Mobile video's sporting chances

Mobile video's sporting chances
Highlights are the lifeblood of sports--close your eyes and you can picture Willie Mays making The Catch in the 1954 World Series, Franco Harris scooping up The Immaculate Reception in the 1972 AFC playoffs or Michael Jordan sinking The Shot over Craig Ehlo in the 1989 NBA Playoffs. The enduring popularity of ESPN's flagship SportsCenter elevated the highlight clip to new importance within sports broadcasting, distilling each 24-hour sports cycle into the defining moments that separate the thrill of victory from the agony of defeat. And YouTube further hammered home the point, offering fans a digital showcase to distribute and view endless numbers of homemade montages spotlighting their favorite players, teams and moments.

Sports fans already fork over serious cash for game tickets, jerseys and memorabilia. Will they pony up for mobile highlights, too? The National Hockey League and Major League Soccer are crossing their fingers. This week, the NHL and Verizon Wireless announced a new mobile video alert service promising in-game video highlights moments like goals, key saves and other momentum-changing plays minutes after they happen on the ice. Alerts are mailed to Verizon subscribers following each period, including overtime, with a maximum of four alerts per day. The NHL service costs $2.99 per month per franchise. Meanwhile, at the Reuters Media Summit in New York, MLS commissioner Don Garber said he is in negotiations with Verizon, AT&T and Sprint to introduce a similar video alert initiative for pro soccer, noting the mobile platform plays a critical role in the league's plans to enhance its overall digital profile.

Regardless of their popularity elsewhere, hockey and soccer are essentially fringe sports in the U.S., suffering from anemic television ratings that many critics blame on a paucity of scoring highlights--those unforgettable, frozen-in-time moments that other team sports generate in bunches. But fans who appreciate these two great games for their intricacies and nuances know it's that same scarcity of scoring opportunities that lends them their drama and tension. Both hockey and soccer demand and reward a level of spectator immersion that baseball, football and basketball, with their endless interruptions, delays and timeouts, simply can't match. Soccer and hockey are about the ebb and flow, intangibles that don't translate into a highlight reel…which calls into question the wisdom of their respective leagues pinning their hopes on mobile highlight subscription services. If their die-hard fans don't pay for mobile video clips--and since non-fans obviously won't, either--then who among the U.S. subscriber population will?  

The sport that may enjoy the greatest bump from mobile video is football … which from a fan standpoint is the sport least in need of assistance. Also this week, Sprint and the National Football League announced they will begin broadcasting live in-game highlights from all contests televised via the NFL Network. The cable channel will produce a three-hour studio show streamed live on NFL.com and on Sprint's Power Vision platform--coverage will include live game action when a team drives inside its opponent's red zone, during scheduled time slots at the :15 and :45 marks, and at other pivotal moments. What makes the deal especially noteworthy is that the NFL Network is in only about 35 million U.S. homes, most of them DirecTV and Dish Network subscribers, because the major cable operators have refused the NFL's financial demands to carry the channel. Now the turning points of NFL showdowns otherwise unavailable to the majority of U.S. viewers are available live on Sprint handsets. That's game-changing potential. - Jason