SMW Q&A With Michael Adamson and Robert Occhialini (Part 1)

Sports Media Watch visited Turner Sports last week and had a chance to speak with Turner Sports VP, New Products & Services Michael Adamson and NBA Digital Dir. of Technology and Product Development Robert Occhialini. Topics of conversation centered on the development of the NBA Game Time app on various platforms.

SMW: Basically I want to know what kind of stuff you’re putting together, what kind of new technologies you’re working on, what kind of things fans can expect to see in the next few seasons.

Adamson: When Turner bought NBA Digital, one of the things that was different about this property was that we built in a team for the advancement of new products into the staff. It was the first time we had done that as a sports group. We would try to innovate and do things in the past, and we’d work with external partners – and we still do – but this was the first time we’d ever committed to a group that was forward thinking.

That group, it’s Robert’s team, really engaged fully about a year ago and immediately jumped into the mobile product space. That was sort of our first calling in here. Now before the group was formed, Robert and I led the team on League Pass Broadband. From both those days, plus our prior experience with other sports, one of the things we’ve been trying to tackle is making sure that we’re laying down newer, better railroad tracks than have been laid down in the past.

It’s amazing how far we’ve come, certainly on the mobile side, in less than a year and a half. We’ve laid down a lot of new foundational stuff here at Turner so that we can start to develop these products without having to rethink the infrastructure and architecture. To the casual glance, that’s kind of boring stuff. But for us from a new product standpoint, it’s been critical because now we can embrace and think about new mobile devices, new tablets that would come out, new TVs.

So that was a big shift for us, in order to rethink how we mine and build and present data and media. Because long term, where we’re heading is trying to sync it all up. Today, you can’t do that. Nobody can do it, actually. So the idea that I want to watch a game, or I want to listen to a game, or I want to see realtime stats and information about a game, you can’t sync all that up today. Each of those have been developed in their appropriate disciplines, the radio technologies, the video encoding and satellite transmission – and all that has been done exclusive to its own media type. Now that we have all this stuff being converted digitally, now that we’re trying to lay down these railroad tracks for these new technologies, that’s a real key for us. We absolutely expect in the next while, that we’re gonna have unlocked the ability to sync all the media up.

Occhialini: We’re in a very unique position there. Today, it’s like TV is on one transport and all these products that are based on IP technology are on a different transport. So getting that to your house in some kind of synchronous fashion is a real challenge. We even see it on the IP only products like League Pass Broadband, where we have to do some pretty complicated machinations to get the scoring information that appears on the flash UI to match closely the score information that appears in the video stream.

Adamson: That’s been sort of the core of what we’ve been doing. In the meantime, the layer on top of that has been the actual products coming out. That’s been seizing the opportunity when a new technology or new device comes out. Seizing the opportunity to try out a new idea with a new event. Once we develop a product, we’ve done two things. Number one, we’ve addressed the functionality of the device itself, in a way that we think the user will enjoy – not knowing how these things are going to come out. Embracing these new technologies is a bet. Then behind the scenes, what’s another piece we can put in a place to get to this synchronous concept. We take lots of baby steps in this process. With every new product, we try to lay down one more rail on that front.

The range of things that we’ve been doing specific on the NBA side have ranged from the live video experiences – both in terms of League Pass Broadband as well as the alternate angle presentations for TNT Overtime – it’s been a complete embracing of the mobile application side and the mobile web side. That’s been an experimentation with very new niche devices like the Roku and the Vizio TV sets.

SMW: What is the Roku?

Adamson: The Roku is, they call it an internet-connected device. It’s a specialty device intended to give you direct access to content outside of satellite or cable or any other traditional content acquisition. It’s a computer box connected up to the Internet.

SMW: So you can access the Internet anywhere you are with that?

Adamson: Yes. Now, you can only access it in certain ways. Roku has a proprietary system for accessing the content. It doesn’t have a browser like we’re used to seeing on a computer, it doesn’t really have a traditional channel guide. Roku has a catalog, that’s the best way to describe it. They call it the channel store. I can go in here, and for people who have developed specifically for the technology used on this box, I can establish a channel over the internet that will let someone using this box have direct access to it. As you can see, there’s lots of different kinds of content. If you’re into your photos at all, you can do Facebook photos. If you want to rent videos, you can hook into Netflix of Amazon video.

Occhialini: And they’re first screen experiences that are designed for television viewing. Specifically engineered for the TV.

Adamson: The Roku folks believe in the direct-to-consumer model for content. Don’t make me go through anything other than directly to the service that I want. Essentially, buy the box and you’re done. This is what I can watch on TV instead of watching TV. We’re interested in it because we don’t know where it’s going yet. We don’t know how many people will want to continue to use the direct access services like this versus using their Comcast service.

