The Ballpark Stadium of the Future 79
thejrwr writes to mention a CNN article about the ballpark stadium of the future. The new Cisco stadium for the Oakland A's will be a paragon of the company's technologies, with cellphones carrying personal data used for advertising and identification purposes. "Cisco, which makes the routers, switches and other devices used to link networks and direct traffic on the Internet, is trying to shed its image as solely a maker of networking infrastructure gear. The company also hopes to capitalize on products and services that utilize the network. One example is TelePresence, a technology similar to video conferencing that Cisco introduced last month that aims to deliver a three-dimensional feeling that the participants are all in the same room."
Technology advances... (Score:5, Funny)
The best part is you cannot leave the stadium until you buy at least $100 worth of advertised product, but you get to do it with your cellphone! Yay, how cool! Go Cisco!
People really still drag themselves to a stadium through all that traffic when HDTV exists?
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It looks like CNN needs more knowledgeable technical people.
Yes, Cisco is best known for... (Score:2)
Re:Technology advances... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, social interaction, atmosphere, making friends etc.
It's not just about the game, there's more to it than that.
Re:Technology advances... (Score:5, Informative)
Not to mention, being able to look at any part of the field you want, not the very small section the director wants you to look at, or a closeup of some celebrity in the crowd, or some commercials, or an irrelevent replay from ten minutes ago, or some talking heads, or any other crap that gets in the way which is avoided by actually going to the game.
You can have the biggest resolution TVs in the world, it still won't count for anything until they invent a technology which allows you to see the entire field, all the time, completely uninterrupted. And no announcers.
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Actually, yes. Nothing quite like sitting several rows back from third base and having to actually watch a baseball game to make sure you don't get a foul ball delivered to the upside of your head. Makes the game much more exciting to watch.
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Last time I checked, HDTV in my living room can't duplicate the amazing feeling of a ballpark. I say screw the over-commercialization of baseball, but I still love going to a ballgame (sometimes alone, so I can really watch
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Should've stayed at your mom's basement then, shouldn't you :p
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People really still go through the "hassles" of getting laid when HDTV POV porn [wikipedia.org] exists? (Should I post this comment anonymously?)
I'd guesstimate that over 90 percent of HDTV telecasts show the game from the center field camera. Most of the time, you see nothing but the pitcher, catcher, batter, and home plate umpire from a behind-the-pitcher point of view (no porn joke intended). When the ball is hit, the camera f
Good for Cisco (Score:2, Insightful)
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Waste of taxpayer money (Score:5, Interesting)
One of those buildings is perhaps used 14 days out of the year. In it, the second richest man in the world pays 50 odd men multiple million dollars a year a piece to play a child's game. As a tax payer and potential fan, I have to pay a lot of money to see the inside of a resource that I pay for.
I don't buy the "increased tax revenue" bit- people would spend their money in other ways. It isn't like I can tell my friends, "hey let's go down to the stadium and play football on the grass". This is a pure taxpayer takeaway, and it sickens me how city after city falls for it. If they want to conduct a business, they should have to pay for the facility just like any other business.
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Did you skip three orders of magnitude or where they really expensive tiles?
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Case in point, PacBell/SBC/AT&T Park has been a contributing factor to completely revamping the Embarcadero in San Francisco. That said, although SF contributed a few million dollars in tax abatements, the stadium has been privately funded.
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Bullshit. I could say that about any building. "If you build this new Intel fab for us, it will revitalize the area and attract new businesses. It's an investment." Every other business is lucky if they get tax breaks when they build a new building. They sure as hell aren't paid for with tax dollars. Why should sports stadiums be any different?
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Once again, case in point, AT&T Park. The SF Embarcadero an industrial area, much of which sat under a freeway until it collapsed in '89. It was a land of warehouses sprinkled with crack heads and liquor stores. That's really not the case any more, and I would argue AT&T park has played the biggest role in initiating that change. It bought tourists, which attracted restaurants and, gasp, stores. You can actually buy food of the non-funion variety
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It's the Fallacy of the Broken Stadium.
KFG
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You are correct. In fact, that building the GP was referring to ("14 days out of the year") is hosting 17 "events" (2-day events counted twice) this month alone [qwestfield.com].
That's not the only information the GP left out (I'm not from WA, so please correct my mistakes). I'm now replying to the GP:
You what ??? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, lets get this straight. The local government pays for team stadia in the US? That's insane. In the UK not only is it private money, often the teams will have to bribe the local council with roads, housing etc. to be allowed to build in the first place.
Sounds like someone is missing a trick
I think that part of the difference (Score:2)
Many of the contracts are written such that if attendance and profit drops below certain levels, the team is free to shop elsewhere. Also, the city tends to own the stadiums, since they pay for it, not the owner of the team.
Can you imagine Man U moving to Liverpool? Or Arsenal moving to Manchester to take their place?
