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Is YouTube the New SportsCenter? ESPN Thinks So

February 8, 2012 by 1 Comment

Remember those old days, grampa Internet, when you used to have to watch SportsCenter on ESPN to see video highlights of the day’s best plays? Remember them slightly newer days, daddio, when you could go online and maybe see some sketchy vid-clips of broadcast games before they were taken down?

No? Me neither. I’ve completely forgotten those days of 2011 and now just rely on Twitter and YouTube for my sports highlights coverage — like for instance, today’s incredible finish of the always classic Duke vs. North Carolina matchup. Within minutes, the official, ESPN approved clip is on YouTube — commercial free!

I’m not sure if this dims overall ESPN viewership numbers — by all recent accounts there is nothing but an upward curve for ESPN content viewership — so it makes sense for ESPN, instead of online pirateers, to take advantage of the Internet replays that are going to happen anyhow. Seems like the NBA agrees with this approach as well.

Somewhere in here there are the seeds of a discussion about how YouTube is becoming, or has become, the new sports network — and I’d spend time writing about it when I am done watching some Shaun White clips of sick snowboard stunts. Talk amongst yourselves.

Filed Under: ESPN, NBA, NCAA Hoops, YouTube Tagged With: , , ,

ESPN Scores With Digital Australian Open Viewers

February 1, 2012 by 1 Comment

We’re still waiting on some final viewer numbers but according to ESPN digital viewing of the recent Australian Open is up over last year, with the “average minute audience” for the various ESPN platforms covering the event (ESPN.com, the ESPN mobile Web, ScoreCenter, ESPN3 and WatchESPN) up 12 percent from last year.

The digital increase makes sense, especially among a U.S. audience since the Australian Open is one of those U.S. prime-time challenged events, taking place in the wee hours of our mornings when you might be more likely to be sitting in front of a PC screen, tablet or phone instead of keeping everyone else in the house awake with the TV on. Here’s more from ESPN on the digital viewership:

During the two weeks, the tennis section on ESPN.com was up 91 percent in average daily unique visitors and up 177 percent in average daily visits. The ESPN mobile Web tennis section also saw a 54 percent increase in average daily unique visitors and an average minute audience up 36 percent. ESPN3 and WatchESPN generated 113.2 million minutes consumed, up 88 percent compared to the previous year.

Filed Under: ESPN, ESPN3, Live Sports Video Consumption, SportsCenter, WatchESPN Tagged With: ,

Who’s Going to Get the Tablet Rights for NFL Games?

January 31, 2012 by 3 Comments

We all know by now that the Super Bowl is going to be streamed live by NBC, and also to Verizon Wireless smartphones via Verizon’s NFL Mobile app. It will be interesting to see what the viewer metrics are after the fact. But the bigger item on the horizon is who will snag the tablet, aka iPad rights for NFL broadcasts going forward?

I was thinking about this potential conflict earlier today when I read a report from my ex-GigaOM collegue Liz Gannes who was covering a talk with ESPN president John Skipper at the D: Dive Into Media conference. Skipper’s crew seems like it has clear vision on what the Worldwide Leader needs to do with mobile, which as we heard yesterday is the prime platform ESPN develops for.

Inside the industry ESPN is unique since it not only is a network, it is also a content creator as well as a clearinghouse for overall information. The latter is mainly SportsCenter, its enormously popular highlights show that dominates the sports world. But more recently ESPN has become a content creator/provider by bidding for broadcast rights to games themselves, across all major sports and a lot of minor ones too.

While finding broadcasts on TV is fairly easy — you just look up to see which network is broadcasting the game — on digital devices the access has been murky. Verizon does have an exclusive deal to show live games on phones, but that’s only covered Monday Night Football, Thursday night NFL Network games and the Sunday NBC games. ESPN, meanwhile, retains MNF rights for tablets but won’t show the games on phones because of Verizon’s deal. DirecTV Sunday Ticket customers this year could opt for a package that gave them access to the Sunday Ticket via mobile — an interesting twist but as a subset of a subset not really a mass-market solution.

