Watching Races On-Line

Major, major, major kudos to Adobe’s new Adobe TourTracker GPS driven cycling technology! This is the best cycling coverage I’ve seen on the net. If you missed watching the Tour of California live on the web for FREE, then you may have to wait until next year to see this tech again. I’ll check with adobe to see if they will be covering any other races with this technology. Anyway, here is how it worked:

The screen was split into 3 panels, the left panel was a chat room, the middle was live streaming video, and the third panel contained an in-motion map that showed the riders moving around the map with little jerseys and names. Riders were equipped with GPS tracking devices (sort of like the neighborhood house arrest delinquents). The video quality was surprisingly good considering the horrible weather, and the cool part was that it contained Picture-In-Picture and I could switch which camera I wanted to watch. Commentary was provided by Frankie Andreu and Joe Silva.

I hope this is the future of television, total viewer control! I could just imagine, watching any sport, for example football, and having the option to switch between 10-15 cameras for whatever view I like. I could watch one play on the Peyton Manning helmet cam, then switch to the Ray Lewis cam (wait that may contain extreme violence…like a stabbing) you get the point.

This is great technology for cycling, I don’t know how many times I’ve been screaming at the TV, saying why are you showing a lazy peloton who isn’t chasing, when you’ve got 4 off the front and 1 in no man’s land! Let me see the no man’s land guy suffering!

Catch all the race you missed on Cycling.tv or Steephill.tv