Simulcasting has long been a part of the developing histories of media platforms, including both radio and television.1 Among the earliest TV experiments is simulcasting existing radio content over TV airwaves.2 However, there is something novel about the simulcasting of the syndicated sports talk show, the Dan Patrick Show in all of its various mediated forms. The Dan Patrick’s Show, which has existed in various incarnations since 1999, is now delivered primarily on a dedicated DirecTV station (“the 101”) and simulcast on numerous terrestrial and satellite radio stations. Patrick’s content is also part of the Sports Illustrated and CNN networks, all under the auspices of Time Warner. Therefore, content produced for Patrick’s daily radio program often ends up recontextualized in a Time Warner owned/distributed print publication and vice versa. In other word, content from the Dan Patrick Show is not contained by the borders of the show’s text, but is instead transmitted throughout various Time Warner media holdings, resulting in branded content that become identifiable as Dan Patrick.

While the DP show is intriguing as a media juggernaut and all its platforms, I’d like to focus my interest upon this reflexive notion of “watching production.” Watching the Dan Patrick Show on DirecTV allows a viewer to not only see Patrick interact with his producers, “The Dan-ettes”, as they book guests, update the daily online poll or troll the interactive chat room dubbed the “Locker Room” for interesting comments, but also provides the viewer with an ad hoc education in media production over multiple platforms. Think of it as a backstage musical, with sports talk and webcams.

Because the DP Show is not primarily a “radio show on TV” or a “radio broadcast of a TV show,” it functions as something in between. The DP Show’s custom-made studio space known as “the man cave,” features such masculine hallmarks as a golf simulator, beer keg and wall of supermodel pin-ups. As a further nod to the particularly hyper-masculine nature of the DP Show, everyone carries a nickname and each producer’s manhood is challenged via weekly tests of humiliation such as in-studio dodgeball, free-throw shooting tests and beard-growing trials. Additionally, there is also a running blog for the show and a voluminous chatroom known on the show as the “Locker Room.” Henry Jenkins calls this production strategy a “circulation of media content” that encourages media consumers “to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content.”3

The “sports talk” show has long been a touchstone for mediated sports programming. Until the recent onslaught of media convergence in the sports media industry, the “sports talk” phenomenon was largely relegated to AM radio with localized fiefdoms, such as Jim Rome on the West Coast or Mike and the Mad Dog in the Northeast. When Dan Patrick, one of ESPN’s more famous “talking heads,” left ESPN, he became a central piling for the Chicago-based media branding company, the Content Factory. When Patrick was still with ESPN, his radio shows were simulcast on TV, and looked very much like the shows that ESPN continues to produce.

In this age of convergent media, it seems that the DP Show and its parent distributors have deemed it necessary to produce not only a radio broadcast or TV program for a four-hour time slot, but also that multiple, new media iterations of content must be constructed as well in order for the show to be profitable. While this seems to have a made-to-order level of interactivity for sports fans, it strikes me that this multiple platform/concurrent production model may be synecdochal of the new media landscape; it is not enough to produce one media product, but rather one must produce five or six simultaneously. Again, as Jenkins asserts, media “convergence refers to a process, not an endpoint” and certainly the producers of the multiple streams of media at the DP Show are striving for a process rather than a self-contained singular narrative.4 This type of production is not simply the antiquated practice of simulcasting the audio portion of a TV broadcast on radio, nor is it simply televising the production of a radio broadcast.

