After several months of waiting, fantasy football is finally back. Football fans all over the U.S. are gearing up to take on friends as they compete to find out who has what it takes to capture this year's crown.
To achieve that goal, you'll need the right tools. That's where we come in. Check out these tools for the fantasy football player.
Get your fantasy on
League creation
CBS Fantasy Football If you're looking for a full-featured fantasy product, check out CBS Fantasy Football.
After you sign up for CBS Fantasy Football, you can either join a public league or create your own private league for free. The app makes it easy to find players, you have the option of online and offline drafting, and customizing your league takes just seconds. When you finally create your league, you'll find everything from expert advice to draft kits. The service has some really nice features. (Disclosure: CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.)
CBS Fantasy Football is a great fantasy game option.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)ESPN Fantasy Football ESPN Fantasy Football features everything you'd want from a fantasy service.
After you sign up for the free Fantasy Football on ESPN, you can opt to join a public or private game. From there, you can rank you players, research those that will provide the best chances of helping your team, and more. Thanks to ESPN's wealth of information, you can research any stat you want. Playing in the ESPN league is simple and fun. But I had one issue with ESPN's service: the company's "Insider" offering, which provides the best information on players, will cost you $3.33 per month for access to it. That's a bummer.
ESPN Fantasy Football provides information on every player.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
Well, well, well. Here's something that just came into my inbox, and presumably the inboxes of the rest of the digital-media press corps: an e-mail from the media team at Hulu, the joint video venture between NBC Universal and News Corp., announcing that the company will be running an ad during Sunday's Super Bowl XLIII. Considering the game airs on NBC, a Hulu ad is not too hard to fathom.
It seems like there's always a rumor about some huge tech announcement that will come to light during the annual football-and-advertising bacchanalia, like that Beatles-iTunes thing two years ago that never surfaced. But at least we know this one actually exists, and to boot, it sounds like Hulu is really hoping to make a splash along the lines of Apple's landmark "1984" ad that aired 25 years ago.
"During Super Bowl XLIII this Sunday, look for the launch of Hulu's ad campaign," the e-mail read. "Finally, we'll reveal the secret behind Hulu."
Ooh! Secrets! I love secrets! Clearly we will learn one of three things this Sunday:
1. Hulu is the Matrix.
2. Hulu is Luke Skywalker's father.
3. Hulu is people.
Aw, heck. With a revelation like this on the way, who cares whether the Steelers or Cardinals win?
This weekend Jacked.com is launching the first stages of its service. The easiest way to describe it is like a souped-up Netvibes you can use as a reference while watching live television programming. The service is rolling out its features slowly, beginning with a partnership with Notre Dame and NBC Sports to serve up real-time content for Notre Dame's football season which starts on Saturday. NBC is billing the service as "Play Action." You can visit the site now, but there won't be anything on it until game day.
Jacked is linked up to what you're watching on TV, so say you're watching the game, and a player scores. Jacked's smattering of Web widgets will pull up the player's stats, photos, related news stories, a comparison chart of that play to others, etc. The idea is to save you from having to track down player, team, and historical information on your own, and serving it up automatically.
The widgets are powered by a group of underlying technologies that scan through live TV content and grab bits and pieces of information from its metadata. Combine that with things like optical character recognition, and you've got lots of information to work with. The result is an impressive array of widgets, that--when viewed during a live broadcast--will pull up information and related content seconds after it happens.
... Read moreFootball-loving couch potatoes rejoice: here's a new way for you to get your NFL fix on during the tragically long off-season. SI.com, the online arm of Sports Illustrated, will be launching a new video portal, NFL Draft FilmRoom, so that you'll have access to video highlights of each of the college football players who have been selected to the NFL's 2007 draft. (If you're not a football fan, FYI, this is a huge deal.)
The picks for the '07 NFL Draft will be announced on April 28 and 29 in NYC.
NFL Draft '07's FilmRoom
(Credit: Gotuit Media)The power behind this portal is Gotuit Media, a video start-up that specializes in metadata "deep-tagging" so that it's easier to search for content within videos. SI FilmRoom won't have the user-generated deep-tagging features found in Gotuit's SceneMaker offering, which is a bit of a shame, because it'd be cool to see what happens when that kind of technology is offered to sports fans eager to dissect the draft picks. But you'll still be able to search and check out the players' college career highlights in an impressive level of depth: you can select by name, school, position, NFL team, mock draft order, or actual draft order. In addition, you can use the embedded "deep-tags" to jump to particular spots in videos that highlight touchdowns, sacks, catches, interceptions, and all kinds of other football moves. Presumably, this will all be accessible shortly after draft picks are announced.
And in case you're a revenue-model geek: it's supported by pre-roll and mid-roll advertising.
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