More ‘Niche’ Sports Content Headed Online
With professional leagues clamping down on the amount of game footage news and broadcast outlets can use (and yeah, we told you this might happen), programmers are looking hard at niche or ancillary content to beef up their online offerings. Perhaps a bit surprisingly, such content is finding not only ready eyeballs, but also eager advertisers, a win-win idea if we’ve ever heard one.
On the lock-the-gate side is the Wall Street Journal report today about the NFL’s new restrictions on the amount of content news sites can use from games. With live sports action easily among the most valuable content out there, it’s hardly a surprise that leagues would seek to monetize it themselves, say on league websites, instead of giving it away for free. The new rules are even causing some friction between the leagues and the big networks who pay billions for broadcast rights; witness Major League Baseball’s excommunication of ESPN’s “Baseball Tonight” crew from the recent all-star game as just an opening salvo in a battle sure to get nastier soon.
But on the plus side, you have innovation at places like Fox, where a recent experiment to stream All-Star batting practices live got the network’s website 72,000 streams (according to a report on Broadcasting & Cable) as well as a $200,000 sponsorship from AT&T.
It sounds all good for sports fans, especially those who geek out in a single sport — if you are a cycling fan, you already know that you can get tons of specialized Tour de France video coverage online, instead of sitting through the hours of commercials stitched in to the tedious tape-delayed coverage on Versus. We’ve already seen CBS have success with online niche coverage of golf tournaments like the Masters, and with making a wide variety of games available via web during the NCAA men’s basketball tourney.
For outlets like Fox and ESPN, the game is going to get harder as the leagues look to keep more content close to the vest. But by experimenting, maybe leagues and news/broadcast outlets can find a happy medium where eveyone makes more money, while die-hard fans get even more access to events and all the happenings that surround them.
Comments (2)
Linkbacks (2)
-
[...] interesting article over at [...]
niche sport content heading online at pixelblog
— 10:56 AM on July 17, 2007
-
[...] sport content heading online An interesting article over at [...]
niche sport content heading online «…
— 3:26 AM on August 15, 2007
Leave a Reply
Popular
- Tumblr Marriage Proposal: Behind the Scenes of Justin and Marissa's Engagement
- Nielsen: Facebook Now the No. 3 Video Site
- BitTorrent After The Pirate Bay: Do You Still Need Trackers?
- 5 Ways to Test If Your ISP Throttles P2P
- Ten Sites for Free and Legal Torrents
- The Megawoosh Waterslide Viral: How It Was Really Done
Recent
Network
- Green Computing Needs a Data Center Whisperer [GigaOM]
- VideoLobby Launches Template for Live Video [NewTeeVee]
- Pogoplug Updates: Gets File Sync, Extra USB Ports [WebWorkerDaily]
- First Look at Google Chrome OS — Extensions, Options and More [jkOnTheRun]
- 4 Substantial Risks That Google Takes With Chrome OS [OStatic]
- Source Expects Tesla IPO Filing “Any Day,” Tesla Calls it Rumor [Earth2Tech]
© 2009 The GigaOM Network. Marketing consulting by ACS.
Niche sports is a tremendous opportunity, but hard to do right. The biggest problem is the costs involved in producing the content. Too many make the mistake of misrepresenting a sport and not capturing its essence.
One way to solve the challenge is UGC. As a member of the boardsport generation I’m amazed how big downhill and freeride cycling scene has become in just a few years. Even though sponsored teams are still making up most of productions in niche sports there are plenty of riders making their own videos and publishing them on the web. Days of video cassettes and discs seems over. From the riders to the riders is still the formula to success. The self-published footage is truly authentic and fits well to the web.
Another new option to get hold of lot of content is automation. Web cameras are not what they used to be and are bound to get more sophisticated. Today you can use motion detection and other triggers to control capturing. Price of sensors is also free-falling so for a sports center an in-house multi-cam production facility is no longer a far fetched idea. In the future pros might really need to battle for people’s time with the real time coverage from the little league.
Good info and will put it into practice on my niche video website.