This trend in “sports talk” radio/TV is not unique to Dan Patrick. Take for instance ESPN’s lineup of “Mike and Mike,” “The Herd with Colin Cowherd” and/or the “Scott Van Pelt Show.” Each of these programs is primarily a radio show with the hosts wearing headsets, speaking to callers and occasionally having in-studio guests, all the while being digitally broadcast to a number of ESPN’s “family” of TV networks. ESPN’s simulcast programs do not burden the viewer with on-set action, as does Dan Patrick and his producers, as viewers watch the DP Show’s production process in real-time. The DP Show seems more an emerging and organic multi-casted product, manufactured with a sensibility toward the “old media” mainstays of radio and TV, but quite literate and adept at new media production without seeming trendy or forced.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Might this multimedia production be the “future” for sports programming, or is it simply a stopgap for sports talk programs to capture the ever-evolving personal technologies that provide an ever-increasing number of ears and eyeballs? Certainly this argument leaves room for expansion with regard to the moving target that is the new media landscape and perhaps sports programming in particular. What seems to be at stake here is some leftover “old media” notion of programming singularity. In previous decades, sports programs focused narrowly upon highlights, game schedules, injury reports and the like. Modern sports programs such as the Dan Patrick Show seem to be striving for a kind of media hybridity that suggests the old ways fall short of the demands of multimedia platforms. The novelty here is that the audience gets to watch the production of multiple media streams as they are generated. Again, it seems that the demands of concurrent production for multimedia content strewn across multiple platforms – be they blogs, podcasts or radio and TV content – make the Dan Patrick Show appear as something “in between” resolute platforms.

Because Patrick and the Dan-ettes are producing not just orthodox and traditional radio/TV programming (i.e., interviews and call-ins) but also are striving for interactivity and user-created content, the “front page” appears thin and not deep. I’m not suggesting here that the DP Show is representative of what critic Nicholas Carr calls “the shallows” when referring to Internet content and how it is consumed.5 I am simply arguing that because Dan Patrick, his producers and the parent distributors have decided to create sports programming content that must span various formats, the content by definition is malleable and takes the form of something in between. Certainly, this trend as growing across the media landscape, but sports programming provides a particularly intriguing and under-reported Petri dish for examination. Of course, mediated sports is ultimately about watching competition. Therefore it makes perfect sense that the Dan Patrick Show and all its various forms let the audience watch the action of production and the resulting “competing” formats.

Image Credits:

1. Dan Patrick’s promo pic
2. Shooting hoops in the studio
3. Inside the “man cave”

Please feel free to comment.

1. Newcomb, Horace. Encyclopedia of Television. 2nd ed. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004, 2094-2095.
2. Currie, Tony, and Peter Fiddick. A Concise history of British television, 1930-2000. 2nd ed. Devon: Kelly Publications, 2004, 17.
3. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press, 2006, 3.
4. Jenkins, 16.
5. Carr suggests that online media, by nature, create a shallow environment that encourages distraction rather than reflection or contemplation.

“Film study creates the game plan, in which you’re trying to out-think or out-maneuver the other guy. … You need to have options for every move or countermove, and you identify your best options by studying film. That way, in each situation, you’re reacting rather than deciding.” — Mike McCarthy, Green Bay Packers head coach1

“Basically in football, if you follow the ball, or in baseball if you follow the runner and the ball, or in basketball if you follow the ball, you’re not going to get into trouble. In golf, you have up to 20 balls in play at one time, all of which have to be covered well.”
— Sean McManus, president of CBS Sports2

At FLOW’s 2008 conference, I convened the roundtable discussion “Televised sports and its contexts.” The contributors approached sports from a variety of perspectives. Some addressed aesthetics and style, while others questioned sports’ vivification of race/gender/class issues. Some proffered historiographic queries with regard to sports’ importance in the overall scheme of TV history, and others addressed the “lowbrow” reputation of sports such as mixed martial arts. All of these lines of inquiry pointed toward one ultimate direction: sports on TV is not studied heavily by media scholars. But it should be.

Sports should be seen as a kind of holy grail for media scholars. Mediated sports represents a Petri dish of fan studies (it could be argued that sports fans are the original fanatics), new media and style, participatory production and industrial/economic import, just to name a few areas. Sports coverage on television is an interesting subset of the discipline of television studies for one important reason: sports programming is often broadcast live. There is a certain thrill of “liveness” to a sports broadcast; that is, viewers often tune in to find out how a certain athletic event might unfold. There is always an opportunity to see something historic like Michael Phelps’ world-record performances or Tiger Woods’ U.S. Open win on a broken leg. In addition, sports are often played outdoors, thus making programming time slots and production unpredictable.