Because you can go into Comcast, go the on-demand section and rent movies as well. So you’re doing the same thing with Roku, but you’re using Netflix instead of Comcast. We don’t know where consumers are going to come out on this. We don’t know if in the end they’ll want everything in one spot and that’s why the cable services are a great deal, or if they’ll just want to skip all that and go direct access to these things. So in the meantime, we’re trying these technologies out to do two things: number one, to try to learn more about these technologies and bet on where we think the market will go, and the other thing is, each one of these that we do helps us lay another one of these rails down in our long-term strategy.

SMW: Could you use [Roku] on a computer or anything else?

Adamson: You can’t plug it into a laptop or anything like that. You could probably configure a desktop to bring video in, but it’s not designed for that. It’s got an HDMI out of the back, which is designed to go into a high-definition TV. So that really is its primary purpose.

We’ve been experimenting around with an NBA channel, and this is something we’ve built in conjunction with the Roku guys. If I feel like I want to know what happened in the game or I want to look at tonight’s game schedule, and I don’t want to go to the computer and go to NBA.com, I can go in here and see, ‘oh there’s two games tonight, and here they are.’

There’s the time of each, really nice and simple. I can go back to last night’s games, for example, and I can see what the final score was. 107-101. I can go in and see some basics, which is how the two teams scored by quarter, what their field goal percentage was, which is kind of cool. I can go in and see some basic team stats, how each team did in regards to field goals, three points, free throws and all that. Sort of nice at-a-glance kind of stuff. I can see how the top players on each team performed, the stats categories. You’ve got the top three from each teams – the top three Spurs and the top three Suns – again, their points, their shooting averages, percents, rebounds and assists. And I can go in, and I can actually watch the recap of the game that’s produced out of the NBA Digital facilities here at Turner for NBA TV and NBA.com.

[Suns/Spurs recap plays]

Occhialini: HD quality.

Adamson: What’s important to know about this is that this is not a TV signal. This is a digitally-encoded file being sent via the Internet to a Roku box and displaying on here. It’s like downloading a file from iTunes.

SMW: That makes it completely different from a Comcast On-Demand, where you can load up the highlight.

Adamson: Absolutely. It is similar, in that we’ll do that with Comcast. Some of our sports properties will send them a file and they do what they do to it. So it’s similar in concept. But this is coming directly out of the Turner facilities here. It’s not going through Comcast or anybody else. These files here were a new experiment with us on producing fully digitally downloadable HD files. You can see, it looks fabulous. And it’s the first time that we’ve done that.

Now we know how to do it, so that’s another thing laid in the way. Now we can produce HD quality downloadable files, just like you can do with iTunes or as you said, how it might look with Comcast – but here out of the NBA facilities through NBA Digital. So that’s what it is, Robert nailed it – it’s a good first screen, at a glance kind of experience. Can’t watch a game off of this, I can’t browse the website, but at-a-glance I can get some good basic information without having to use anything but my TV and my box.

Occhialini: And we launched it this postseason.

Adamson: The other thing it’s important to know, and we’ve tried to do this as much as we can predict as well, is that this experience here was actually designed around the mobile experience. Because we like the at-a-glance nature of the mobile experience, the mobile products we design. The difference is that, with the mobile product you can actually drill right into the scoreboard there and get those stats. Whereas here, you can’t do that because this technology hasn’t been built that way. But you’re getting essentially the same information.

Jeff Pomeroy: Some of the leagues – this is why it’s a good thing for Turner to be a step away – the NHL is devout to one particular mobile carrier. We’ve tried very much to be mobile agnostic. To create our products for all mobile, because I’m not a mobile fan, I’m not a Google fan, I’m an NBA fan.

Occhialini: Most of the UIs translate seamlessly, but for some devices – like, this is the high-resolution curve Blackberry – we have to make some modifications to it to make it easier for the user to use it. But we’re pretty careful about respecting the user’s needs, the screen size and the interaction model on the individual device.

Adamson: The newer smartphones have their own operating systems. The Google phones and the Droids and all that that have the Android operating system, the Blackberries – and then we’re kind of waiting to see what’s going to happen with HP and the Palm devices. Those have operating systems that are conducive to building apps for.

Occhialini: They also represent 78%, as of today, of the market share of smartphones across those three platforms. We’ve launched 100 apps across those three platforms.

Adamson: Just tackling that alone has been a significant effort. But we do recognize that there’s all these other cell phones out there that have these browsers. They don’t have [operating systems], they just have installed code and they have browsers. For those, the mobile website has been the way you access it.

I can tell you that right now, there is work going on to upgrade the mobile websites for this coming fall. There’s things ranging from team personalization or player personalization, you’ll be able to see all of the team’s sites, and just making it more robust from an information and graphics standpoint so it starts to take on some of these qualities. So that work is literally being done right now for the fall.