In looking at the calendar, we just realized that college football season is half way over. Half way!
Now before you start crying and getting the blues knowing that your opportunities to tailgate are slowly dwindling away, fear not. We have a solution that allows you to squeeze out more fun for the last remaining tailgates of the college football season. We recently teamed up with AT&T and will be publishing a three part series regarding #techgating.
What is #techgating? In a nut shell, #techgating is utilizing technology, whether it be on your smart phone, mobile apps, social media or even the newest tech hardware, to enhance your tailgating experience. Whether it is using tech to allow your friends to find your tailgating spot easier or to show the early college football games on your tablet or smart phone, using technology while tailgating has never been easier.
In Part One of our #techgating series, (Part Two will be a virtual tour of the AT&T Fan Zone truck and Part Three will include a big giveaway of a rather large gift card) we would like to show you how “new tech” can easily replace your “old tech”.
Most everyone today has a smart phone in their pocket. Many of you have a smart phone and a tablet. We all take our smart phones tailgating so we can stay in touch with others, take photos, keep up to date on our social media and even track scores of rival schools’ games underway while we are tailgating. An old way of keeping up with the early games was to drag out a portable electric source, more than likely a generator, hooking up cords to a satellite dish, locking in the satellite signal and then transmitting it to your TV you took off the wall of your living room. A few years ago, that was the way to go and you were on the cutting edge. Not anymore with the way technology has advanced.
Nowadays, you can up your game by utilizing something you already have in your pocket; your smart phone. Simply get an HDMI cable that on one end connects to your smart phone and the other end connects to your TV. Many college football games can be streamed onto your phone and with the HDMI cable or even Bluetooth, you can project the game from your phone to your TV screen for everyone at your tailgate to enjoy.
If bandwidth in order to stream the game is an issue, ask a friend to enable their smart phone to be a mobile hot spot. With AT&T’s Network, you can use the combined strength of the mobile hot spot, never miss a play of the early games while you grill up your tailgating grub for all of your adoring fans.
Taking another page from the #techgating playbook, you can pick up a mini HDMI projector that hooks up to your phone and can project the game onto a vertical flat surface. Grab a white, dry erase board, zip tie it to the frame of your pop-up tent, and you now have a big screen showing the game at your tailgate. That will sure be a crowd pleaser, especially when you can show your rival fumbling away the ball in their own end zone in the fourth quarter.
Lastly, a great way use new tech to enhance your tailgating experience, subscribing to a television service that can be picked up via your mobile device, like AT&T U-Verse, will bring your home TV to the parking lot. This way you can control what is viewed while tailgating right from your parking spot just as if you were on your couch at home. And we’re willing to bet and smell of brats on the grill beats the smell of your roommate’s ramen noodles boiling on the stove any day.
If you have other tailgating ideas on how to replace old tech with new tech while tailgating, leave them in the comments below. If it is a really awesome idea, we would encourage you to leave that suggestion on AT&T’s #techgating website, techgating.att.com. Once you visit there, you can tweet a picture, video or tip and make sure to include the hashtag #techgating for a chance to win a trip to the 2015 College Football Playoff National Championship. Someone has to win. Why not you?
Stay tuned for more #techgating tips and our Part Two in this three part series next week. We visited the AT&T Fan Zone truck at the State Fair of Texas in Dallas prior to the Oklahoma/Texas Red River Showdown and got a private tour. We will post up the video and let you know what we found out.