‘Twetting’ On Sports No Threat To Traditional Gambling

Posted by Jonathan in INTERNET on 02-25-11    No Comments

via Larry Brown Sports

It really is time to send Twitter to the woodshed.

Never mind that the microblogging service is on track to reach 200 million users by the end of year, or that it generates 65 million Tweets a day, or that this operation is seen as a rare web success. It’s true, Twitter makes money. The rumor is that it is on track to take in $1.5 billion in sales and make $111 million in net earnings by 2013.

But Twitter probably will never crack one of the most lucrative markets going: gambling on sports.

Web-based mobile microbetting, or “Twetting,” is seen by many as the holy grail of the digital age. Here is a Las Vegas Sun piece on a company called Cantor Gaming, which wants to bring the quick-twitch Twitter vibe to gambling. Its concept is for people to make bets on a minute-by-minute, play-by-play basis,often for small amounts. The theory is that this will be an easy and addicting form of online gambling, hooking a new generation.

Of course, there will be technological problems. And beyond that, there really must be somebody responsible for the notion that every kid with a cell phone will be turned into a generation of gambling junkies.

But the real truth is that even if such microbetting is allowed, it will be just like Twitter: such a crap business that nobody should bother. Just look at the numbers. During last year’s Super Bowl there were about 4.5 million Tweets. Let’s assume 10 percent of those were microbets. That makes 45,000 active betters. Assuming each bet is $1, that’s not very much money. And remember there are only 11 or so minutes of actual action in a football game, and out of 150 or so plays, maybe only half of them are bet-worthy. That makes the possible book on the game a disappointing total — maybe around $ 3.5 million. Compare that to conventional betting on the Super Bowl: The Nevada Gaming Control Board said Nevada sportsbooks took $82 million in bets on the Super Bowl last year.

That means microbetting is just the same non-starter as Twitter. It’s a sexy-sounding service with crap margins, little future and low prospects for growth.

Being able to gamble the way you Tweet isn’t going to make anybody any money at all.

Sports Guy To Try Quality Over Quantity, But Will It Work On The Web?

Posted by Seth in INTERNET on 02-19-11    No Comments

For a medium that not many news outlets seem able to master or monetize, the web has no shortage of folks eager to take their shots.

Sports Business Daily is reporting that ESPN.com star Bill Simmons will be launching a new website later this spring that will be 70 percent sports and 30 percent pop culture. It’ll be owned by ESPN, but not branded as ESPN site. Simmons plans a small stable of writers, one of whom will be Chuck Klosterman.

Sounds like a heck of an idea. John Ourand of Sports Business Daily referred to it as a sports version of the Huffington Post. It is encouraging that a major player like ESPN is backing such an effort. There’s plenty of low-brow sports discourse out there, so a site with smart writing will be a welcome addition. We sincerely hope someone will read it.

The truly frightening thing about sports content the web is that traffic doesn’t have much to do with quality. As operations like the much-maligned Bleacher Report have demonstrated, playing games with search engine optimization is what gets you traffic, although Google may soon put an end to that as it tries to cut down on the content farm results that show up in Google searches. Even if that happens, Bleacher Report, full of poorly reasoned, poorly written sports opinion — essentially a glorified message board — has somehow struck content sharing deals with major players like CBSSports.com.

Meanwhile, a quality operation like FanHouse had the plug pulled on it by AOL, just a couple weeks before AOL turned over its editorial content to Arianna Huffington. FanHouse was universally held in high regard — a 21st century version of The National, the ill-fated daily sports newspaper that brought together some of the top writers in the business back in the pre-Internet early 1990s. Yet in spite of FanHouse’s substantial traffic — 9.7 million unique visitors in December 2010, according to comScore — its fate now belongs to Sporting News, which took over FanHouse and is reportedly cutting most of the staff.

So this is the web world that Simmons’ new venture — or any other that comes along — must navigate: A new media landscape where quality doesn’t ensure survival. Of course, this thing will be backed by ESPN, and Simmons told Sports Business Daily that he plans a sponsorship arrangement that will be limited to a select few advertisers, which he believes will make it so the site “will not become a slave to page views and a minimum number of posts per day.”

So it’ll succeed based on the quality of its writing? Quality over quantity? You need only hear the names Simmons and Klosterman to know that it will, indeed, have quality writing.

But sadly that may not be enough anymore.

Devils Launch Digital Command Center For Social Media

Posted by Jonathan in INTERNET on 02-18-11    No Comments

Hockey is getting its geek on.

The New Jersey Devils said they are launching a digital command center. Basically, it amounts to a bunch of computers manned by social media experts — i.e. people who hang out and Tweet about the team and see who else is Tweeting about the team so they can quash those Tweets with the team’s own messages if they need to.

