With the NBA Final, Stanley Cup and World Cup all happening around the same time, I’ve been taking in a good number of recap, live-streamed and highlight videos. It turns out people are getting a lot smarter about how they surface interesting moments in a game.
I find it annoying that recaps for games I care about are sometimes only 30 seconds long. Sure, 30 seconds of a Cubs game is enough for most people, but I’d like at least a couple minutes. The NHL has solved that with their game highlight videos (pictured above). While there’s no commentary, they show you ever goal and a selection of exciting saves and hits. This is great for finding your favorite moment from a game or getting a sense of everything that happened. MLB’s At Bat app let’s you watch a condensed version of the game in 10 minutes, but I’d like a version with just the good parts.
On Friday, we watched some of the US World Cup match on ESPN3.com. I don’t remember if these showed up during the game, but right as the game ended, I noticed all of the little tick marks on the timeline. Those were highlights for each of the teams. This is a great way to go back during the game and review some of the choice moments. I’d also love if they kept a marker of where you were when you left live time.
Have you seen any other original ways of displaying sports highlights online?
06/22/10 8:40 AM
A really cool way of doing it would be to rank every play by importance, then let the user pick how long they want to spend watching highlights. That would be sweet.
06/22/10 11:39 AM
I love that you brought this up. I actually just sent feedback through the NHL site about their highlights (what a nerd!)... I do love that they have the individual highlights, but I hate that 99% of the time it's one real-speed view. Sometimes I am just going there to see a summary of a game I missed and it's useful then, but more often I want to see something again because I couldn't get a good view of it, or it happened too fast, or I don't know how that guy made that pass, etc. A slow-mo replay would be so helpful! Or maybe a couple from different angles! So, I usually end up trying to find clips on Youtube anyway.
06/22/10 12:07 PM
Lizzie: That's a really good point! Ideally, it would be like the iPhone and podcasts; you can play any replay at .5x, 1x or 2x speeds. I would totally pay some amount of money to be able to watch really high quality highlights of games I care about. And, while I'm at it, I wish more leagues would let you watch all the games for just one team. It pains me that I have to pay $300/year to watch all of the Bears games.