Day 35 or 36 on the BottomLine Watch. It keeps on turning…
We all know that, among other ways Augusta National is intensely protective of its Masters broadcasts, it forces CBS and now ESPN to use a 1995-ish CBS graphics package for the Masters.
But either NBC has a change to its graphics in the works and its production of the Golf Channel’s coverage of the Players Championship includes graphics, or the Players is just as controlling about its graphics as Augusta.
Day 32 or 33 of the BottomLine Watch, and still the BottomLine remains the “old” BottomLine. Perhaps ESPN’s technicians should experiment less with adding periods to the end of headlines and more with getting the new BottomLine back on the air – assuming they’re still changing it.
TNT has been rather interesting to watch during the playoffs for the experimentation they’ve done with the little line above the box assuring you that yes, this is a playoff game. First, although early in the season words like “OPENING WEEK” or “REMEMBERING MLK” would appear standalone above the box with no background other than the action, at the All-Star Break a long rounded rectangle appeared.
This rounded rectangle continued into the playoffs, alternating between “2009 PLAYOFFS” and some indication of where the series stood…
…but the indication of where the series stood quickly changed to look similar to the “2009 PLAYOFFS” logo, instead of plain white text on a dark grey background. Why? My guess: readability.
That’s not the end to the changes! Just in time for Celtics-Bulls Game 7 came another change, with “2009 PLAYOFFS” gone entirely…
…and for the Conference Semifinals, it’s now alternating between “2009 EAST/WEST SEMIFINALS” and the same indication of the status of the series as before.
Maybe this will actually remain constant through TNT’s coverage of the Eastern Conference Finals.
Finally, Versus introduced a new banner for its coverage of the NHL’s Conference Semifinals.
I have to say, it looks a lot more professional – the font isn’t right out of ESPN’s graphics early this decade, and the team logos aren’t standing alone and hovering over slightly turned-to-the-side circles in a way that just screams “cheapo operation”… too bad the banner was the ONLY thing that changed, and all the other graphics look exactly the same, creating jarring dissonance. If you’re going to change your graphics package, change it ALL AT ONCE. You couldn’t wait until next season? (Assuming they ARE going to change the rest of the graphics…) And what are those things on the side in HD? You couldn’t just have the stripes extend across the whole screen, you had to put doodads on the sides?
(I hold out hope this will mean Versus’ hockey, college football, and college basketball graphics will actually look like one another, and the IndyCar graphics will have at least a superficial resemblance, but who knows?)
(Can someone explain to me why every YouTube video of an IndyCar race I can find is either direct from IndyCar.com and lacks any graphics, or has what appears to be an international or online graphic directly based on the graphics ESPN used last year, not the Versus graphics? I found one video after the first race that would work IF it didn’t somehow manage to avoid showing the banner at all. It’s a shame, as Versus has tweaked the graphics somehow after just about every race, mostly in ways having to do with the display of positioning for “on-board” cameras, which was impossible to read for double-digit positions in Race 1.)
The Jets released Brett Favre from their “reserve/retired” list yesterday, an auspicious move considering so far as I can tell players on the R/R list don’t count against roster or salary caps, but ordinarily a fairly routine move, at least for any player not named Brett Favre.
So naturally you’d expect plenty of “does this mean he’s thinking of coming back?” speculation from ESPN and the like, and you’d expect the blogosphere to do plenty of “there they go again, obsessing over Brett Favre” and thumbing their nose because they’re so above that…
…hold on, it appears the number 1 topic on SportsCenter’s “Blog Buzz” segment this morning was Favre’s release. Seems not even the blogosphere is immune to Favremania when a plane traveling between Minneapolis and Hattiesburg and back again sends them going “OMG OMG OMG IT ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH BRETT FAVRE BECAUSE HE IS THE ONLY PERSON IN ALL OF HATTIESBURG THAT EVER HAS TO TRAVEL OMG!!!!!11!!1!!!eleven!”
If the Super Bowl were covered the same way the NFL Draft is:
It would last two days.
It would be covered by TWO networks.
It would be preceded by a five-hour pregame show. Same (or less) than now, right? Well, there would be pregame shows on both networks.
One of the two networks would have analysis throughout the entire game on a sister channel.