Sadly, this is what social media has become in this end-of-days scenario for the Internet These sorts of organized PR efforts are now fairly common across lots of industries, and it is only a matter time before the other teams follow the Devils’ lead here. The net effect will probably be that the level of Twitter discourse will probably take a step backward, as the only people with any time to Tweet at all will be the teams themselves, driving their own messages.

But such is the state of the web.

Youth Sports Team Management Tools Are All Grown Up

Posted by Seth in INTERNET on 02-16-11    No Comments

I grew up playing youth soccer in the 1980s, and the soccer leagues of my youth are no more. Back in the day, we just played for fun. Everything is highly competitive now: travel teams, Olympic Development Program, State Cup competitions, showcase tournaments, year-round play. Youth soccer is all grown up, which I don’t think is necessarily a good thing. But I digress.

The other thing that’s all grown up are the communication tools that all of these highly competitive, highly organized teams have at their disposal. When I was a kid and practices or games got cancelled, you had the good ‘ol phone tree, and the schedule was mimeographed from a typewritten page and handed to you the first day of practice.

Of course, all of that stuff has moved to the web now, and Seattle-based Korrio is leading the way in providing communication tools that make the phone tree look less efficient than snail mail (sorry U.S. Postal Service … the times they are a changin’).

Korrio’s Playflow system gives youth sports organizations everything they need to quickly organize their game and practice schedules, rosters, news and announcements — pretty much any type of communication a club would need. It’s like a team-management tool and a social networking infrastructure all in one, because the system can be set up to distribute email and text message alerts anytime there’s a change in plans. And it’s all web-based.

The company has recently partnered with Washington Youth Soccer, which has more than 12,000 teams and 124,000 players. To be sure, Korrio is not alone. There are plenty of other players in this game, like Teamopolis,TeamOn3, eTeamz and LeagueLineup. With all those options available, there’s a hodgepodge of different teams using different sites. Getting everyone in the Washington soccer community on the same platform is a solid idea, and Korrio’s system is slick-looking and appears intuitive to use.

We’re not sure, but we figure you can even set it up to text a reminder to the mom whose turn it is to bring the sliced oranges. How cool is that?

The Sports Genome Project? Pandora To Enter Sports Radio

Posted by Jonathan in INTERNET on 02-16-11    No Comments

Via Idolator

Nothing like an IPO to make a hot new radio star-up look a lot like stinky old radio.

Online music service  Pandora, as part of its S-1 filing in advance of its stock offering later this year, announced that it plans to offer old-fashioned talk radio — including sports talk — along with its suite of music products.

Huh?

The point of Pandora was that it would reinvent the audio and radio landscape by doing away with  pesky gatekeeper radio programmers. Pandora’s promise was to turn the programming process over to an elegant machine that would choose music for us based on our inherent likes and dislikes, and not the crass “opinion” of humans.

But spend any time on Pandora and what you will see is that it really has become is just another music feed, like a zillion other web audio feeds. So to make it unique, what is Pandora doing? They’re going back to what everyone knows works on radio: personality and passion. In other words, people talking about topics they love.

It turns out that sports and a good game are all the genomics we need.

More Good Online News For Baseball Fans

Posted by Seth in INTERNET on 02-14-11    No Comments

We’ve already gone over MLB.com’s feature-laden MLB.TV online package, and on Monday came word that some of that content will be integrated into CBSSports.com’s Baseball Commissioner fantasy leagues.

Clearly the use of in-game video that we saw executed so effectively by NFL.com’s fantasy football game last fall is going to become the standard across all fantasy sports, if for no other reason than the fact that it gives fantasy sports providers a chance to upsell their products. The video in the NFL game was free, but don’t be surprised if they start charging for it next season.

Baseball Commissioner is CBSSports.com’s fee-based fantasy baseball option. Registering a league there will run you $159.99 through February and $179.99 after that. And that’s not per player, that’s for the whole league. Split that 12 ways and it’s $13 or $15 per person. Not a bad deal.

CBSSports.com offers free games as well, and frankly my sense is a lot of people probably don’t want to pay for a fantasy sports site since free options are readily available. But the addition of this content from MLB.com gives you some incentive to open the wallet. You’ll get in-game highlights on your league’s live scoring page, and all of the individual player pages will have video added to them. So when you’re looking at players and trying to figure out if you want to add or trade for someone, you can check out his highlights along with his stats. In addition, you’ll get MLB Game Audio, giving you the home and road radio broadcasts of every game.

One thing to keep an eye on is how quickly the in-game highlights are available. In the NFL.com game, they added video clips to the fantasy site roughly at the end of each quarter of games. MLB.com is saying that in-game highlights will be added “moments” after they happen. The faster the better.