In addition to the liveness of sports, mediated sports programming offers some surprising nuggets for media studies. The Masters golf tournament in April provides a fascinating example of how curious televised sporting events are with regard to television’s other fare.3 CBS has been virtually held captive by Augusta National Golf Club since 1956: the club holds CBS to one-year contracts, allows only four minutes per hour for commercials.4 and offers critiques of the broadcast after the tournament’s conclusion about verbiage used by announcers (patrons not fans, and bunkers not sand traps) and technological/production choices (buried production cables and wires, placement of cameras). As for programming, in the case of golf or tennis, events can take place over multiple days and not in the prescribed TV windows of 30-60 minutes. Such prescriptions with sports programming are virtually unique in broadcasting and deserve more rigorous attention by media scholars.

Because televised sports are unscripted, sports programming can be considered the original reality TV. The reason Tiger Woods’ heroic and superhuman effort at the 2008 U.S. Open drew 16.4 million viewers over the weekend and almost 5 million for the Monday playoff has little to do with Woods, his gimpy knee or Rocco Mediate as everyman. Such numbers do not belie the beauty of Torrey Pines or the sublime nature of golf in high-definition clarity. Sports on TV draws casual viewers and rivets like nothing else on TV for one reason: sports isn’t scripted, which means anything can happen. There is no way to know that Appalachian State will beat Michigan in the season opener of the 2007 college football season. There is no reason to imagine that the United States hockey team will upset the Russians in the “miracle on ice” in the 1980 Winter Olympic Games. Certainly, no one could predict NBC’s infamous “Heidi Bowl.”5 Derek Kompare (Rerun Nation, 2005) writes that one of TV’s guiding economic and programming principles is its reliance upon reruns and thus re-broadcasting knowable and repeatable outcomes. Certainly, sports is not immune to TV reruns (ESPN Classic, highlight shows, blooper reels, etc.) but sports’ calling card is its possibility for surprise.

Finally, few industries rely upon film/video “study” more than sports. Be they amateur, collegiate or professional, sports practitioners and/or commentators evaluate a staggering number of video images in preparation for and evaluation of games. In fact, viewers often decry how long TV production drags out a sporting event’s running time by replaying segments repeatedly in an effort to verify/clarify what just happened. Certainly, most media scholars are familiar with Andre Bazin’s notion of ontology with regard to film images; that is, that film captures reality in a way that other mediated forms could not. Sports programming on TV provides another layer to Bazin’s ontological onion, in that sports programming offers intrigue in the area of epistemology as well. Consider the case of “instant replay.” Outcomes of games often hinge upon the close examination of “instant” replay of certain events during the course of play. Football coaches may “challenge” the rulings of the naked eye on the field and request the officials both on field and in editing booths revisit multiple angles of the play to clarify/expand/overrule the rulings made on the field. Such events require the fetishization of various video images to reveal the most “accurate” angle (often slow- and reverse-motion feeds) to determine the decisive and official call on the field. The film/video image is given unerring credibility because it offers some ontological and epistemological evidence that the naked eye did not (could not?) perceive.

As the Mike McCarthy epigram suggests, coaches, players and critics devote enormous amounts of both time and energy to analyzing film/video images in hopes of discerning minor flaws with opposing defenses, imprecise physical movements and/or the aforementioned review of erroneous calls. In each instance, the vivification of human motion in sport is aided by film/video technology and offers the possibility of better understanding of the physiology of sport, to say nothing of the epistemological truths revealed, through the apparatus.

