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Fall is finally here! Turning leaves remind us we’ll soon be with loved ones eating pumpkin pie and cheering for our favorite sports team. Whether at home, at a bar or live at the stadium, watching sports in a group has been proven to have important health benefits. 

“We know that people live longer and recover more quickly from an illness when they have strong cases of social support,” says William Wiener Phd. “If you have a group of people you watch a game with consistently who offer support when you are down, it does lead to longevity and can keep you active and engaged and alive longer.”

Watching sports in a group also keeps your mind active. Research by  the University of Chicago shows that a region of the brain usually associated with planning and controlling actions is activated when fans listen to conversations about their favorite sport. 

Additionally, the reason that we enjoy watching sports in groups is because of our memories.  NPR social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam says, “We connect with sports teams through family, through our parents taking us to ballgames, and that’s why following a sports team feels so intense because it’s tied up in these family loyalties.” 

And none of these benefits even include the fun of putting on the t-shirt of our favorite players and our game-day face paint before meeting up at the local sports bar or heading to the stadium for a tail-gate party. But which is the better location to watch the game? 

Many would answer that question by saying it’s obviously the stadium. The energy of the crowd, the live action, and the opportunity to do “the wave,” among other things, make attending a live sporting event exhilarating. 

Stadiums are exciting, but also very noisy. Cheering fans, thundering applause, thumping music, hollering vendors, blaring horns can all make it pretty hard to hear the play-by-play. Unless the stadium has an assistive listening solution, you might be better off watching at a bar. With an assistive listening solution for stadiums streaming the play-by-play directly to your smartphone you still get to hear every part of the game no matter how rowdy it gets.  

However, watching your favorite sports team with a group of friends (or even strangers) at a local sports bar is like your own private viewing party. Watching on a TV gives you the advantage of seeing replays and gives you the ideal bird’s-eye view of the action. 

But what happens when there are multiple games on multiple televisions at once? 

Having the volume up on all them would be awful. With the sound off, you miss even more than you might at a stadium, unless the bar has an audio streaming solution that streams audio directly to your device. With a local audio streaming solution you can choose which TV to tune into using the app that receives the sound from a transmitter connected to each of the televisions. So you can have your beer and drink it, too. 

The whole point of getting together for a game is to actually watch the action and hear it even among the noise and excitement of everyone around you.  With AudioFetch’s bar TV app that streams the game audio to smartphones or tablets, you’ll get all the health benefits of watching the game in a group, and you won’t miss a single play, replay or stat. To learn more, contact us today!