Posts Tagged: "sports"

Name, Image, and Likeness, or “NIL,” is the buzz word spinning around college athletics. In July 2021, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) adopted its Interim NIL Policy (“the Policy”) which allows, for the first time, student athletes to monetize their NIL rights without losing scholarships or eligibility. Fans love college sports and cheering on athletes who play for their alma mater or favorite school teams, which creates collaboration opportunities for athletes and brands alike. In an attempt to connect their products and services with college athletes—who are the face of a billion-dollar industry—brands are jumping on the college-athlete bandwagon.

Branding goes beyond thinking about a catchy name and color scheme to compose the trademark that will represent the company’s products or services. Today, more than ever, it is imperative to consider the values that the brand communicates because consumers and even commercial partners seek to associate with companies with shared values. Poor branding decisions can be costly in terms of reputation, reduced profits and forfeited commercial partnerships.

Stan Honey’s advances in sports graphics technology are outlined in the patent for which he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. U.S. Patent No. 6141060, titled Method and Apparatus for Adding a Graphic Indication of a First Down to a Live Video of a Football Game, issued October 31st, 2000, covers a method for adding a graphic indication of a first down to a live video of a football game by receiving an indication of a location on a football field corresponding to said first down, sensing first field of view data using field of view sensors that don’t use pattern recognition, determining a first position in the live video corresponding to the first down location at a first time, creating a first graphic of a line in real time for the live video and adding the first graphic to the live video based on the first position.

Facebook is not the only company seeking to provide content to consumers via their own Internet-based platforms. In early May, the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) announced a deal with San Francisco-based social media firm Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) to livestream 20 games per year over multiple seasons on the social media platform. The first WNBA game livestreamed on Twitter on Sunday, May 14th, earned 1.1 million viewers, nearly one-third the average audience watching National Football League (NFL) games streamed on Twitter during the 2016-17 season. Seattle-based Internet e-commerce giant Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) will livestream Thursday night NFL games during the 2017-18 season for $50 million, a sum which is reportedly about five times what Twitter paid to broadcast NFL games last year. Twitter’s WNBA deal and Amazon’s NFL deal both include promotional efforts on behalf of the Internet companies to promote either sports league.

The harder and more unbreakable the helmet the better it is to protect from a cosmetic standpoint, but the more likely the helmet will transfer the power of any blow through to the brain… Helmets today are reasonably good at protecting from blunt impact, but that does not mean they do not suffer from serious problems. “A major weakness in helmets is that they do not protect from any twisting or torsion motion, for example when a wearer suffers an impact that forces his neck to rotate at a substantial speed,” Abu-Taleb explains. “This is a major cause of concussions, as the brain rattles within the cerebrospinal fluid inside the skull as soon as the rotating comes to a stop, causing multiple potential points of impact between the brain and skull.”