Sports is again the site of revolution with regard to media as it faces the challenge of technologies such as Twitter. Sports Illustrated’s Sean Gregory goes as far as to say that Twitter is “changing the face of sports” and satisfies “fans thirst for a closer connection with some of sports’ biggest stars.” Gregory suggests that athletes such as Shaquille O’Neal and Stewart Cink and their use of social-networking technologies are re-defining athletes’ relationship to their fans. No longer do Shaq and Cink need to issue press releases or negotiate their actions via a sports information director or management group. The athletes can simply Tweet their thoughts about the state of their game, team or the sport itself unfiltered to their fan base. Such a revolution is already raising issues of access and privacy among sports entities and leagues. Recently, the Southeastern Conference (others have followed suit) have issued strict guidelines about what social-networking media fans and players may use with regard to the SEC’s “products.”

These queries represent a broad range of possibilities through which sports programming might be addressed and studied by media scholars. Given that sports programming often represents uncharted areas of industrial convergence, on-field and in-game technological innovations and booming ratings, the study of televised sports should be considered a rich area yet to be fully tapped by media studies.

Image Credits:

1. Jumbotron
2. Augusta National
3. 1980 U.S. Hockey Team
4. Madden NFL ‘09 Video Game

Dr. Harper Cossar is a Visiting Lecturer at Georgia State University. His publications have appeared in Flow, the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, the Journal of New Media and Culture, and Film and History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies, as well as the anthologies All-Stars and Movie Stars: Sports in Film and History (University of Kentucky Press, 2008) and Convergence Media History (Routledge, 2009). His forthcoming book is Screen Space: Widescreen, Aspect Ratios and Film Style (University Press of Kentucky, 2010).

Please feel free to comment.

1. McCarthy, Mike. “Mike McCarthy column: In NFL’s chess match, game plan takes time.” Green Bay Press-Gazette, 10/21/06.
2. Schiesel, Seth. “Aiming for the Perfect Shot; Golf is a most challenging game – for the TV crew.” The New York Times. 10/6/99. C1.
3. Cossar, Harper. “Televised golf and the creation of narrative,” Movie Stars and Allstars:
   Sports in Film and History, Eds. Ron Briley, Michael K. Schoenecke and Deborah A. Carmichael, University of Kentucky Press, 2008.
4. The private golf club is powerful and influential enough that it can afford to go without commercial sponsorship, as it did during the Martha Burke controversy several years ago.
5. NBC cut away from the New York Jets vs. Oakland Raiders football game on November 17, 1968 with the Jets leading 32-29 with only 65 seconds left in the game. The Raiders scored 14 points in those 65 seconds, winning 43-32, but fans outside of the Pacific Time Zone did not see the outcome because NBC cued a hard schedule break to show the movie Heidi.

In a recent issue of FLOW, John Jordan hypothesized about what function sports commentators serve given their ubiquity in sports TV programming. This essay is not a retort to Jordan’s argument1, but does address the issue of how one sports network, ESPN, uses its sports commentators to reinscribe the brand of ESPN by actually making sports talk into competition.

ESPN runs two programs daily–Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption–that are talk shows based upon current sports issues and, more specifically, sports highlight packages. The same packages are recycled continuously throughout the day on virtually all of ESPN’s media platforms. While packages/agendas are a staple structuring mechanism for any media organization, ESPN actually turns the discussions on these two programs into sporting competitions, thus reasserting the sporting brand of ESPN.

Shows such as Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption create competition between the panelists with scores and, ultimately, winners and losers. Around the Horn centers on “competitive banter” and claims to be the “show that scores the argument.” ATH host Tony Reali sits at a command module, complete with joysticks that “score” points for the most salient and well-argued retorts. Reali faces a bank of four video monitors featuring sports writers from across the USA (also represented by a map in the studio’s mise-en-scene), and the competition ensues that is described by Reali as “ten topics, one winner.” The mise-en-scene of ATH enacts many familiar environments to TV consumers — the remote control, the video game module and Reali’s spectatorship and selection of content/panelist.

