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.