Video Downloads Of Playoff Games: $3 / each

[vjz]

May 7, 2007
E-Commerce Report
Want to See That Shot Again? Download It for $3
By BOB TEDESCHI

DESPITE the many treasures posted online, sports fans still can’t find videos of the first Yankee game they saw with their fathers, or download all of Pete Maravich’s behind-the-back passes.

But Baron Davis’s recent demolition of the Dallas Mavericks is yours for the taking. The National Basketball Association said it would announce today a new video download store that it quietly rolled out at the start of the playoffs, allowing fans to download, for $3 apiece, playoff games from this season and last.

Other major sports organizations, mindful of the Internet’s insatiable appetite for video clips, are converting game footage to a digital format to post online. The leagues say the effort is a necessary, though costly, means of preserving their histories. But given how deeply fans crave to reconnect with obscure moments of their favorite teams, the initiative could generate significant revenue.

According to Steve Grimes, who, as the league’s vice president of interactive services, oversees NBA.com, early sales have been “promising.”

“It’s not a big surprise: great games and surprising results have driven the most popular downloads,” Mr. Grimes said. For instance, he said, the hotly contested series between the Golden State Warriors and the Dallas Mavericks has sold well, as has the final game from last year’s championship series between the Miami Heat and the Mavericks.

In addition to single games — which come free of commercials or timeouts, and which feature league announcers — fans can download an entire series for $13, or all playoff games for $80. The average game length is a little under two hours.

For the moment, users cannot search the clips for, say, every Steve Nash assist, but that is coming. According to Steve Hellmuth, a senior vice president with the N.B.A., league employees are breaking down game films and logging events within each team’s possession.

For instance, if San Antonio’s Tim Duncan pulls down a rebound and then dunks, N.B.A. employees would tag the video with those two events; in the future, viewers searching for Duncan’s rebounds or dunks could quickly find that sequence.

There are about 500 such highlights in each game, and because only humans can log these events, the tagging process is labor intensive. Mr. Hellmuth said the league has about 40,000 games on tape in its archive, mostly from 1990 and later, and about 3,800 have been logged. Those games are already being used by coaches to scout other teams, as well as league executives who review the calls of game officials.

“We’re getting slowly to our older games, but we’ll be focused 100 percent on that this summer,” Mr. Hellmuth said. It will take about eight years before all 40,000 games are digitized and logged. Mr. Hellmuth declined to discuss the cost of the project. “We view this as a mission we have to execute for the fans,” he said. “The revenue side of it comes second.”

According to Ken Kerschbaumer, editorial director of the Sports Video Group, an industry trade group, the N.B.A.’s efforts are “a bit ahead of the curve,” compared with those of other leagues. “But other leagues, colleges — everybody’s looking at digitizing their archives.”

Mr. Kerschbaumer said no one has proved how valuable those archives can be, so sports organizations cannot tell whether online sales of their clips will merely help defray costs or turn into a significant source of income. “But it could bring in some good revenues,” he said.

Although the idea of searching for specific instances of a player’s career and compiling one’s own highlight reel sounds enticing, consumers are unlikely to do so, according to Scott Bailey, general manager and vice president of Turner Sports New Media, which produces the official Web sites for Nascar and the P.G.A. Tour, among others.

Mr. Bailey said that in 2001, his company experimented with an approach where Internet users could create highlight reels from archived auto racing footage.

“You could search all the night races on a short track that Jeff Gordon crashed in, or won in a final lap, which sounds great, right? Consumers didn’t want it,” Mr. Bailey said. “The larger opportunity here is in the things you’d see at the DVD store where someone has packaged a series of dramatic moments for you.”

This summer, Mr. Bailey said that Nascar.com would release many more videos for downloads, like compilations of races a particular driver has won.

Like other organizations, the National Hockey League is struggling with how to quickly digitize and index its mountain of archival footage, which dates back to the 1920s. Patti Fallick, group vice president of NHL Productions, which maintains the league’s video archive, said the league must carefully choose the people who index that footage.

Ms. Fallick said those who log the events from a game must also evaluate the best plays, and only those with deep hockey knowledge can make such judgments.

Other leagues are finding low-cost sports experts from a familiar talent pool: college students. “We pay them $15 an hour,” said Bob Bowman, the chief executive of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, the league’s online subsidiary. “It’s not a multimillion dollar project,” he added, “but nor is it a $100,000 project.”

Mr. Bowman said that MLB.com will later this year introduce a video search product so users can search through hundreds of games to find highlights from specific players. Users will likely be able to download those clips free, he said.

“The cost of the technology to do this keeps coming down, but we don’t really have a choice,” Mr. Bowman said. “We don’t know how a standard game from 1963 will drive revenue, but we have to have it.”

The National Football League will roll out a new version of its Web site this summer, with a heavy emphasis on video, said Brian Rolapp the league’s vice president of media strategy. Mr. Rolapp said the league is weighing how much historical footage it could offer for downloading, and which clips would be supported by advertisers, versus those that would be available for purchase.

Mr. Rolapp agreed that it is costly to digitize the league’s old games and highlight reels, but thanks to the proliferation of high-speed Internet connections and video-sharing sites, that footage has become valuable.

“People have talked about this for a long time,” he said. “But the difference now is that it’s really worth doing because you’ve seen business models develop to warrant the investment.”