Reali introduces segments such as “Buy or Sell” and “Out of Bounds,” during which the respondents make arguments that Reali either rewards or discounts with points. After the initial three segments, Reali “cuts” a panelist by freezing his/her frame (Reali also “mutes” participants as needed, again reinscribing the consumer’s experience of TV’s flow) and the competition continues between the remaining three. A final “cut” results in the two respondents with the highest scores for the day. The final two continue to the “Showdown”—a rapid-fire, head-cutting duel of various sports/current events topics, in which Reali awards points for creativity and rhetorical moxie.

ATH is a postmodern enactment of modern TV viewership2. Reali controls the show with a series of remote controls and awards points for substantive retorts. Panelists are often pitted against one another in a split-screen formation to display their points. This setup also serves to narrativize the sporting contestation, much in the same way that sporting events are televised and structured around the principles of continuity editing and screen direction. By aligning opponents on opposite sides of the televisual “field,” the commentators simulate the competitive struggles that they are opining.

Both ATH and PTI imitate another “competitive” enactment of what sports consumers (viewers and fans) understand: the dialogue of sports talk. In the world of sports talk (radio, TV and new media), competitive banter involves an encyclopedic knowledge of statistics, schedules, injuries, history, etc., to make a compelling argument about whatever the current topic may be. For example, ATH participants can’t simply discuss Tiger Woods’ latest golfing victory, but rather must outdo one another with a litany of facts and figures to “win” the argument and points. ATH is based upon the subject of various sporting competitions (though heavily favoring the USA’s big three of football, basketball and baseball), and is itself a competition. Daily “winners” of ATH taunt the other participants first with their “prize,” which is “Facetime” — a 30-second freestyle on their topic of choice — and second with their “all-time wins” in a display of competitive records and statistics that mimics the sports they cover as journalists.

Immediately following ATH is a second ESPN “competitive banter” show, Pardon the Interruption. PTI’s namesake is again a postmodern, intertextual address of the interruptive nature of television and the two hosts, The Washington Post’s Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon, carry out this edict by constantly interjecting into each other’s arguments. Interestingly, ATH host Reali is relegated to “stat boy” on PTI. Reali’s function on PTI is (again) to moderate a competitive segment of PTI called “Odds Makers.” In this segment, the hosts give their percentage chances to the relative likelihood of some upcoming sporting endeavor (“100% that Ricky Williams will fail another drug test!”).

Click here to view the embedded video.

This segment is also structurally related to the commonly understood “betting lines” or the “point spread”–betting options available to gamblers–of many major sporting events. Reali’s role as “stat boy” again reinscribes the event of television in the show’s penultimate segment “Errors/Corrections.” Usually, introduced by the hosts as, “now it’s time to find out where we messed up,” Reali proceeds to “correct” any erroneous assertions (inaccurate records, statistics, etc.) made the hosts throughout the show’s rapid-fire tete-a-tete.

Both ATH and PTI visually and narratively try to emulate the sporting endeavors they observe and report upon. The programs often seem very similar to game shows and are in fact structured in similar fashion to something akin to Survivor. The significance lies in ESPN’s strategy to create competition between its commentators. Other commentary/news programming on ESPN function as talk shows or panel discussions–Outside the Lines or The Sports Reporters–but the other shows do not assign point values nor do their participants gloat as “winners” and protest as “losers.”

Perhaps in ESPN’s ever-converging and expanding media empire, the creation of programming that mimics the niche content (sports) of the network is merely another enactment of synergy and convergence. As aforementioned, a consumer of ESPN’s daily agenda/packages can determine what “points” will be bandied about during the course of a news day by observing the initial packages of morning programming such as Sportscenter or Cold Pizza/First Take. These programs are much more along the standard news package or commentary programs, whereas ATH and PTI are something innovative. Perhaps ESPN’s producers realize that their programming niche is competition and by creating competitive programs that ape sporting contests, ESPN is simply creating more of what their audience knows and wants: winners and losers.

