This past season, regular readers of this site probably noticed our weekly post sponsored by Comcast the NFL's Red Zone Channel. Too many sponsored posts can water down a site, but obviously sponsorships like this are great for the credibility of the site. After all, when a media giant like Comcast wants to do business with you, you've clearly reached a certain level of respectability.
Once the season ended, the powers that be here at SB Nation were able to work out an extension of the Comcast deal through the rest of the calendar year, and potentially beyond. Although cable companies can sometimes be difficult to deal with, Comcast has managed to work out some of its problems with the NFL and develop some solid content. In the 2010 NFL season, we'll see the return of the Red Zone Channel, which is the equivalent of football porn. Additionally, NFL Network On Demand will provide some helpful re-airings. Apparently NFL Network On Demand will allow us to re-watch every NFL game as soon as 24 hours after its original airing. Even more interesting is that this On Demand channel will be leading up to the draft next month with profiles on the top 100 prospects in the NFL draft. I'm going to have check that out and compare it to Drew K's 100 in 100 posts.
Given all that, we'll continue having sponsored posts from Comcast. One option would just be to pick a random post and paste the sponsor name on it. However, I thought it'd be more fun to have a weekly feature that relates to Comcast in some sense.
Since Comcast is a media giant and we're talking about the NFL on tv, I thought we'd use this weekly sponsored post to discuss aspects of the media. I don't have any specifics nailed down yet, but I was thinking we could discuss everything from broadcasters and color commentators on tv, to beat writers, to biases in the media's coverage of the NFL and the 49ers. I'm going to sit down and come up with some specific plans, but for now that's the general idea.
In terms of a general discussion point at this time, we've all got announcers we dislike to a certain degree (some might call it blind hatred). Rather than just bash announcers though, I wanted to open this up for announcers who have grown on you. Is there an announcer you disliked that you now don't find quite so distasteful?
I'm not 100% sure how I feel about this now, but I actually think Jim Nantz has grown on me. And actually, it's more because of his outside-the-booth work. Something about his tone of voice used to bug me. However, over the past few months, he's appeared in several great commercials, and also made an amazing cameo appearance on How I Met Your Mother. I realize this doesn't his football play-calling, but if I can be entertained by him in other ways, I can live with that.