Professional Sports and Fantasy Sports – the line continues to blur

As a self-professed fantasy sports junkie for over 20 years, I’ve always followed the fantasy industry and have marveled at how something that was a fringe, little-known hobby in the late 1980’s has now blossomed into a multi-billion dollar annual industry. I remember being a young teenager and waking up at 5:30am on Monday mornings to greet the paperboy so I could anxiously get access to the boxscores and statistics that were only available in the daily newspapers. Today, you can have just about every statistic imaginable at your fingertips the moment it happens 24/7, thanks to the internet. The internet is ‘the’ reason fantasy sports has reached such widespread popularity. How serious are fantasy sports players about managing their teams? Very serious. The Wall Street Journal recently covered a stats venture called Inside Edge that has helped Major League Baseball teams win the world series, and are now focused on giving fantasy players access to the same ‘insider’ information the professional teams use.

Inside Edge would also contribute to the next four World Series champions – the Yankees from 1998 to 2000 and the Arizona Diamondbacks, who signed up before the 2001 season. Now they hope the general public will also pay for their services. As an example, they point to their “well-hit average” statistic charting how often a hitter hits the ball hard (whether he reaches base or not). “The average hitter has a batting average of .262 and a well-hit average of .230,” according to says Kenny Kendrena, Inside Edge’s product and marketing director. Examining batters with a lower batting average and a higher well-hit average should lead the fantasy owner to some players who are just getting unlucky and due for a breakout. According to Inside Edge’s numbers, this season’s least lucky players are the Orioles’ Ramon Hernandez (.240 BA, .302 WHA), the Pirates’ Adam LaRoche (.221 BA, .269 WHA) and Jim Thome of the White Sox (.227 BA, .261 WHA).

The company couldn’t have its stats without its scouting. Inside Edge employs 30 to 35 former professional baseball players, mostly guys who never made it out of the minors. (“Chad Curtis’s brother works for us,” says Mr. Istre.) They chart every pitch and every swing of every big-league game. That sounds easy, but it can be maddeningly complicated. Imagine Barry Zito pitching to Jason Bay. Say Mr. Zito throws a curveball out of the strike zone with his first pitch, Mr. Bay makes good enough contact for it to be a hit, but Omar Vizquel makes a great play and throws Mr. Bay out. For a scorekeeper, it’s recorded as a simple out. But an Inside Edge scout has to note that Mr. Zito threw a curveball, that it was the first pitch, that Mr. Bay swung at a pitch outside of the zone (which ups his overall “chase percentage” while counting as a pitch out of the zone for Mr. Zito), that it was well-hit (upping Mr. Bay’s “well-hit average”) and that it was recorded as an out. And all of this has to be noted before Mr. Zito throws his next pitch.

Full article: WSJ

Yes, the Wall Street Journal now has a ‘Fantasy Sports Expert’ on staff.

Craziness.

Philanthropist donates $8 million to solve newspaper’s future

Retired ex-newspaper exec Leonard Tow is donating $8 million dollars to two schools in a dual-effort to train journalism students in digital media and experiment with new business models for the newspaper business. Columbia University will receive $5 million for training, while City University of New York gets $3 million for research and development. While I think this is both generous and positive, I do wonder if $3 million will really have any impact or utility on testing new newspaper business models or technological concepts. Nonetheless, a really nice gift, but might MIT had been a better place for this kind of R&D investment?The newspaper biz does need all the help it can get and Dr. Tow is clearly focused on the notion that authentic, trained news reporting may be eroding.

Leonard Tow, a co-founder of the foundation, said the grants were a response to his “serious concerns about what is happening in the world of journalism.”“I thought it was time for us to think about addressing these new-media opportunities so what we as citizens receive from them is more an accurate reflection of what is going on in the world than some opinion

via Chronicle.com

Newspapers continue to feel their way

I stumbled across an interesting article recently from the Miami Herald about the ongoing struggle to re-invent and re-invigorate the newspaper business. Some great commentary by Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. after news broke that upwards of 190 Herald employees may be let go.

Virtually every newspaper is going through the same thing: shrinking profit margins, declining circulation, staff cutbacks and morale at subterranean levels as journalists struggle to figure out how we can save the American newspaper. But I have come — reluctantly — to believe we can’t. We must blow it up instead. Doing otherwise is like trying to save record albums in an era where music is downloaded to iPods, trying to save film in an era where every camera is digital. People did not stop listening to music or taking pictures, but new methods of doing so evolved, and those who were in the business of selling music or pictures had to adapt or die.

We in the business of selling news have yet to adapt. Yes, every newspaper has a website now. Some, like The Herald, have TV and radio facilities as well. I’m talking about something more: a radical change of focus. We still tend to regard our websites as ancillary to our primary mission of producing newspapers. But I submit that our primary mission is to report and comment upon the news and that it is the newspaper itself that has become ancillary. So maybe we should regard the Internet not as an extra thing we do, but as the core thing we do.