There would be cameras inside each team’s locker room which each broadcast could switch to whenever they needed to, AND cameras inside the houses of players who could be called in at any moment to fly to the game and pitch in for either team.
There would be in-game interviews with coaches and team executives, and an interview with one player after every play either early or late in the game.
Each network’s broadcast team would include an expert who has analyzed every single play each team could possibly use during the game and has drawn up a “mock game” scripting every move of the entire game (or at least the first quarter).
There’s been a lot that’s been said about John Madden’s retirement, and I could repeat everything that’s been said about how beloved he was (not so much in my household, but that may be because he made all the obvious things he said obvious) or his alleged man-crush on Brett Favre or his impact on football and the broadcasting profession or his retirement’s impact on NBC, the NFL and its network, and the careers of Cris Collinsworth, Al Michaels, and Frank Caliendo.
But let me just say this about replacement Collinsworth.
NBC was caught off guard by Madden’s retirement, but they were not caught unprepared.
We’re on Day 12 of the ESPN BottomLine Watch, and last I checked the BottomLine was still in its old ways. I wonder if anyone has a specific time that the BottomLine reverted to its old ways last Monday the 6th – I’d like to keep a running count.
One reason I didn’t like being cut short on my last post was that I still had one graphical matter yet to be taken care of, and it related to ESPN, which has introduced a new NASCAR banner. I had thought the inspiration was Fox’s NASCAR banner, but now I suspect the real inspiration was an attempt to get a headstart on making the new banner take after MNF.
The main problem I have with it came to me while I was watching the above race live, and it’s the real reason I think this is an attempt to go MNF style: when showing stats like intervals behind the leader, those stats are not shown on a separate line below the scroll, but actually incorporated into the scroll itself, so you might see (for the sake of example) 5. (88) EARNHARDT JR. -1.24, instead of the “-1.24” being on a separate line. “RUNNING ORDER” is also replaced with “INTERVALS” for this purpose, and the leader just lacks an interval, meaning at the start of the scroll the lengths each driver gets vary WIDELY. I prefer at least the appearance of each driver getting the same amount of space on the scroll. But because of the amount of information that needs to be presented, I can see how it might be difficult to properly convert the NASCAR strip for the MNF-inspired hub. Still, here’s a mockup I made; other than being larger than the real thing probably would be, and the rather stunning paucity of driver logos online in any context, and the fact I probably still don’t have the exact fonts, I think it came out well enough I’d be surprised not to see ESPN adopt a variant of this, to the extent I may have gotten myself AND ESPN in legal trouble at some point down the road.
On to baseball, and we start on the national level, with a move with an impact on other sports. In something of a surprise, Fox has adopted the new FSN score bug for baseball broadcasts – a score bug I had thought was intended to match Fox’s own new graphics. In that sense it’s something of a throwback, both to the era when Fox used boxes and not strips, and to those intermittent times when Fox has made a conscious effort to match the FSN graphics. In a more general sense it’s also a throwback to the era when replacing the count AND number of outs with the pitch speed all at once was the norm.
The dissonance between the amount of space taken up by the count and number of outs, and the amount of space taken up by the inning, makes me wonder why the count and number of outs didn’t get a column to itself. But baseball is probably the hardest sport to create a graphic for, especially one originally designed for another sport, unless you have the simplest of strips, because of the sheer amount of information required – in fact I suspect Fox’s move to this was the result of frustration with how last year’s strip turned out. In this case I suspect taking a cue from FSN’s football and hockey (and soccer) bug was called for; I suspect the lack of use of that for basketball and football points to disillusionment with the new horizontal bug. Again, the fonts and sizes are WAY off in this mockup, and I couldn’t quite get the base display to look right.
MLB Network is on the air as well, but I couldn’t find an embeddable highlight. This will have to make do:
This is what happens when score bug designers don’t have to blend baseball and other-sport priorities. One oddity: Apparently taking a cue from the MNF hub, MLB Network has the bug change to display stats about batters, instead of having a separate graphic at the bottom of the screen, despite the bug being on top. Bit weird, that one.