The big question still out there is who will get tablet rights for NFL broadcasts going forward? Right now Verizon can’t offer NFL Mobile on an iPad, which would seem to be a bit of a no-brainer except it isn’t. The tablet market, aka iPad, is getting bigger every moment and it will be interesting to see how the tablet rights get broken out, or whether they are bundled into the overall broadcast rights for a hefty increase in fees. According to Liz’s report, ESPN won’t buy rights without all platforms included:

Since 2005, ESPN has made sure that all its content deals include rights for every device. As Skipper put it, “We don’t cannibalize ourself, we use those platforms to cross-promote.”

After several digital stops and starts ESPN seems to have crystalized its mobile thinking behind the WatchESPN idea, where you download an app and have access to all ESPN programming — so long as you also have a contract with a qualifying cable provider. This is a smart move because it keeps the people paying ESPN the big bucks happy, while giving the cable customers the kind of access that is commonplace for all other kinds of media.

Maybe sometime in the future ESPN will offer a non-cable-customer price to access all its content digitally, but for now it seems content to keep its window open only to those customers willing to pay.

Here’s the link to Liz’s story again. Good stuff, wish I was at that conference.

Filed Under: Apps, ESPN, iPad, iPhone, Live sports via mobile, Monday Night Football, NFL, NFL Mobile, NFL Network, SportsCenter, Super Bowl, Tablets, Verizon Wireless Tagged With: , , ,

Pac-12 Looks to Build ‘Digital Network’ for Social-Media Centric Sports Future

January 31, 2012 by 2 Comments

The Pac-12 conference, one year into its new broadcasting deal is now looking to expand its presence in other areas aside from broadcast television, a move that will encompass streaming media and other technologies broadcast to smartphones, tablets and other devices, mobile and immobile.

To spearhead the program the conference‘s wholly owned subsidiary Pac-12 Enterprises has hired David Aufhauser as vice president and general manager of digital media. He has been in various positions in the sports and social media market for almost two decades with his most recent position being Vice President, Media at Say Media where he managed the global ad network. Prior to that he led business development at Yahoo Sports and has a variety of positions at Citizen Sports, Evite and Netscape.

The job will entail all aspects of the digital media properties of the Pac-12 as well as the creation and management of the Pac-12 Digital Network. The Digital Network will be a unified web site that will provide world wide access to mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets as well as computers and even television for a wide range of sports activities that the Pac-12 is involved in.

The group will handle hundreds of sporting events and provide original programming at all 12 major campuses. This will include live streaming, mobile technology and social TV capabilities, the world. The network is expected to be launched in late summer 2012.

Last year the conference entered into a major upgrade on its broadcasting presence by working with major cable companies to create six regional cable networks as well as signing new national deals with FOX Sports and ESPN. The Digital Network is expected to work with the television networks to provide a more unified presence for the league. The new effort will also handle all sponsorship, licensing and event management for the Pac-12.

His hiring is just the latest in a string of newly enlisted personnel, all seemingly with wide experience in both sports and an array of various media. Last August the conference hired Gary Stevenson as the head of the Enterprise group. Stevenson has more than 30 years in a variety of sports and broadcasting experience including working with the NBA, the PGA Tour and owning his own sports consulting firm OnSports.

The Pac-12 Enterprise has also hired Bill Cella as its chief revenue officer. Cella has experience in sales and marketing and will design and implement long term strategies and oversee the management of all revenue generation for Pac-12 Enterprises.

Expect this to be the tip of the iceberg and a move that is carefully watched by both rival conferences and the NCAA governing body. No school is going to let additional revenue slip through its fingers and we will probably see a number quickly emulate the Pac-12.

The NCAA on the other hand may want a bigger piece of the pie. When Major League Baseball teams started to move onto the Internet MLB itself was a bit slow to follow. When it did it moved everything under its own umbrella, and no doubt gets a larger cut for its effort.