Again, the web is changing the way we consume sports — the real ones and the fantasy ones.

Sports On The Web: MLB Gets It!

Posted by Seth in INTERNET, MOBILE, TELEVISION on 02-13-11    No Comments

If you want a first-rate example of how much the web can benefit sports content, take a look at what Major League Baseball is doing with its MLB.TV package. Yes, we know it’s February and we have the brilliant March Madness On Demand coming soon. But the boys of summer are headed to spring training and we’re sick of winter, so let’s talk baseball.

The first thing you have to love about MLB.TV is that they’re making it available on a whole bunch of platforms, including the iPad, iPhone, Android phones, Roku, Boxee, PlayStation3 and certain Internet-enabled televisions from Samsung and LG.

And, yes, all of us fuddy-duddies still using computers can get our baseball that way too.

Now, if you’re an uber fuddy-duddy and you have to have your baseball, you can subscribe to the MLB Extra Innings package on cable and satellite TV. But that’ll run you around $200 for the season. You can get MLB.TV for $100 — or $120 with a few added functions. But quite frankly the $100 base version blows Extra Innings out of the water. Take a look at what you get:

• Portable to multiple devices
• HD quality
• In-game highlights and stats — MLB says these will be updated “within moments” of when the action happens
• Full game archives
• Gameday Audio — giving you the option to listen to the radio broadcast if you don’t care for the TV announcers
• Clickable linescore — allows you to instantly view any player’s at bat
• Fantasy player tracker — allows you to enter your fantasy lineup and be alerted when any of your players are on deck

Spend that extra $20 and you also get home and road team broadcasts, live game DVR controls and the ability to split your screen four ways to watch up to four games at once.

Now, the one potential drawback to this baseball panacea is the image quality. Last summer, we had a chance to check out MLB.TV delivered via the PlayStation 3, and while it provided an HD picture, there were compression issues that noticeably impacted the quality. But we were also watching it on a 42-inch screen. On a computer, or iPad or mobile phone screen, it’s probably not as much of an issue.

The thing to take away from MLB.TV is that this is what the web allows for sports — not just easy distribution of content, but giving fans the chance to consume the content in any way they want. You have flexibility with MLB.TV that you simply can’t ever have with linear TV broadcasts: Go back and watch a specific at-bat, watch highlights on demand, get alerts about your fantasy players — and watch it all on pretty much any platform you want.

Play ball!

Super Bowl 45, Technology 0

Posted by Jonathan in GENERAL, INTERNET, TELEVISION on 02-07-11    No Comments

Never mind that The Black Eyed Peas are a cover band, or that the Super Bowl XLV iPad “app” amounted to nothing more than a few maps and interactive location guides, or that NFL.com’s in-game content on Sunday night was easily bested by its content during the regular season. Never mind any of it. Why?

Nobody cares.  This four-hour game was the the most-watched piece of television of all time.

Forget all the cutesy stuff like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the crash of the space shuttle,  the Olympics, or even 9/11. These are all just another episode of Oprah in comparison to Sunday’s game. Super Bowl XLV smoked all of ‘em, and with absolutely no help whatsoever from any new technology, save for super-slow-motion and some nice use of cameras.

I really tried to find a cool next-gen digital spin on this year’s game. But it really wasn’t there. There was nothing interesting that was Web-based or digitally enabled. And truly new tools, like 3D were nowhere near this broadcast.

The fascinating part is that from a valuation and business perspective, the Super Bowl now makes companies like Google and Facebook look like Nick at Night.

Assuming a per-commercial rate of $3 million for 30 seconds, and about 90 minutes of commercial time over the four-hour broadcast, we are talking about a half billion in sales — a number Facebook is lucky to make in a couple of months. Add last night’s game to this list and Super Bowls now account for 11 of the top 20 most-watched broadcasts in U.S television history. Now, some of these games are from years ago, so revenue calculations are tricky, since you have to discount those sales in today’s dollars. But still, we are easily talking $100 billion in total ad sales for the live game — about the same number Google has in the past 5 years.

And that is just for ad revenue. It doesn’t count ticket sales or tie-ins or shoulder programming — nothing else. That’s just what Fox charged to advertise during the game. If you factor those other numbers in, Google and Facebook are not even in the discussion. Can we just end this “Google Economy” nonsense and get on with the future?

It’s the NFL’s world, and we just live in it.

New For 2011: The Super Bowl Virus!

Posted by Jonathan in INTERNET on 02-03-11    No Comments

Click On Me At Your Own Risk!

Sure, this is really just PR spin, but it is interesting to see that online traffic surrounding this week’s Super Bowl is on track to hit new heights.

And along with that comes a risk of online attack.