Comcast SportsNet hasn’t changed its graphics, but its current graphics and logo got its start at SNY, Comcast’s collaboration with the New York Mets, so it may be in for new graphics since SNY has changed its graphics package. Helpfully, SNY provided a mockup for SportsBusiness Journal for an article that was briefly free before the season, so I don’t have to go hunting for a highlight:
The good news is that it adopts a trend I’ve always liked: adding the team logos to the strip. (What I’ve really liked is the logo-only approach once experimented with by Fox on its NFL coverage and now only used by NFL Network, but there’s a reason Fox didn’t stick with it.) The bad news – and it’s not really clear on this thumbnail – is that it’s rather bulky, with large, separated, square elements embedded in a rectangular banner.
What else? We can look at the new graphics for NESN and MASN. So many team-owned RSNs try to get experimental with their graphics and fail. I’m talking to you, SportsTime Ohio. Neither of these two RSNs fell into that trap. MASN only tweaked its graphics and NESN gave them a nice, professional, parallelogram look. (However, I’ve seen evidence that the banner is the only thing NESN changed.)
Back to racing: Versus has an excellent banner for IndyCar races but I’m not finding it on the Web anywhere. We can also confirm that ESPN will whip out its new graphics for coverage of the NFL Draft, complete with the new BottomLine, but since the Draft ticker is handled differently than the BottomLine proper I don’t read anything into this other than the new BottomLine hasn’t been abandoned entirely, which makes it all the more frustrating it’s taking so long to come back in full.
I’ve been anticipating a potential update of ESPN’s game graphics to coincide with the debut of a new graphics package for SportsCenter – if not for that, at least in anticipation of picking up the BCS and in case they want to pick up March Madness. ESPN’s graphics have started to feel almost painfully generic, and an update – perhaps one that would adopt the recently-popular convention of putting each team’s name or abbreviation on a background with the team’s respective color – was much needed.
The current package, which started getting phased in with MNF and the NBA in 2006, was desperately needed to keep ABC sports broadcasts from looking like cable games. It was very spiffy in its day, and until ESPN updated SportsCenter’s graphics it was far spiffier than the studio show graphics that (except for GMC NBA Countdown on ABC) remained unchanged. Look at any ABC college football broadcast from 2006 to see how necessary it was. But it now looks behind the times.
Here’s a mockup I did of what a new package might have looked like for March Madness. These aren’t the exact fonts I envisioned – Arial Narrow and Calibri are the closest I have on my laptop – and I don’t have anything more advanced than PowerPoint for spiffier effects, but you get the idea. It looks pretty close to what I had in mind, with perhaps some scaffolding on the sides and clearer borders between elements, popping in with a flash of light and color, and all looking very elegant.
What ESPN actually came up with, as debuting on NBA broadcasts this week,was somewhat similar to what I had in mind… but I sure as hell wasn’t anticipating basically a straight rip of the MNF graphics, complete with “all information in the bottom space” gimmick. Especially given the new graphics ESPN had introduced for tennis, which was my main inspiration for the above.
There are two major differences with the MNF graphics that work to its detriment; while they may serve to mark MNF’s version as the strip ESPN wants to make feel special (see the “orb” of 2006-07), they also serve to make it look like crap. First, rather than reserve the entire bottom of the screen for graphics, ESPN is throwing all graphics, including its score banner, into a simple rectangle, which merely changes its size as various elements pop in and out. It looks less elegant when it has to stand alone. But perhaps more importantly – and comprehensible for other sports but less so for the NBA, which lacks a BottomLine unless it’s bumped to the Deuce – the bottom line, the part either reading “NBA Wednesday” or showing stats, does not utilize the space that would be used by the BottomLine. Those two elements combine to make it look like a two-line strip, which makes it look bulkier. The use of what appears to be Arial or Helvetica for the bottom line reading “NBA Wednesday” (a possible holdover from the old strip) doesn’t help.
That mockup I did above? Comes from before the new SportsCenter package debuted. I’d have come up with something very different after I got a good look at the new SportsCenter graphics. Since 2006 ESPN’s game graphics have looked spiffier than its studio show graphics. That relationship may now be reversing. Incidentially, across all its platforms, I wonder what ESPN’s most watched shows are, games or studio shows?
