NEXTEL FanView Adds New Dimension to Sports Watching
As much I love watching baseball at a stadium, I hate not having the angles on the game that people watching at home do. Sure, you can yell at the umpire all you want over that strike call, but how do know he's wrong or right unless you can see the play up close, in slow motion? Well, NEXTEL may have the solution, although they've debuted it to the fans of the second most popular sport in the US: NASCAR. Called the NEXTEL FanView, this device takes the traditional scanner, used by race fans for years to monitor the radio communications between the pits crews and the drivers on the tracks and learn more about the race and adds some pretty cool new features, like being able to switch between 8 in-car camera views, get real-time race statistics and hear any of the radio chatter you missed with audio replay. The device operates off of a set of mobile phone towers set up for the race and debuted earlier this year at the Daytona 500.
Another cool thing about the FanView is the price: they rent out for $50 a day or $70 a weekend and they're doing a good deal of business at races so far this year. As SFGate.com's Tech Chronicles points out, Sprint, the company that owns NEXTEL, is also a sponsor of the NFL. With the success its had so far, imagining FanView at football stadiums (and from there, spreading to other professional sports) doesn't seem too far fetched.
