NBA, Video Your Way
Not all would agree. Spoonemore of the NBA believes that while fans may not be clamoring for full-game coverage over the Net, the type of personalization the Internet can offer will make shorter video clips very attractive to users. "I think that in the short-term, until broadband reaches a high enough penetration to drive a business model, functionality will drive usage on the Internet," says Spoonemore.
And Cuban cites the example of Broadcast.com, which through Raycom Sports, offers video of Michael Jordan's games while at North Carolina. The games are streamed at 300Kbps, so the quality is quite high, but it's also an example of the opportunity to offer specific viewer groups what they want, when they want it.
In general, sports organizations hold the rights to video coverage of all events once completed, and then license highlights of those events to other media sites. But each sports organization still has exclusive rights to stream video coverage highlights on its own Web site. For example, the NHL licenses some highlights to the major sports and news sites, but keeps a wider selection for NHL.com.
While the NBA considers the licensing of highlights to be a solid revenue model, it also is looking to utilize the full potential of the Internet in leveraging those assets for its own site — by offering the user personalized highlights on NHL.com. Launched last May, and re-launched this season under the name "My Highlights," the service allows users to search through last night's games for the highlights they want.
"Now we have fully encoded games that are indexed, so while the application allows you to search now, we are also building a digital archive," says Spoonemore.
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The NBA is working with Convera, a company newly formed by Intel and Excalibur, to not only encode and index its nightly video coverage, but also to begin the daunting task of bringing the video archives of past games into the digital age. "My Highlights" is a free service, but as the NBA digitizes and indexes its archives, Spoonemore can foresee services that would be worth a premium. What Chicago Bull fan wouldn't pay to be able to call up, on-demand, streaming video of the heroics of Michael Jordan in his team's six championship runs?
The NHL is also aware of the interactive potential of its video archives, and Perlman says the NHL is taking its time choosing a company to work with. Digitizing video on such a massive scale can be expensive, and in this quickly evolving industry the NHL wants to make sure it only has to do it once. "We want to make sure our archives are in a format that we can deliver it to our fans no matter how they choose to ingest their entertainment content," says Perlman.
Hear and Now
While video on the Web remains significantly behind that of television quality, streaming audio has reached near-equal footing with broadcast quality, and live audio coverage of major sporting events is already here. The revenue from radio broadcast rights is miniscule compared to television, and therefore has not stood in the way of Internet distribution of audio coverage.
When quality is no longer an issue, the Internet has an obvious advantage over other broadcast media. For example, fans of the Washington Huskies football team can be anywhere in the world and still listen to the team's home broadcast, thanks to Yahoo!'s streamed sports offerings.
Yahoo! carries more than 500 pro and college audio streams, not to mention English Premier League soccer. Yahoo! already has deals with the NBA, NHL, and NFL, and at press time was in negotiations to extend the agreement with Major League Baseball to put live radio coverage of games online. The audio streams are available through Yahoo! and the leagues' own sites.
Currently, all audio coverage is free to the user; Yahoo! relies on banner ads and sponsorships for revenue, and the lure of popular sporting events to spike traffic. The sole exception is for NBA games, where Yahoo! offers a season-long subscription service called Audio League Pass for $29.95. The NBA has been offering its Audio League Pass for four years, and Spoonemore is quick to point out that the NBA is the only league to offer audio streams of every game, home and away.
"Due to how we hold the rights a little bit different than the other leagues, and because some of the team rights are different, we can pull together a comprehensive package," she says.
The subscription model has worked well for displaced fans who want to listen to their home announcers, says Spoonemore, and for international fans. The NBA has television distribution in 206 countries, but it doesn't cover every game, so nearly 37 percent of NBA.com usage is international. That percentage is reflected in the Audio League Pass subscriber base.
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