It’ll look relatively nice on ABC, and in some ways it’s a throwback to the strip used in the last year of ABC Sports (remember those atrocious numbers? I think I blocked them out)…
…but I can’t help but think they could have done a lot better. The single method for showing the score going to and coming back from break was needed, but it kinda makes ESPN look cheap. At any rate it’s odd that they would choose the instant of the introduction of the new SportsCenter graphics for the new strip, especially with no other ESPN studio shows, including NBA ones, adopting the new graphics yet; the new NBA graphics not looking anything like the SportsCenter graphics; and the BottomLine’s graphical update lasting all of a morning. Couldn’t they have waited, say, two weeks for the playoffs like they did when they introduced the gold border to the NBA strip? (And counting that border, ABC’s streak of never having the same graphics for the Finals in two consecutive years continues!)
(I may try to watch GMC NBA Countdown on Sunday to see the new graphics in a studio show context…)
While we’re in ESPN-land, it appears Sports Media Watch has been horning in on my turf! SMW has been giving full coverage to the rollout of the new SportsCenter graphics, going so far as to get quotes from ESPN spokesmen. (Bloggers doing actual exclusive reporting, and not just one of the big blogs like Deadspin or Fanhouse either? Shock! Horror!) And SMW has just reported the official explanation for the new BottomLine disappearing: “technical complications”. I guess I can buy that explanation. A few seconds into its existence, on ESPN, the new BottomLine started fritzing out and going into a short loop, then disappeared for a while. It made another disappearing act later as well, and I wouldn’t be surprised if ESPN were fitting it out with new functionality, such as showing the time during ESPN2’s morning shows, “SportsCenter on this other channel” in the same space (I saw “Baseball Tonight on ESPN2” on Monday in fact), various alerts moving into the space such as “BREAKING NEWS”, “PROGRAM ALERT”, or Baseball Tonight’s “TODAY’S SCORES AND HOME RUNS”, or appropriating it for ESPN’s 18/58 updates.
But if all of those were already ready (or in the case of the first, discarded), the BottomLine seemed to be working pretty well aside from occasional glitches, and if they weren’t ready that’s pretty short-sighted. At any rate, why is it taking so long? And how much testing of the BottomLine did they do, anyway?
I’m going to be finding the timetable of rollout of the new graphics very interesting, at any rate. According to the more recent SMW post there’s “no timetable” for rollout of the new game graphics, but based on past experiences I would be surprised if it didn’t hew to the following timetable: baseball no later than the start of next season (both ESPN and FSN have been known to make midseason updates to graphics, ESPN for the c. 2004 update, but on the other hand in 2007 Fox didn’t update its graphics to conform to the new NFL style by then adopted by NASCAR even for the postseason), golf possibly as soon as the US Open but maybe not until the British or even next year, NASCAR and the Indy 500… see Part II, horse racing either this year or next (mayyyybe for the Breeder’s Cup), college sports are more likely to see a rollout sooner than last time given the time frame but the main determining factor may be whether ESPN is pressured to move the BCS to/keep it on ABC after next year (a boy can dream), most other sports next year, soccer maybe never.
It’s getting late, so although I had something more comprehensive in mind, that’ll wait for later.
The death of ESPN2 continues. At least on the SD feed, even the BottomLine is marked as simply “ESPN”. About the only indication that this channel is not ESPN is when programs are promoted as being on ESPN2.
A bit odd seeing the new BottomLine alongside the old graphics on Mike and Mike and First Take on ESPN2. Apparently the new graphics will be starting out on SportsCenter only, and ESPN will effectively have three graphics packages: one for SportsCenter, one for games, and one for other studio shows. (I haven’t seen any studio shows since First Take, though.)
Funny story on the BottomLine. The old BottomLine was changed shortly after its introduction, at least in SD; apparently the first version wasn’t legible enough. For that reason, whenever changing to a new topic, such as from “NFL” to “GOLF”, the BottomLine would show a scroll of four sports – with each pair of sports separated by space enough for another sport.
The new BottomLine is actually designed for the font size it’s using, which shouldn’t be too much of a problem, if at all, compared to the old version – except they found space for a larger, less scrunched font for the sport identifier, and now the sport-switch graphic shows six or so sports. It’s also less utilitarian and square, but it’s not really obvious that it’s a parallelogram.
Though I liked when the old BottomLine would shrink the size of the score in order to show stats, and it looks like that’s not happening anymore…
Here’s the funny part: I only saw the morning SportsCenter with its PTI-style rundown, but I suspect the new main graphics for SportsCenter will attract its own concerns of having too small a font size!
