Watching Wimbledon … on web radio!

The old truism, that the best pictures are on radio, passed the test last weekend watching Wimbledon.

While watching the nail-biting Federer-Nadal men’s final last Sunday on NBC, I couldn’t stand the advertising breaks. So I did what many people do, played a game of ‘media tennis’ –toggling between TV and a laptop, TV and radio. The official web site of Wimbledon had a great digital scoreboard that beat the one on TV.

I am referring to what they call the ‘Slam Tracker‘ (left), a dynamic scoreboard with the interactivity we have come to expect. I could, for instance, click on icons to get details of the Swiss and Spaniard, and switch to scores on a different court in another window.

I then settled for muting the TV and logging on to Radio Wimbledon, that changed the game, so to speak. Especially when the game was stalled due to rain in the 3rd set. Later I discovered the commentary was a few seconds shy of being ‘live,’ but two things made me stay tuned: passion and interactivity.

As with the real game, media tennis has its tie-breaker moments. TV serves up high def pictures, multiple cameras angles, terrific slo-mo replays, and close-ups of royalty in the stands. Radio then slams a return with the commentators tripping over their vocabulary unable to describe the volleys and the 119 mile per-hour aces. It sure gets your adrenalin going.

As Federer succomed to Nadal I wasn’t sure whom to cheer for, the box that made me lean forward, or the box that made me lean back.

In the end I chose a hybrid medium called Web-Radio-TV, and it made this historic finale a rich media experience.