Watching sports on two screens via Jacked.com
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It happens to the most dedicated of sports fans. You’re sitting there, drinking your beer, scratching your, um, leg, and watching the game, and suddenly, it dawns on you. You need more statistics than TV can provide. Who cares what a player’s batting average is or how many home runs he’s hit? You need to know what school he went to and how much he weighs and if he could beat you in a fight.
Enter Jacked.com. The Santa Monica company provides what it calls ‘interactive broadcasts’ for sports games on TV. The idea is to watch a match with your laptop open, and the site feeds you stats, online videos, news stories, analysis and other information customized to your preferences. Jacked’s software pulls up relevant information as the game goes on, so if Manny Ramirez is batting, he’ll pop up on-screen and you can get more information about him.
Jacked recently signed a deal with KTLA (the TV station that’s owned by Tribune Co., which also owns the Los Angeles Times) to provide these interactive sportscasts for Raiders and Clippers broadcasts (including for the preseason Raiders game Friday). The content will be available through a KTLA website. In these broadcasts, Jacked users can send questions and commentary to the sportscasters, and the company says the sportscasters will respond to the questions.
Jacked CEO Bryan Biniak created the company two years ago when he noticed lots of consumers going online during games to check up on stats and find information, essentially watching the game on two screens at once. He figured the practice would only get more prevalent as more and more consumers got laptops and faster Internet connections.
Jacked just makes it easier, he says, because all the data sports fans could ever want is available on one page. (All that data takes up a lot of space, so people with slow Internet connections should prepare to get as frustrated as they do when their football team fumbles the ball.) Still, it’s a lot of information: Biniak promises ‘more stats than you’re going to get on one page anywhere else in the marketplace.’
-- Alana Semuels
