX games, I generally don't have to do anything. 

 

CBS and NBC tend to monkey with their broadcast a little bit so even if its synced, it tends to not stay synced.  I bought a little device off eBay called "Sports Sync" radio, which is just an analog radio with resistors that let you dial in up to a 5 second delay, which is usually good enough to sync any non-streaming broadcast.  Things go out the window once the variables associated with streaming come into play.

 

This is the exact one I have, and while it's super sensitive (even a dog wagging its tail can impact reception) it works really well.

 

[The_Admiral]

Well, necessity is the mother of invention, and it was necessary to get out of listening to Joe Buck and Thom Brennaman call games.

[Digby]

 

Chad Johnson?

[Digby]

Today's Dennis Eckersley's last game as a broadcaster and even that might get rained out. I always found Jerry Remy more annoying than most Sox fans did (sorry) but Eck is and always has been a delight, just makes the games so much more fun to listen to. Hard to think of many people who were so good as players AND broadcasters. I can't imagine watching games next year with some newbie TV guy and this revolving-door milquetoast roster. Grim times at Fenway.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

 

 

[The_Admiral]

Quote

NYT writers are complaining about Athletic reporters "introducing themselves as Times journalists."

Eternal AP students

[Red Comet]

1 hour ago, the admiral said:

Eternal AP students

Take that sort of person in New York and then imagine them covering small to medium sized markets. You can feel the angst from not being connected or maybe talented enough to be in New York, DC or LA.
 

Obviously, not all of them are like that or even most, but you do feel it on occasion. 

Edited October 8, 2022 by Red Comet

[The_Admiral]

I took some time to revisit some mid-aughts bits of Those Guys Have All the Fun over the weekend and was reminded of what a colossal pudwhack Mark Shapiro was and how he would have burned Bristol to the ground if it weren't so fireproof. To recap:

 

- Pissed off the NFL so profoundly that they jacked up the price of the dregs game and gave NBC the game of the week for a song

- Tried to fill as many hours as possible with made-for-TV movies and reality shows in pursuit of a mythical sports-adjacent audience

- Signed the NBA, immediately developed a toxic relationship with Stern, and inaugurated a continuing tradition of vaguely crappy NBA coverage

- Got rid of the NHL, the network's greatest time-filler, to make room for more TV movies and because he didn't like hockey

- Alienated almost every single person he worked with

 

And got the keys to the kingdom because he supervised some one-hour documentaries about Jim Thorpe and was good at being annoying. And then after making what would be in normal circumstances a complete mess of ESPN, he failed up to go work for, you guessed it, Dan Snyder. Even in high school, I remember the nonstop promos for 3: The Dale Earnhardt Story (all I wanna do is race, daddy) and goddamn Beg, Borrow, and Deal, and being like guys, what are you doing. ESPN has had plenty of dumb managers since then, but the Shapiro era was truly remarkable in how the network succeeded in spite of itself.

[TrueYankee26]

Stephen A doing 'Manningcast' style alternative broadcast of NBA games on ESPN 

 

[DG_ThenNowForever]

That's dumb because Manning actually played the game. Stephen A is just going to be yelling at the TV.

[TrueYankee26]

4 minutes ago, DG_ThenNowForever said:

That's dumb because Manning actually played the game. Stephen A is just going to be yelling at the TV.

"Giannis is a baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad MAN!"

[Germanshepherd]

The ManningCast is pure magic when its working, but 50-75% of the time they whiff on the guest and we just get 15 minutes of athletespeak. 
 

When it’s working, it’s because the guys are smart enough to know what they’re talking about, but dumb enough to be relatable to every chuckle:censored: on the couch. 
 

Adding a chaotic guest like Shannon Sharpe only enhances that magic, where the negative chemistry between the white bread Mannings and the boisterous guest is a hilarious environment they all know how to run with. 
 

Nobody who’s tried something similar has gotten anywhere with it,  which seems obvious when you consider that ESPN barely even lets it work its magic. 

[Digby]

And I think ManningCast was also a new and different thing, a fresh way of watching the game. Whereas adding Stephen A to anything gives us nothing new and unexpected, we all know exactly how it's going to go. With the benefit of hindsight, maybe they should have done this at peak Bill Simmons era (it might be work, I didn't say it wouldn't be annoying) and it would have been a better way of shoehorning him into the TV production than his NBA Countdown tenure turned out to be.

[The_Admiral]

It seems like The Shrinking Middle Class is a problem in Bristol, too. Where they once had a pretty solid stable of on-air talent, now it's just a bunch of disposable bodies, Stephen A. Smith, and Mike Greenberg. What is the demand for Stephen A. Smith twitch-streaming an NBA game?

[TrueYankee26]

LOLOLOL Another Manningcast this time LeBron James and his show "The Shop" for TNF as another Amazon alternate feed starting November 17

 

https://www.nexttv.com/news/amazon-adds-lebron-james-for-its-version-of-the-manningcast

[DG_ThenNowForever]

 

[DG_ThenNowForever]

Elon seems like the kind of guy who would laugh at low-effort April Fool's Day jokes, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.