Direct TV Dish

ESPN’s 2008 College Football Coverage will feature the return of the deepest roster of experienced and knowledgeable commentators for ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPN360.com, ESPN Classic, ESPN Radio and ESPN Mobile TV telecasts. Brent Musburger, Kirk Herbstreit, Lisa Salters, Jesse Palmer are the main commentators of the college football coverage. Other returning commentator pairings include Mark Jones and Bob Davie; Sean McDonough, Chris Spielman and Rob Stone; Dave Pasch, Andre Ware and Erin Andrews; Charlie Neal and Jay Walker. Todd McShay and Trevor Matich will return as analysts on College GameDay on ESPN Radio. Shaun King, who has served as an NFL analyst for ESPN on First Take, NFL Live and ESPNEWS, will work as a college football analyst on select ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPN Classic games.

National Geographic and NewsGator Technologies partner to create, host and track a series of dynamic widgets, including an interactive puzzle widget that transforms photographs into a digital jigsaw puzzle that users spend, on average, several minutes assembling. Dayton Daily News and Tampa Bay Online have already picked up the puzzle widgets. National Geographic Channel widgets will include OurShot, a widget in which photo editors highlight recent exceptional work, and YourShot, through which end users can contribute photos in the hopes of being featured in the magazine.

“National Geographic is the latest of our growing list of media customers who are defining a new generation of media experience based on dynamic content syndication and user interaction that results in a more engaged audience,” said Jeff Nolan, vice president, NewsGator Consumer and Media Services. “By redefining the syndication model, we are enabling our clients to extend their best content to major media sites in addition to start pages and social networking sites — resulting in much greater exposure and the potential for an exponential number of ads to be served.”

CNN has selected Clickatell to bring mobile SMS coverage of this month’s Beijing Olympic Games to fans around the world. CNN and Clickatell have worked together since 2007 to provide a broad range of news via SMS alerts, and is now powering the CNN Beijing 2008 SMS gold medal alert service. Fans can register from their mobile phones by logging onto the CNN mobile site at http://cnnmobile.com/beijing08 and clicking on “alerts” to begin the registration process.

GolTV, the only live bilingual channel delivering 24/7 soccer was removed from DISH Network lineup from Friday, August 1. DISH subscribers are disappointed that they have lost GolTV’s exclusive, live from London, TV coverage of the Emirates Cup. This decision also falls on the verge of 2010 World Cup qualifying matches and season kick-offs of GolTV’s exclusive TV coverage of the Spain’s La Liga on August 31 and Germany’s Bundesliga on August 15. GolTV is available on DIRECT TV, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Cox, Verion FiOS and Cablevision.

“Dish Network has demonstrated total disregard for independent networks, the millions of soccer fans we represent, and minority-owned businesses by this action,” said Rodrigo Lombello, GolTV COO. “We urge upset Dish viewers to contact us or Dish to voice their concerns.”

FSN will broadcast EliteXC mixed martial arts (MMA) Match specials in September and October. The value of the deal is not disclosed. FSN will bring four one-hour slots on Sunday’s in September at 9 PM and into early October, will showcase many elite fighters, including Internet sensation Kimbo Slice, MMA legend Frank Shamrock, EliteXC Lightweight Champion K.J. Noons and Phil “The New York Bad Ass” Baroni. These specials will be hosted by Jay Glazer, along with FSN’s MMA analyst and former Icon Sport champion Frank Trigg.

Universal HD in August will honor the upcoming 2008 Beijing Olympics with a themed month of Olympic events and athletes and a schedule packed with fan favorite sporting events that include the continuation of Showtime Championship Boxing. Universal HD viewers can see all their favorite celebrities with the hottest movie premieres in 1080i High Definition. The final season of “Battlestar Galactica” also lands on the network in August.

“We are so thrilled to be supporting the long awaited 2008 Beijing Olympics this August on Universal HD,” said Dan Harrison, Senior Vice President, Emerging Networks, and
NBC. “Throughout the month, our viewers will get all of their favorite sporting events with wall-to-wall Olympic programming in superior high definition.”

DIRECT TV to include Major League Baseball’s new cable channel MLB Network, based in Secaucus, N.J, in its basic programming package to be launched on January 1. MLB’s new channel is expected to reach 50 million homes during its launch. Tony Petitti channel’s CEO said “We will have the definitive highlights show in the last hour of the studio each night, ESPN has very good talent, and we will need a strong team that people see as entertaining and credible.”

SPEED, a sports cable television networks has integrated Neural-THX Surround professional products for their HD programming schedule covering NASCAR, Grand Am, IndyCar and more. A market leader in developing advanced audio and surround sound technologies, Neural Audio Corporation has announced this on Tuesday. The Neural-THX Surround MultiMerge and Neural-THX UpMix professional products allow broadcasters and networks to manage their stereo and surround sound content so that the viewer at home receives a constant, natural and enveloping surround sound experience.Bruce Shapiro, coordinating technical producer for SPEED said “Neural-THX Surround has significantly helped bring SPEED into the HD and 5.1 world with tremendous ease and simplicity, The MultiMerge and UpMix units keep us covered across a variety of HD efforts.”

ESPN Deportes is offering the most complete Spanish-language All-Star coverage, with all events presented live from Yankee Stadium in New York, Sunday, July 13 through Tuesday, July 15. The television network’s All-Star coverage will begin with the 2008 Futures Game Sunday, July 13 at 3 p.m. ESPN Deportes‘ commentator team features Ernesto Jerez, former major leaguer Candy Maldonado and Carolina Guillen. Guillen will provide in-game interviews from the World Team dugout.

NBC Universal will present an unprecedented 3,600 hours of Beijing Olympic Games coverage, the most ambitious single media project in history. NBCU’s unprecedented Olympics coverage features the most live coverage in the United States (75 percent in all), across the most platforms, of any Summer Olympics in history when the Games of the XXIX Olympiad commence on Aug. 8. The announcement was made today by Dick Ebersol, Chairman, NBC Universal Sports & Olympics and Executive Producer of NBCU’s Olympic coverage. The 3,600 total hours of coverage on seven NBC Universal networks: NBC, USA, MSNBC, CNBC, Oxygen, Telemundo and Universal HD, as well as NBCOlympics.com, is 1,000 hours more than the combined coverage for every televised Summer Olympics in U.S. history (Rome 1960 - Athens 2004, 2,562 hours). NBCOlympics.com will feature approximately 2,200 total hours of live streaming Olympic broadband video coverage, the first live online Olympic coverage in the United States.