Filed Under: ESPN, Fox Sports, Live sports via mobile, Major League Baseball, NCAA Football, NCAA Hoops, Pac-12, Smartphone, Social Media, Tablets Tagged With: ,

NBA Wastes No Time Slamming Griffin’s Monster Dunk Onto Social Media

January 30, 2012 by 4 Comments

That didn’t take long, did it? Minutes after LA Clipper Blake Griffin completely posterized Oklahoma City’s Kendrick Perkins, the dunk of the year in all its glory was all over the web, even in a slo-mo clip embedded above on YouTube, courtesy of the NBA.

Remember when you had to wait for the next SportsCenter to view highlights? Or could only see somebody’s hazy shot of a webcam capture of a TV screen? Those days are so 2010. Welcome to the new era, where sports is served up immediately, social-media style. Right now Kendrick Perkins, #dunkoftheyear and Blake Griffin are all trending on Twitter and if you don’t get a link there just hit Google News and the NBA is already serving up league-approved clips of the dunk.

The takeaway, other than the fact that this dude is perhaps the all-time slam champion: Nobody’s waiting for TV anymore. The big screen might still be the best place to watch, but it’s no longer the first.

Of course, SportsCenter wasn’t far behind. This tweet hit a minute after our post. Glad to know they’re burning the midnight oil in Bristol. Or maybe down in LA where ESPN left coast hangs out.

#SCtop10 What name should we give Blake Griffin’s dunk over Kendrick Perkins: http://t.co/P75l8m71

January 30, 2012 10:55 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@SportsCenter

SportsCenter

Filed Under: ESPN, NBA, Twitter, YouTube Tagged With: , ,

ESPN: We Design First for the Mobile Experience

January 30, 2012 by 2 Comments

There’s a lot of talk on the interwebs today about ESPN saying that it designs its content sites and programs first for the mobile experience, a statement that is not so surprising on its face but still probably somewhat of a shock to the general public who still thinks of ESPN as something you watch on a TV, either in a bar or in your living room.

But as our old pal Om Malik notes, with 400 million smartphones out there it’s pretty clear what’s going to happen. Om says:

With more than 400 million smartphones expected to be sold, it makes perfect sense for sports to get the mobile bump. I mean, don’t we want the baseball gossip, score updates or results of the F1 race when on the go?

The obvious takeaway from ESPN is: The future of fat profits in content is mobile, and we’re all over it. What that means for startups and established players looking to get into the mobile-sports arena is that your business plan better have a provision for what you will do when the WorldWide Leader becomes your competitor.

The design-for-mobile-first mantra is widespread in the sports content world — it is even part of our internal thinking here at humble MSR — but when big players like ESPN and Bleacher Report start talking about how mobile isn’t something in the future but something that is here now it makes sense.

For most desktop Internet connections, bandwidth, screen size and network latency generally aren’t problems when it comes to site experience. On a small handset with extreme variables in network connection, screen size and local processing power, how a site is designed has a huge impact on how it is seen. And you don’t need any exhaustive usability studies to tell you that people don’t come back to a site that doesn’t load or isn’t usable on a small screen. With development resources in demand everywhere, it makes sense to put an emphasis on mobile, which is growing fast and has the more-stringent demands.

At least it does to ESPN. If you’re a business looking at the mobile-sports space, the question is now: if the leader is already there, what are you doing to design for mobile?

The MediaPost recap by Mark Walsh of the keynote speech from Michael Bayle, vice president and general manager of ESPN Mobile, is worth a long read because it touches on a lot of places where ESPN sees mobile going. But a quick grab of a stat from the post should make it easily understandable why ESPN cares so much:

Bayle pointed out that its mobile audience across its mobile properties has surpassed 20 million, with users spending 45% more time with ESPN mobile content in 2011 than the prior year. ESPN Mobile now ranks as the company’s fourth-largest network and it has 150,000 people plugged into its mobile offerings at any given time.

Sounds like it’s more than just cowboys at horse troughs watching ESPN in a mobile fashion. And it will be more so going forward.

Filed Under: bleacherreport, ESPN, Live sports via mobile Tagged With: , ,
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