Full article: Launch a fiery campaign to reinvent newspapers

Where’s The Beef in Online Video?

We are still very much in the nascent stages of online video, that much we know. While the online video space is still very immature, three tiers of online video have clearly emerged. Which one tier will be the most profitable? Which tier will yield the most traction? Which tier will fade? Which tier will ultimately win? In this post, I will attempt to break down the online video space and describe some of the pros, cons and outlook for each sector.Let’s start with a diagram. Hamburger, anyone?

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There are 3 distinct tiers of online video as I see it. I’ve divided up the online video space into Professional Video, Semi-Professional Video and User-Generated Video.

Professional Video
Professional video has been the slowest tier to ‘legitimately’ form. Broadcasters and studios have been dipping toes in the online video water, but nobody seems to be getting completely immersed in it, yet. The vast majority of Professional video is still offline being broadcasted exclusively on television, in movie theaters, lying dormant in studio archives or distributed on physical media like DVDs. Much like the diagram shows, professional video is not the most dense tier by any means, but it is the most puffy and glossy of the three. As of today, the top half of the bun has not come close to finish baking. Professional video is still making a very slow migration to the web with vast repositories of professional video not yet being repurposed and repackaged for the web. Eventually, a tsunami of professional video will make its way to the web and will do so in two forms – original made-for-web professional video programming, and repackaged offline professional video. When I say ‘repackaged’, think along the lines of what Charlie Rose is now doing. He’s now slicing and dicing his vast array of interview footage into 600+ two-minute bite-sized video clips for online consumption. This is just one example, but over time many broadcasters and studios will dig into their massive archives of programming and begin the chore of repackaging their content to satisfy the insatiable appetite for online short-form video consumption. Made-for-web professional video will be the last component of this tier to gain momentum. We are likely still years away from seeing broadcasters/studios sink substantial money into original web video. The monetization of online video is currently far too immature to support the high costs of professional video production. I would argue that this will someday signal the end of television’s reign in the advertising spectrum. When major studios start creating original video programming for the web, you can be sure that the monetization of online video will have truly come of age.

Semi-Professional Video
Semi-professional video creators are one step above User-Generated video creators because they typically have more skills, more time and are prepared to spend some money to produce online video. A good example of Semi-Professional video are the ‘How To’ videos that can be seen on many video sharing sites these days. Guides to cities, biographies and some amateur episodic productions like Lonelygirl15 are also examples of Semi-Professional online video. Semi-Professional video will be the least dense tier of the online video spectrum as it can not compete with User-Generated video on volume, and over time Professional video’s ongoing migration to the web will dwarf the Semi-Professional tier. In many ways, Semi-Professional is filling a short-term ‘quality’ gap in the online video spectrum. Much of User-Generated video is considered ‘lower quality’ and Professional video is still sitting offline waiting for the monetization of online video to mature so it can justify a Professional-level investment. Hence the reason why ‘lower cost’ Semi-Professional video is gaining traction and eyeballs right now.

In many ways, Semi-Professional video is keeping the seat warm for Professional video and due to the present-day lack of ‘high quality’ online video, it is Semi-Professional video that is enjoying a siesta of popularity and demand.As the online video space matures, Semi-Professional video will be the most difficult tier to defend. The ‘quality’ gap I mentioned above will eventually be met by larger-budgeted Professional video that will be produced or repackaged for the web. Semi-Professional video will also begin to feel encroached upon by User-Generated video. As time marches forward User-Generated video will begin to look more and more like Semi-Pro. We know this because the software to make and produce consumer video is getting better and cheaper with each passing month, and while production/acting talent is not universal, it is incredibly widespread. Now you can begin to understand why the Semi-Pro tier is caught in the middle of a sandwich and will eventually feel squeezed from the two larger halves of the bun. Also, because it is the least dense and diverse of the three tiers, it will likely be the most prone to commoditization. If there are 250 Semi-Pro YouTube videos today on the sites, sounds and history of Chicago – how many will there be next year? In three years?

User-Generated Video
Far and away the most dense of all three video tiers, no other tier can compete with User-Generated video on volume – both in terms of production and viewership. But despite being the crowned-king of online video, it has become incredibly fashionable to slam User-Generated video and that is largely due to the assumption that this tier will be the most difficult to monetize. Critics of User-Generated video are quick to point out that advertisers are leery to put their brands next to random content offerings that are raw, have low production value or in its worst form, may be offensive.What User-Generated video has over Pro and Semi-Pro is not just volume. User-Generated video offers immediacy and access in ways that the other tiers can not compete with. Media consumers today clearly value immediacy and access over quality and accuracy. We know this because we’ve seen blogs take a chunk out of mainstream media for those exact reasons.

