FANS OF POLITICAL and athletic battles face quite a conundrum tonight.
The third and final presidential debate will be on TV from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” game between the Chicago Bears, from President Obama’s adopted hometown, and the Detroit Lions, hailing from Mitt Romney’s birthplace. It starts at 5:30 p.m.
And it’s critical Game 7 in the National League Championship Series — St. Louis at San Francisco. It’s on channel 13 beginning at 5 p.m. The series is tied at 3-3. Which team will go to the World Series (begins Wednesday) against the Detroit Tigers?
What’s a patriotic American to do?
What’s a patriotic American to do?
From The New York Times today:
“ESPN is subtly advertising a solution: watch both (the debate and Monday Night Football. As for the baseball game, how about using TiVo??).
“Not with a picture-in-picture display on the TV screen — that’s so 1990s — but with two screens, like a TV set and an iPad.
“A pair of ads that started appearing on ESPN on Saturday promote the WatchESPN app, which allows subscribers of certain cable companies to watch ESPN on phones and computers at no additional charge.
“‘This debate will be settled on the gridiron,’ one of the ads says, after referencing the verbal battle that will be taking place on a stage in Boca Raton, Fla. The ad concludes, ‘Don’t miss a minute of Monday Night Football on ESPN, the WatchESPN app and WatchESPN.com.’
‘”Monday Night Football’” is blacked out on phones because the National Football League has a separate mobile carriage deal with Verizon. So the ads for Monday night’s game show a big-screen TV set transforming into a laptop computer and then a tablet computer, but not a phone.
“Of course, some football fans may relegate the debate to the laptop or tablet screen while keeping the game on the big-screen TV, since ESPN’s sibling ABC and dozens of other outlets are live-streaming the debate.
“Recent second-screen studies by Nielsen and other measurement companies have found that many tablet and phone owners use the devices at least once a day while watching television.
“This has been on display during the presidential debates, as millions of real-time reactions to comments from Obama and Romney have been recorded on Facebook and Twitter.
“Surely at least a few debate-and-football watchers will have a third screen handy for reacting to both events.”