It happened in the NFL several years ago when one of the oldest franchises literally snuck out of the city
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Indeed. As an American, I can tell you exactly how this happens. Team A announces that it will leave unless it gets a new stadium paid for by the city where the team plays. Other greedy cities, fooled by neb
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A thief called "the city" is still a thief (Score:2)
Technically on paper, the group is better off financially, but in practice you are all far worse off because you have all lost the right to determine how you sepnd your money and resources. Not to mention that the reputation and credit
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Yep. That's why voters in Seattle approved Initiative 91 [nwsource.com] requiring the city to receive a "fair value" cash profit greater than or equal to the rate of return on a 30-year U.S. Treasury Bond in exchange for any subsidy. It was approved by a 3-1 margin (74%-26%), I think accurately reflecting how fed u
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terminology change (Score:3, Funny)
home run: tracert
out: ttl expired
you say...
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Or they could just make the game more exciting.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Granted, the players in the US are probably better than the Japanese players, but damn the Japanese games are much more fun to watch.
The design makes no sense (Score:1)
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http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&safe=off&cli ent=safari&rls=en&sa=N&resnum=0&q=Oakland%20Colise um&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&tab=wi [google.com]
Tickets (Score:3, Insightful)
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And what if you wanted to sell your tickets or give them to a friend. would my friend have to take my cell phone?
Not an issue, nobody wants you to transfer tickets. Customers want to do it all the time (especially if you have season tickets), but the ticket sellers want nothing to do with it (probably something to do with scalpers). So ticket sellers just kind of ignore that transferring of tickets even exists.
Advertising Overload (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree although it probly won't be as obvious to an average person as it is to us that loath advertisments.
People really still drag themselves to a stadium through all that traffic when HDTV exists?
You can easily make it to Wrigly Field by way of "The L." Location is everything in bussiness.
From the article:and pay to show them on the Jumbotron.
For the
Corporate Dollars (Score:5, Informative)
Since I've been following the A's stadium on the site mentioned above for over a year, I can tell you that it is by no means a done deal. Among other things, there aren't enough police to regulate games, and who's to pay for the increase necessary for that is absent in the current deal.
Why we should all hate baseball (Score:1)
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Baseball truly does need a salary cap to keep things competitive. I live in Milwaukee, where we recognize that the Brewers are essentially an expensive minor-league team, and so we never expect another season like the pennant run in 1984. If you're expecting a good won/lost figure, the smaller-market teams will never have it. And, if they ever get close, their rosters will be torn apart by actual big-league teams throwing money at their players.
And of course, the
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And I agree about the salary cap -- it's one thing for a bigger market to attract more money overall, that's just economic reality. But the salary inequity is so great that the smaller markets can't compete with their peer teams on anything like an equal footing.
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Personally, I blame soon-to-be former Mayor Jerry Brown for the A's leaving Oakland. The A's had an excellent, privately-financed plan to put up a new stadium just north of Jack London Square that would have literally transformed Oakland, since having some 80 games there per year would attract a lot of development around the ballpark, which would have strongly revived the economy of the city since the stadium would be so close to downtown and Jack London Square (I believe it would have b
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Mod parent up! (Score:1)
Lies (Score:2)
So how much is all this going to cost? (Score:2, Funny)
That's not the future... (Score:1)
Yum (Score:1)
Cell phones... (Score:2)
-b.
Big Bother (Score:1)
Looks like it was an easy sell (Score:2)
He didn't understand it so the default answer was sure go ahead. What an irresponsible idiot. He committed to spending a bazillion tax dollars (and likely forcing people to spend another bazillion) in order to let Cisco and others abuse his citizens'
Dumbest. Ideas. Ever. (Score:3, Interesting)
Tickets on a cellphone? This is obviously change for change's sake. Two peices of paper are just fine as it. You can put them in your shirt pocket, give one to a friend, or sell them when you can't make a game. Why in the hell would I want to tie that to my cellphone? Even if it worked exactly as intended, it would be less functional than the existing solution. There's a reason e-books haven't caught on.
Paying to show your face on the big screen? This has got to be the worst idea ever. Any and all excitement related to seeing yourself on the large display is directly related to the serendipity of the event (aside from those morons who propose at baseball games). People who don't want to pay will resent it, it will be abused by morons, and it's not like it couldn't be done just fine with existing technology. Call or log in up to a week in advance, give your seat number and CC#, and congratulations! You're on TV.
Watching instant replays? Everybody who wants this feature carries a small TV. If you're going to go digital with this, how about streaming the entire game in HD to the internet at large. I bet far more people would be interested in that than there are people who want to watch laptops in the stadium.
In short, adding a few new features that nobody wants and changing a perfectly working process would make this the Windows Vista of stadiums.
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Stadium of the Future Demonstration Video (Score:1)
http://www.stadiumofthefuture.com/ [stadiumofthefuture.com]