Online video viewers are constantly looking for community and for the ‘next big or new thing’ whatever that may be. It is the undeniable hunger for the unpolished, fresh and undiscovered that will continue to drive the growth and popularity of this tier long into the future.Can User-Generated video be monetized? That is the million-dollar question. This reminds me a lot of the trajectory of blogs and blog content. Many people were quick to slam blogs in 2003’ish because they believed that monetizing blogs was not doable. Who wanted ads next to some random person’s online diary or opinionated diatribe? Over time, as blog content began to fragment and separate into definable niches, niche content networks formed, ad networks formed and advertising technology matured to enable the monetization of blogs. In my view, it is both fallacy and short-sighted to say that advertisers dislike User-Generated video.

More than any other tier of online video – it is impromptu, unscripted video blog content (ie, UGC) that scares broadcast media executives the most. Why? Because UGC gets the most online viewers, and broadcast media is not equipped to compete in this area. Advertisers may not want their brands next to ‘all’ User-Generated video, but I firmly believe that many advertisers would love their brand next to some of it. That folks, is called a technology problem. One of the most important lessons I have learned in my 10+ years as a web entrepreneur is that you don’t sweat technology problems. Inevitably, they all get solved. Essentially, all advertisers want attention and eyeballs, and in time, advertisers will be given the necessary controls and assurances they need to begin capitalizing on the huge traction that User-Generated video offers.

True Video Search Looms As The Ultimate Game-Changing Wild-Card
For all intents and purposes, video search does not exist today. Sure, you can search for videos on YouTube, Google, Video.ca etc. but you are not searching the video itself. The video search of today is really a text-based search of the Title, Description or Tags that surround the videos.The video search of tomorrow, or next year or in ‘X’ years may not be a text-based search at all. Eventually, a true video search will search the actual ‘frame data’ of a video. What do I mean by this? Let’s suppose you are looking for a video of a ‘pink elephant’. Either by typing in the words ‘pink elephant’ or by providing a ‘base image’ the video search of the future will search the actual visual frame-by-frame data of videos. So a 5-minute animated video of a pink elephant which does not have the actual words ‘pink elephant’ anywhere in the Title, Description or Tags could some day be the #1 search result for ‘pink elephant’ simply because it contains 9000 video frames of a pink elephant.What impact would a true video search have on the online video spectrum? The easy answer is, density wins. All of those seemingly unmonetizable, undiscovered User-Generated videos are actually incredibly rich repositories of frame data waiting to be properly indexed and searched.

The Hidden Value In The CBS – CNET Deal

I’m not suggesting CBS is paying $1.8 Billion for domain names. However, CNET does bring with them an impressive list of some highly brandable, extremely rare domain locations. Over time, CBS will leverage them to create lasting, high-recall brands in the marketplace and cornerstones to their overall online strategy. CBS has had trouble gaining traction beyond the Sports arena online, with the acquisition of CNET’s developed and undeveloped brand assets, they now have a platform of possibilities and potential to grow on.Another point to mention is that CBS has their toes dipped in numerous forms of media. These brand assets will give them value-added traction for every single ad dollar they spend marketing these locations be it in print, television, display etc. As the marketplace continues to get more saturated with brand messages, the high-recall nature of these brand assets will make each ad dollar CBS spends marketing these locations go further.

“Notice CNET is right there behind IAC on that value list. CNET has sites and domains they haven’t even fully launched/promoted yet along with fantastic content sites: TV.com, Radio.com, Chat.com, Kids.com, Browser.com, News.com, Download.com, UpLoad.com, MP3.com, etc… I mean think about the MAC.com example and wonder how many billions in subleases can be made from TV.com..Owen Frager

Tech diva Sarah Lacy agrees…CNET’s domain assets include:
Auctions.com
Browser.com
Builder.com
Buying.com
Chat.com
Com.com
Community.com
Computers.com
Download.com
Events.com
Freeware.com
Gaming.com
Help.com
Kids.com
Labs.com
Marketplace.com
News.com
Online.com
Radio.com
Search.com
Shareware.com
Shopper.com
Silicon.com
Store.com
TV.com
Updates.com
Upload.com
Welcome.com
and more…

Newspapers are dropping the ‘paper’

The sign of things to come? Is news on paper really dying? That depends on who you ask. I truly believe newspapers will be around for a long time yet. But they must evolve and embrace change. I added some flotsam and jetsam on this topic a few years ago. While debating the newspaper’s future is much traveled territory, one association is grabbing the bull by the horns. The International Newspaper Marketing Association has just announced that they are changing their name.

INMA is changing its name to reflect the evolution of its member newspapers and lead the newspaper industry toward its multi-media future.

