I like baseball. Who knew!

I don’t like cricket (oh no). And with that in mind, I’ve never really cared too much for it’s distant cousin baseball – once described to me (by a fan!) as like cricket, but slower.

So, you can imagine that it was to my great surprise that I left a panel session at IBC today with quite some interest in the game.

The session in question was chaired by Cisco, featuring panellists Steve Plunkett from Red Bee Media, RTL and a representative from major league baseball who’s built an app for viewing and interacting with baseball games on the PS3.

And it’s cool. Viewing the game in high quality on my PS3, I get a completely smooth UI, neat chapterisation with tags on the timeline for incidents and key points in the action, multiple audio tracks (including one which features no commentary, just the noise of the game to make you feel like you’re there) plus interactive links to analysis, stats and a world of related content. And, being a gaming platform, in future I’ll be able to pause the live action and link through to the play that I’ve just watched as a game to see if I can do better. Even though I know nothing about baseball, I found myself wanting to engage…

So after I got over the shock of being attracted to baseball, I realised that actually I’d witnessed something more important. I’d witnessed one of the first viewing experiences to pull off the big trick – that for all the clever technology at work here, all I saw was the game, and all I thought was how much I enjoyed it. And the Holy Grail as the added bonus – it was content I’d never wanted to watch before.

Batter up!