How to watch yankees game today

Amazon Prime Video will livestream 21 New York Yankees games this season in partnership with the Yankees and YES Network. The streams will be simulcasts of games produced by YES, and will also televise on YES Network as well as other Yankees local broadcast partners such as PIX11.

The games on Amazon will stream at no additional cost for Prime Video subscribers. However, they will only be viewable within the YES Network’s home market, which includes New York state, Connecticut, northeast Pennsylvania, and north and central New Jersey. The first Yankees game on Amazon Prime Video will be on April 17, when the Yankees host the Cincinnati Reds.

“We understand that fans are consuming content in a variety of different ways, and we believe our unique partnership with Amazon represents an exciting development in the realm of live sports,” said Hal Steinbrenner, CEO of Yankee Global Enterprises, in a press release.

STATE OF THE INDUSTRY: Make Sure You’re at the World’s Premier Sports Tech Event (March 26–27 at Barclays Center in Brooklyn)

Amazon purchased 15% of the YES Network in August in a deal that saw the Yankees regain majority ownership of the regional sports network. This offseason, Major League Baseball updated its rules to allow teams to sell their local digital streaming rights for the 2020 season. The league previously controlled the streaming rights for all 30 MLB clubs.

Amazon’s X-Ray feature will allow fans to access live in-game stats, team and player information, and real-time play-by-play data while watching Yankee games. In addition to the Yankees, the YES Network owns local rights to televise the Brooklyn Nets, NYCFC and the New York Liberty.

Fantasy sports app Underdog has raised a $35 million Series B funding round that will be used to fuel its expansion into licensed sports betting. BlackRock and Acies Investments led the funding round for Underdog, which now values itself at $485 million.

On top of its existing fantasy sports app, Underdog plans to build sports betting products over the next year and hire more than 100 new employees. The company raised $10 million last year from notable investors such as NBA stars Kevin Durant and Trae Young, NFL stars Odell Beckham Jr. and Jared Goff, and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.

Underdog’s season-long fantasy football tournament held last NFL season had a $10 million prize pool. Chris Grove, a gambling industry analysis for the firm Eilers & Krejcik Gaming, is also a co-founding partner at sports betting-focused venture capital firm Acies Investments.

"While the typical sportsbook is spending over $500 to acquire a customer, Underdog is bringing in new users for a fraction of that. Underdog's product is leading to competitive advantages as Underdog's customer acquisition and retention success is best in class," Grove said in a statement.

Sense Arena, a virtual reality ice hockey training platform that works with five NHL teams, has announced two new collegiate partnerships with Boston College and Arizona State University. Both BC’s men’s and women’s hockey teams will now use Sense Arena during practice, while ASU’s deal makes Sense Arena the cognitive training partner of the Sun Devils men’s hockey team.

Boston College and ASU join Harvard, Cornell, Northeastern and Quinnipiac as the six NCAA Division I schools partnered with Sense Arena. Players wear an Oculus VR headset to access Sense Arena’s app that simulates a variety of hockey drills for skills such as passing, shooting, reaction time, checking and goaltending. Players wearing the headset hold a hockey stick mounted with Sense Arena’s sensor so that their real-life stick movements transfer within the training game. Players on the Arizona Coyotes have used Sense Arena to help them train while rehabbing injuries, and the company’s other NHL partners include the New Jersey Devils, LA Kings, Las Vegas Golden Knights.

“We have much more usage from the younger athletes who are looking for an edge to make the final step to become pros,” Sense Arena founder and CEO Bob Tetiva told SportTechie. “From a marketing and business perspective, obviously you want to have the NHL contracts, it creates credibility. But from the athletic perspective, it is even more important to bring the technology to the college teams and to high schools [because] this is where we can really influence their development. And then it will benefit in a couple of years when these guys sign their NHL contracts, they will have the routine and be happily using our system on a continuous basis.”

Sense Arena expects to add a sixth NHL partner ahead of the upcoming season and the company raised $3 million in May to fuel expansion of its VR cognitive training products into other sports. Prague-based Sense Arena also plans to develop virtual reality-based entertainment games across multiple sports to complement its cognitive training products.

BC will receive four Sense Arena systems and ASU will receive two to start. Sense Arena is currently only available for Meta’s Oculus headsets, but Tetitva expects to soon expand compatibility to headsets from PlayStation, Apple, and Pico, which is owned by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance.

“Everybody's looking forward to what Apple's going to do. There are rumors that they should come up with their headsets at the beginning of 2023, which from the marketing standpoint doesn't really make sense to miss the Christmas market,” Tetiva says. “But let's see. We know from history that whenever they put something out there, it has really elevated the technology to the next level. So I completely understand their standpoint that they want to bring a highly advanced solution. And then we will just adopt to that.”

Sports tech unicorn Whoop laid off 15% of its corporate staff late last week amid departmental reorganization, citing “new challenges and uncertainty” in the current macro environment and the need to build “a durable business that is able to withstand whatever economic climate we find ourselves in.” 