Their new official name is: International Newspapermedia Marketing Association

“We are an association evolving to meet the evolving requirements of our members in a changing information landscape,” said Earl J. Wilkinson, executive director of the 1,300-member global association. “Our roots and our origins remain intact. Most of our members continue to make the preponderance of their revenues from print newspapers, and we believe this will resume growing in the future. Yet the online, mobile, digital, and niche publishing canvasses are vital, growing and important to news consumers and advertisers who want to reach them. We want to be an association inclusive of professionals in our larger industry not be tied specifically to those of one medium.”“We simply replaced five letters in our name to reflect the new realities of our business.”

Bloggers vs. Mainstream Media – Rivalry Not Dead Yet

In many ways the ‘Bloggers vs. Mainstream Media’ rivalry has come a long way over the last couple of years. Bloggers have carved out a modicum of respect from traditional media, and traditional media have begun embracing the blog medium as a new way to deliver their message.This all sounds peachy, until you put a successful renegade sports blogger on stage with with a crotchety Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Bob Costas ‘Internet Media’ show featured Deadspin blogger Will Leitch and Friday Night Lights novelist Buzz Bissinger. It didn’t take long before the swear words were flying, reputations put on the line and the end result was some riveting live television that clearly proved that the nerves and tensions between mainstream and blogosphere, are still quite raw.

From Bissinger’s opening glare, it was clear things weren’t going to go well and the situation quickly escalated. “I really think you’re full of ****,” Bissinger told Leitch. “I think that blogs are dedicated to cruelty, they’re dedicated to journalistic dishonesty.” He added: “It really pisses the **** out of me. It is the complete dumbing down of our society.”

Watch the full video over on Deadspin.

Tastes great, more filling – Miller ‘gets’ blogging

Miller Brewing Company started blogging in July 2007 on a blog called ‘Brew Blog’. My first reaction when I read about this was ‘just another corporate blog’. 95% of the time, I’d probably be right in that assumption. But in this case, Miller did something different and I believe we are going to be seeing more and more companies follow their lead. Instead of blogging about all things Miller, they started a beer industry blog that covers everything, including their competitors and their products. And if you think they just slam their competition all day, think again. Their coverage is industry-wide and their reportage tone comes across as unbiased, and if there is bias, at least you know where it is coming from.

Brew Blog is the brainchild of Paul Pendergrass and Pete Marino, communications consultants for Miller who wanted the brewer to have more influence over what’s covered in the industry. In 2006, they recruited Mr. Arndorfer from Advertising Age and told him to cover the sector like a beat reporter would.

Miller has now become a publisher and they are filling up their industry niche with meaningful content. Miller is using the blog platform to enhance brand awareness in a much more powerful way than just an extension of their PR messaging. Cheers to Miller for thinking outside the corporate blog box. And hey, if you really get good at being a publisher, your competition will come to you…

The blog has enough influence that a staffer at a PR agency for Anheuser pitched a story to Mr. Arndorfer (Brew Blog) about Budweiser’s Superbowl ads. A representative for Tecate, a Mexican beer, inquired about running an ad on the site.

via WSJ

Canadian web is just getting started

It’s really easy to get caught in the echo chamber and think that everyone, every business has a web site. Truth be told, I was somewhat surprised when I read the latest internet report from Statistics Canada. While 87% of Canadian businesses ‘use’ the internet, only 41% have web sites. In addition, only 8% of private sector companies, and 16% of public sector companies are selling on the web. It’s no wonder that CIRA is projecting that .CA registrations will double over the next 3-4 years. Bottom line: there is a lot of room to grow!

Will hardware save Blockbuster’s business?

In a follow-up to my previous post that touched on the major transformation from ‘store to web’ for big-box retailer Circuit City and their sagging offline sales, comes news today of a $1 Billion offer for Circuit City by Blockbuster. Much in the same way that Microsoft missed the boat on search which opened the door for Google, Blockbuster has similarly missed the boat on online video rentals and they’ve been chasing Netflix ever since.

Blockbuster
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Netflix
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Will merging with Circuit City save Blockbuster’s business / brand? Blockbuster appears to be moving toward a ‘hardware-based’ strategy that would likely see them launch a set-top content delivery box ie, think Apple TV. This strategy would explain the interest in merging with an electronics retailer.

“The combination of Blockbuster and Circuit City will result in an $18 billion retail enterprise uniquely positioned for the convergence of media content and electronic devices,” wrote Blockbuster’s Keyes this morning. “We would seek to differentiate products in both Blockbuster and Circuit City stores by offering exclusive content and content-enabled devices. Both companies would benefit from complementary products, marketing, management strengths, technology and distribution and the resulting synergies would significantly improve consolidated financial performance.”

In Canada, the online video rental business is suffering from a lack of competition and choice for consumers. It’s not a mature business yet by any means and over time that will change as new players, partnerships and brands enter the Canadian online video rental market.

via betanews