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NASCAR HotPass Off to a Warm Start
February 18, 2008
Yesterday NASCAR celebrated 50 year of the Daytona 500 and DirecTV got in gear with it’s kicking off the 2008 NASCAR season with a free preview of its NASCAR HotPass package.
This year’s HotPass has been expanded so that race fans can listen to the team communications of their favorite drivers, on the main network feed viewers can listen to 13 different drivers, and then DirecTV has 4 separate channels in both SD and HD where your driving in the car with the top 4 drivers as were picked by DirecTV website voters. These driver specific channels offer viewers 3 audio selections, Network Audio, Hotpass Audio (Announcers only talking about the driver that your watching) and Team Audio (Walkie talkie conversations between drivers and his pit crew.)
This years HotPass got off to a bumpy start with some audio issues. Many HD viewers found that at the start of the race the audio was out of sync by about a second, but this problem was quickly fixed. A more major issue was on the HD version of the Tony Stewart channel which was airing audio from FOX on the HotPass audo selection, Tony Stewart fans did not to hear interviews with Tony nor heard custom commentary for Tony Stewart fans until the problem was fixed about halfway through the race. (DirecTV did run a crawl at the bottom of the screen letting viewers know they were working on the issue)
Once the audio issues were out of the way the race was fun to watch, although when your riding with the racers it would be nice to see in the cars instead of just outside them. The In car camera are looking out the front or rear windows. I personally would like to see the drivers driving every once in awhile instead of just seeing things like I was tied to the hood or bumper of the car. Dale Earnhardt Jr. had an issue last night where the knob on his shifter stick broke off, Dale asked if the camera could zoom down and show the shifter so that his team would know how to fix it., but with no camera inside the car they were unable to comply with his request.
Fox’s network coverage was on par with what Fox does best… a lot of action with a lot of commercials. I found the commercials annoying as I was listening to the drivers radio conversations and when they went to commercial they turned off the driver radios and made us listen to the Fox commercials. One other thing annoyed me with the Fox broadcast and that was the new “Gopher Cams”, the cameras were mounted in the track looking up, and while the camera looked great, most every time they showed these Gopher Cams they would put an animated Gopher Cam graphic on the screen, were a Gopher was seen coming out of his hole then ducking before one of the cars passing by ran him over. It was a cute graphic the first 5 times they showed it but got annoying after that.
With the early technical glitches aside, I enjoyed the NASCAR HotPass package, and I actually subscribed to it. The way I had things setup was I had the main race on the big screen HDTV, then had Tony Stuarts driver channel on a smaller LCD HDTV, this let me enjoy the race and the team communications at the same time. It was as close as you could get to the race without being there.
DirecTV did a great job of producing the HotPass package; it was well done and very well produced. I would love to attend a NASCAR race one day just to see how the DirecTV guys put it all together, I am sure it’s a lot of work.
Thanks for reading!
Posted by Scott Greczkowski on February 18, 2008 | Comments (3)
