It’s been one of the more exciting summers for sports in recent memory, and we’ve still got a long ways to go. About 3,500 kilometers to go in fact, give or take – that’s how far the teams participating in the annual Tour de France will end up pedaling before the event concludes on July 27. Bicycle’s most famous race started up on July 5, sneaking in there somewhere amidst World Cup hysteria and an epic Wimbledon finale.
Even in the thick of a historic sports weekend that is in the thick of a historic sports summer, the Tour de France enjoys tens of millions of TV viewers globally. But while the race has proven to be a broadcast success over the decades, it also, despite being more than 100 years old, feels as though it were custom-built for the mobile space. With its legions of different international teams and riders, constantly shifting statistics and rankings, remote locales begging for a map-tracking system to add context, and epic length that doesn’t make much sense when viewed in arbitrary chunks on a TV screen – the Tour de France is the perfect sports competition to be experienced through the all-consuming lens of an app.
The race’s American broadcast company NBC certainly believes in its potential has an interactive digital experience, and has demonstrated as such by charging $14.99 for the recently released app, NBC Sports Tour de France Live 2014. Would YOU pay $15 for a sports app? You very well might if it offered not just live video coverage on your smart phone or tablet of every stage of the race, but the ability to create your own slow-mo instant replays by pausing, rewinding and watching back whenever the urge strikes. You might as well if it offered a live GPS tracking map to follow the riders’ progress and to see an enhanced interactive map for each stage. And you might want to even more with the option to follow your favorite riders as they cycle along that map.
NBC Sports Tour de France Live 2014 does indeed contain all of that, plus all of the features you’ve come to expect from any sports viewing app worth its weight in kilobytes: standings, statistics, rider profiles by country and team, daily news updates, exclusive photos and of course built-in Tour de France-specific Twitter functionality. It all adds up to a mobile app that, if you are a cycling junkie, offers a truly robust, immersive way to enjoy the Super Bowl of bike racing.
A la carte may not yet have come to cable, but who needs it when apps like NBC Sports Tour de France Live 2014 are increasingly offering everything you could ever want and more around one very specific content commodity? For $15 in July, you’re not just experiencing the Tour de France in its entirety, you’re controlling that experience like never before.
Screw a la carte for cable channels – let’s do a la carte for individualized cable programming. Pick your 10 shows/events for the month, put your $200 cable bill toward those, watch them and nothing else, but do so at a deeper level than you ever imagined. That’s a world this writer would happily live in.
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