The idea is the folks over at PC Tools are arguing that with all those knucklehead young mean surfing the web during the game for photos of cheerleaders and stats, the world’s internet criminals will be out en masse looking to infect them all with viruses, using scams based on cheerleaders and sports scores.

So that means anything  involving cheerleaders — and we mean anything at all — should be sent right here for our personal inspection.

Somebody has to do it, right?

Forget The Daily: Super Bowl Party Planning Gets Top Billing At App Store

Posted by Jonathan in INTERNET on 02-02-11    No Comments

Yes, News Corp.’s new iPad app The Daily looks interesting, particularly for sports content. And I plan to subscribe.

But it is telling that when you go to the App Store to actually get the app, Apple sees as much mileage in promoting other stuff like Wild About Books, Dead Space and, yes, apps that let you plan your Super Bowl Party.

Eventually, I did find The Daily app, and I am playing with it now. It’s easy and free for two weeks as a demo. At first blush, there is plenty of cool stuff for sports fans to like, including in-game scores and cool media and some nice use of web tie-ins.

At about $35 a year,  there is real value here, at least to start.

But considering The Daily is being billed as the future of newspapers, shouldn’t Apple think this is more important than apps that help you figure out the best guacamole to serve during the Super Bowl?

I’m just sayin’.

Episode 73: The TSC Zombies Live!

We celebrate our final show at Hothead Studios by breaking down sports video games from E3;  talkin’ through some dang sports video baseball cards and then go getting into the fallout from Derek Boogarrd’s untimely death.  Finally, what we have all been waiting for: Dan on latest on with Posada’s crazy, tweeting wife. Share this [...]

Episode 72: Dan’s Cool Rugby Shirt

Blum breaks down 42 miles on a bike with no chain. Evans reports on the Oprah/Nike summit. Dan’s got a rugby johns he would like to share. And some high tech tricks to baseball scouting. (26.8 KB, 27.10 Minutes) Share this post:ShareEmailPrintStumbleUponRedditDigg

Episode 71: The NFL For President!

Dan breaks down the body blow online poker just took from regulators. Blum talks up the new book about what the NFL has to teach capitalism. Seth hates yet another video game. And finally ESPN on your iPad. (25.3 mb, 25.4 minutes) Share this post:ShareEmailPrintStumbleUponRedditDigg

Episode 70: “Are You Ready to Rumble?”

MLB TV’s online service is legitimately cool. The Masters will be a non-event online. Tiger Woods plays with crappy equipment and Blum compares betting on Wrestlemania to trading corn futures. Share this post:ShareEmailPrintStumbleUponRedditDigg

Episode 69: “A Podcast Unlike Any Other”

The organizers of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar seek to bend nature to their will with artificial clouds. Blum gloats over the NCAA Selection Committee’s epic seeding failures. Blackberry “Super” Apps underwhelm and Dan takes a crack at the new Masters video game. Share this post:ShareEmailPrintStumbleUponRedditDigg

Episode 68: “Revenge of the Nerds”

Seth and Blum mix it up with MIT over sports data. Dan reviews EA’s Fight Night Champion (virtual boxing is better than the real thing). Amar’e Stoudemire’s goggles get explained and the guys tour some physical fitness web sites. All that, plus, the week in review. Share this post:ShareEmailPrintStumbleUponRedditDigg

Episode 67: “Follow the Bouncing Blum”

Dan’s on the injured reserve this week, so Blum’s flying solo (with an assist from Seth the Tech Nihilist). In this episode: Seth breaks down March Madness On Demand, Blum wonders what gives with the crap-tastic apps that are dominating college athletics, a look into the NFL’s financial picture, plus the week in review at [...]

Episode 66: “It’s Hockey Night Tonight!”

It’s all hockey all the time for this week’s episode. Dan and Blum look at the cross-border battle between the Winter Classic and Heritage Classic as well as the Buffalo Sabres ownership change. Dan and Seth the Tech Nihilist reminisce about the classic NHL video games. Plus, how did a trade between the Stars and [...]

Episode 65: “Take This Job and Shove It”

Blum pitches his wild-eyed plan for NFL players to use social media to circumvent ownership. Seth the Tech-Nihilist gives his report on the new MLB.Com. Dan reviews NHL ’11 (it’s awesome) and digs into some racing tech at Daytona. Share this post:ShareEmailPrintStumbleUponRedditDigg

Episode 64: “Jets Fans are Damaged Individuals”

As Blum gloats, Dan lets the Jets know they can go straight to hell. Also, the best televisions for your Super Bowl party; Dan discovers Broadcast HD; Blum shares his illicit passion for wooden baseball bats; PLUS, the best sports e-books for your e-reader. Share this post:ShareEmailPrintStumbleUponRedditDigg