Image Credits
1. Screen capture provided by author, made November 2007.
2. Screen capture provided by author, made November 2007.
3. Screen capture provided by author, made November 2007.
4. Home Page image.

Works Cited
Cossar, Harper. “Televised golf and the creation of narrative,” in Sports in Film, Eds. Ron Briley, Michael K. Schoenecke and Deborah A. Carmichael, University of Kentucky Press, forthcoming in 2008.

1. I do however feel that announcers provide narrative contextualization for viewers, and I develop this argument for sports announcers (and golf commentators specifically) in Cossar (2007).
2. While ATH is littered with pop culture and sports references, two apparent instances stand out. The show’s name derives from a baseball drill in which infielders throw the ball “around the horn” after recording an out to keep their arms loose. Reali also commonly ends segments and leads into commercial breaks by yelling “Fore!” as is customary for golfers when a ball may be offline and threatening other golfers. It is short for forewarned; again, this is ATH’s intertextual and reflexive assertion that a commercial is forthcoming.

IN ADDITION TO OUR REGULAR COLUMNISTS AND GUEST COLUMNS, FLOW IS ALSO COMMITTED TO PUBLISHING TIMELY FEATURE COLUMNS, SUCH AS THE ONE BELOW. THE EDITORS OF FLOW REGULARLY ACCEPT SUBMISSIONS FOR THIS SECTION. PLEASE VISIT OUR “CALLS” PAGE FOR CONTACT INFORMATION.

What is “shown” on television is always the result of a complex process of selection: what items to report, what to leave out, what to replay, and what to downplay. Television sports production also involves a wide range of processes of visual and narrative representation–choices regarding the images, language, camera positioning, and story line required to translate “what happened” into a program that makes “good television.”
– Richard Gruneau (”Making Spectacle” 134-35)

To suggest that ESPN's “Full Circle” programming is the very definition of media convergence (and transtextuality) is an understatement. Four times this year ESPN has utilized its expansive (Disney-owned) family of networks to show a single sporting event in as many as nine different media manifestations. These include “traditional” network telecasts on ESPN (and ESPN-HD), ESPN2 (and ESPN2-HD), ESPNU and ESPN International, in addition to broadband coverage on ESPN.com, ESPN360 (subscription online service) and Mobile ESPN (phone service by AT&T). What's so interesting about a sports network exploiting sports-crazed media junkies? Sure, it's compelling that ESPN is using its network “family” to reap advertising money by selling ad space to the same event nine times, but what is really innovative is the broadcast implications of the multi-screen interface on ESPN2 (and ESPN2-HD).

While ESPN (and ESPN-HD) offer a “traditional game telecast,” ESPN2's coverage is something akin to the multi-image mosaics of films such as The Boston Strangler (1968) or Time Code (2000). Certainly, prime-time TV is no stranger to multi-screening, but typically 24's uses of such techniques serve as exposition or transitional strategies. ESPN's deployment of the multi-screening visuals is interesting not only for its narrative uses, but for its subject matter: sporting events have a particular fascination of and dependency upon visual style and editing practices.

In the modern media era, sports utilize film and video in ways that few other industries can claim. Players and coaches regularly have “film sessions” to study opposing teams' defensive strategies and schemes. Golfers watch high-speed video of their swings to work out minute flaws, and baseball players use video iPods to study opposing pitchers' tendencies. Many university (and virtually all professional) sports programs house editing suites with teams of editors whose sole purpose is to edit highlight packages for game “prep” by the assistant coaches. In this way, coaches study film (actually video) with the same passion that we media scholars analyze texts but for different goals. Coaches look for small quirks of opposing squads to exploit them and thus gain an edge.

Games are often “decided” by “instant replay” (the use of video to review and revise the on-field rulings of the officials) that undermines the inherent liveness and spontaneity of the sporting events. After all, many fans will proclaim that the very unpredictability of sporting events–who will win and how–is their largest and most important reason for watching. Therefore, ESPN decided to up the ante of what is considering lingua franca in sports broadcasting–coverage.

