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NBA all-star Pascal Siakam visited Gagetown, N.B., students and received an honourary doctorate on Wednesday. The 2019 NBA Champion with the Toronto Raptors was in town for a celebration of Data Dunkers, which is described as an innovative basketball and data science learning experience for students in Grades 5-to-12. The program focuses on activities which are designed to help students learn how to find the meaning in data, particularly by using data that is openly available from the NBA and WNBA.
Siakam is a partner for the program through his foundation PS43. The foundation aims to make a difference in the lives of children through education. “Technology is the future,” Siakam told reporters Wednesday. “We just want to continue to empower kids through technology and through education. For us this was the perfect way to do it, basketball and data together, that’s a perfect marriage.”
Dapper Labs, Inc. and NBA Properties Inc., the licensing arm of the National Basketball Association, agreed to a $7 million pixel privacy settlement on Thursday with more than 1.2 million consumers who purchased NBA Top Shots, a non-fungible token depicting NBA players' highlights.
The NBA last week submitted a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court urging the justices to review whether the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) —a 1980s era law known as the “Bork Bill” because it was a response to the leaking of one-time Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental history— applies to a man who signed up for a free online newsletter published by the NBA and who watched free videos on NBA.com while logged into his Facebook account.
Michael Salazar sued the NBA in 2022 because his viewing history was transmitted to Meta via a Facebook cookie and his Internet browser. A district court dismissed the complaint, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reinstated it, leading the NBA to petition the Supreme Court for review.
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“This issue is critically important,” the NBA asserts, noting that many businesses “offer free audiovisual content to consumers on their websites” with consumers’ video viewing history sent to advertisers who then use the data to send “ads targeted” to consumers’ interests. This model is portrayed as “expanding the amount of free content on the web” for consumers and assisting advertisers in locating “potential customers at affordable rates.” It also helps businesses who lack other ways of determining if a viewer of a video “previously bought some separate product from the business.”
Silver said the league was even using artificial intelligence in its search for clues about why the injury happened so often this season. "I'm hopeful that by looking at more data, by looking at patterns, this is one area where AI -- people are talking about how that's going to transform so many areas -- the ability with AI to ingest all video of every game a player's played in to see if you can detect some pattern that we didn't realize that leads to an Achilles injury," Silver said. "We're taking it very seriously."
In Game 4 of the series, LeBron James fell victim to Sony’s new Hawk Eye camera technology when officials reviewed a call at the basket and ultimately tagged him with a foul. It was one of several first-round calls that were overturned as a result of referees’ use of Hawk Eye technology. “There was a piece of camera work in the postseason, of our game in Minnesota, that I have never seen in my f*cking life,” James recalled on Mind the Game this week. “Where the f*ck did that camera come from?”
Rose Wang: We are beta testing a new feature with the @nba.com. If you click their profile picture when there’s a red border with a “live” callout below, you will be directed to the live content they are promoting. We aren’t trapping you in Bluesky. We want you to use Bluesky to discover what’s happening.
At its Upfront presentation at Radio City Music Hall on Monday, NBCUniversal showed off some new features that are planned for Peacock when the NBA makes its debut on the streaming platform this fall. Among them are key play highlights, games, and optional realtime overlay stats and graphics.
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The first thing users will notice is NBC Sports’ effort to throw you directly into a game trough the “Live In Browse” presentation on the Peacock homepage. Live game action will play in the background on the home screen and will instantly stream at full screen when selected. Those tuning in late will be able to access highlights in “Catch Up with Key Plays” which is available on any device, including mobile devices.
For Monday’s Peacock Exclusive Games, NBC will offer a curated show that places the viewer in a courtside seat. This “Courtside Live” feature is designed to display the atmosphere of the arena from one of the best seats in the house. It will also prioritize showing the viewer elements of the gameday experience like player arrivals, pre-game shoot arounds, and reactions of celebrities sitting with you in the front row.
The NFL urges the Court to accept the NBA’s petition to review Salazar v. NBA, a case where the NBA is accused of violating the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 (VPPA) because a California man’s data was shared when he watched free videos on NBA.com while logged into his Facebook account. The NBA scored a dismissal of Salazar’s complaint in the Southern District of New York, but last October the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit vacated the dismissal and sent the case back to the trial court.
Although a fan whose video-watching data is shared arguably hasn’t suffered a kind of harm the law ought to remedy, the VPPA provides minimum statutory damages of $2,500 per plaintiff. That might sound like a drop in the bucket for a multibillion-dollar league like the NFL or NBA, but the NFL notes that statutory damages can “add up quickly” in a class action where potentially numerous consumers are class eligible.
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