A human performance data company, Whoop collects and analyzes key physiological metrics such as sleep and heart rate and computes its proprietary strain and recovery scores to guide fitness and wellness. The company has raised more than $400 million since its founding in 2012, including a $100 million Series E round in Oct. 2020 and a $200 million Series F in Aug. 2021, which gave the company a $3.6 billion valuation.

Whoop now has 550 current employees, suggesting it had employed about 630 prior to the downsizing. Among its most high-profile partners are the NFLPA, PGA Tour, LPGA Tour and WTA.

“Whoop is experiencing record-levels of engagement in our app this year and has more members than ever before,” a Whoop spokesperson said in a statement.

“Although this difficult decision impacted employees across all departments and all levels, we still expect to continue hiring to support key company initiatives in the coming months. We are as committed as ever to delivering the best membership experience and innovating on the most advanced health monitoring technology.”

The Baltimore Ravens have hired Imagine AR to help create an augmented reality mobile platform for its fanbase.

As part of the two-year revenue-sharing partnership, the Ravens will leverage Imagine AR’s signature SDK Platform to drive metaverse-focused experiences for fans via their mobile phones. The deal is Imagine AR’s first with an NFL team. The company already has a deal with the La Liga club Valencia.

Imagine AR will collaborate with YinzCam, the Ravens’ app developer, to release the platform in time for the upcoming season. The team’s fans can aim their mobile devices at logos, signs, products, buildings and landmarks to activate videos, ads, coupons, 3D holograms and other team content that is housed in Imagine AR’s cloud. The Ravens have previously made mixed reality part of their game day experience, with a virtual Raven produced by The Famous Group.

Vietnamese automotive brand VinFast has signed a global sponsorship deal with The Ironman Group to become the exclusive electric vehicle partner of Ironman and Ironman 70.3 Series events in U.S., Europe, and Asia through 2025. The agreement covers several Ironman triathlon events, as VinFast is now the first-ever naming rights partner for the Ironman U.S. Series, and the new title partner for both the 2022 Ironman World Championship and the 2023 Ironman 70.3 World Championship.

VinFast’s sponsorship of Ironman’s world championship events will run through 2025. Ironman events around the world will see VinFast host on-site activations to let fans test-drive its electric cars. The company’s electric scooters and electric vehicles will also be visible at Ironman races for consumer-facing transportation experiences and programming.

The sponsorship category for electric vehicles has heated up in sports over the past year, with automakers such as General Motors, Chevy, BMW, Kia and Polestar also airing commercials to promote their EVs during Super Bowl LVI. MLS club NYCFC also partnered in March with EV charging station company FLO. Electric vehicle leader Tesla provides its electric batteries and hardware to Formula SAE, a college student racing competition.

Note: The Ironman Group is owned by Advance Publications, the same company that owns Sports Business Journal and SportTechie.

The Drew League, Los Angeles’ iconic 50-year-old summer basketball league, will for the first time have selected games streamed on the NBA app and NBA.com starting Saturday. The summer games will stream on NBA platforms on select weekends from July 23 through the championship game on August 21.

This summer’s league features NBA stars LeBron James and L.A. native DeMar DeRozan, among others, and the NBA’s digital platforms will livestream various games (schedule still to be released on NBA.com) that feature marquee players. The NBA will produce the broadcasts and disseminate notable highlights and celebrity-driven content.

Founded in 1973, the Drew League has, over the years, drawn players such as the late Kobe Bryant, James Harden, Baron Davis, Kevin Durant and Paul Pierce.

TendedBar, the automated cocktail machine that uses facial recognition to process drink orders, will be implemented at Empower Field at Mile High for Denver Broncos homes games this upcoming NFL season. The stadium began using TendedBar at concerts earlier this summer in partnership with Aramark Sports + Entertainment and will debut TendedBar’s new digital age verification tool for Saturday’s Red Hot Chili Peppers concert at Mile High. 

Concerts at Mile High this summer have offered three TendedBar stations—each 10-feet long—at locations such as Section 110 on the lower level, Section 517 on the upper level, and the West Club. The typical beverage-dispensing station includes four touchscreen units that fans can operate to select cocktail combinations across 10 liquors and 18 mixers at a time. Fans scan a QR code on TendedBar’s screen to begin the enrollment process on their mobile devices, which includes uploading a selfie, photo of their driver’s license and credit card information. The new digital age verification tool compares a fan’s selfie with their driver’s license to confirm their age before ordering alcohol.  

TendedBar made its NFL debut last season during Jacksonville Jaguars home games at TIAA Bank Field, and it was also deployed at Allegiant Stadium during the Pro Bowl in Las Vegas. The PGA Tour also begun offering TendedBar at tournaments starting with January’s Farmers Insurance Open. TendedBar is not the first automated concessions service to reach Mile High, as the stadium also debuted Zippin’s autonomous checkout-free stores during the 2020 season.