Like DVD commentaries and multiple-angle options, ESPN decided to not preference any one vantage point in a single broadcast to show the action on the field. Instead, ESPN's Full Circle on ESPN2 shows what it feels like to attend the event itself but still have a multitude of information about the game and its participants. The mosaic view mimics a producer's bank of separate video feeds to switch between and provides dedicated camera coverage of coaches on the sidelines, quarterbacks on the field and off, a skycam view¹ (integrated from the video game franchises of EA Sports), fans in the stands and in-studio commentary. This last feature is particularly problematic for aural clarity. The in-studio commentators are in a lower quadrant of the screen and much like in Time Code, their vocal tracks are overlapped with the in-game commentary. The resulting cacophony of sound and visual spectacle is novel, but very authentically mimics the confusion and excitement of a live sporting event.

While certain TV techniques like letterboxing can corral a viewer's gaze and represent authorial control by the producers, ESPN's decision to splinter the screen into a jigsaw puzzle requires even more manipulation to guide viewers' eyeballs. Why would a network willingly deploy a technique that almost certainly will confuse and frustrate its viewers? ESPN observes the guiding rule of sports broadcasting for fans: the only thing better than coverage of “their” game is more coverage. ESPN's goal for the Full Circle programming package is deluge. Sports fans and commentators often interact via the vocabulary of statistics (or “stats”): How many fouls does a player have? How many seconds remaining on the shot/play clock? What is the passing completion percentage for a certain quarterback? ESPN distributes all of this information throughout the mosaic telecast either at the top center of the frame (see above image) or alternately with “bleeds” via a vertical stats box down the left edge of the frame. This last technique exploits and emphasizes the wider (16:9) HD proportions, further fetishizing the technological prowess of both the network and the viewer.

What then are we to make of ESPN's decision de deluge? Is this the direction that sports broadcasting will go to compete with new media environments such as video games and/or DIY consumer-created texts that appear on YouTube? This is unlikely in the immediate future, but ESPN has established that the “full screen” approach to covering sports is not indispensable. Will this mosaic view become a norm of TV visual style? We are all accustomed to viewing (and listening to) multiple talking heads vivified in split-screen fashion on any number of news programs, so one can't say that ESPN is revolutionizing TV watching with Full Circle. ESPN's decision to exploit and fully utilize its empirical powers to sell one telecast in as many formats as possible and therefore to secure as much ad revenue as possible is probably the most compelling industrial aspect of this innovative move. As ESPN continues to experiment with its broad-reaching network of media outlets, we can be certain that more unique ways to cover sporting events will follow, and for us sports fans that is a good thing.

Works Cited

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 2002.

Garfield, Bob. “Innovation Boxes out Effective Approach in Mercedes-Benz Ads.” Advertising Age 63.19 (1992): 77.

Gruneau, Richard. “Making Spectacle: A Case Study in Television Sports Production.” Media, Sports and Society. Ed. Lawrence A. Wenner. London: Sage, 1989. 134+.

Kendrick, James. “Aspect Ratios and Joe Six-Packs: Home Theater Enthusiasts Battle to Legitimize the DVD Experience.” Velvet Light Trap 56 (2005): 58-70.

King, Geoff, and Tanya Kryzwinska. Screenplay: Cinema/videogames/interfaces. New York: Wallflower, 2002.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 2001.

Vagoni, Anthony. “Out of the Box.” Advertising Age 70.46 (1999): 48-50.

Note
¹ For ESPN's Full Circle coverage of basketball games, this camera is replaced with a dedicated camera “above the rim.”

Image Credits:
1. Logo from 2006 NBA Playoffs
2. Jason Jennings scouting opposing batters
3. FSU vs. Miami on Full Circle

Please feel free to comment.