Blog / Online

I’ve been watching the couple of days of the coverage so far being streamed on PGA.com. Overall the experience has been pretty good. I think my problem has been my slow connection speeds. I’m in a TV truck in Victoria, BC. We have the slower 11mbps wireless connection in here, so there are a lot of rebuffering moments. Also they aren’t showing the whole day of coverage, the feed gets turned off around 12:30pm PST, which is OK if you’re on the East Coast, not so OK from Vancouver Island. On the plus side, the coverage is streamed in widescreen from the high-definition feed, which looks great for golf.

These are early days, but I hope that networks continue to open up their coverage to web viewers that can’t get to a regular television during the working day. Once some more of the sustained bandwidth issues are figured out, getting video coverage of a sporting event from anywhere will be a winner.

There aren’t many more powerful cable entities than ESPN. Their particular brand of broadband video offering is called ESPN 360, where you can watch many of the regular ESPN shows, as well as a growing number of live events such as college football. Most online video offerings tend to be either advertiser-supported, or charge the end user for access. ESPN 360 is charging the internet service providor for the right to carry the service. This is much like the subscription model that exists today with regular cable channels. Time will tell if this is going to be a success. I’m thinking by limiting yourself to certain ISPs, they will be shutting off a large group of people who would gladly pay to access the content, but don’t want to change ISPs to do it. It also completely shuts out the international market, something that MLB.TV especially caters to. I think we’ll see a change in direction before it’s all said and done.

Read the Ars Technica article here

There once was this boy named Kevin. He was a TV host in San Francisco who spent a lot of time with the high-flying technology crowd back in the internet bubble days. When the party came to an end, the craziness was over, but the underlying innovation never really left. Kevin looked around and noticed a couple of things. First off, while at the height of the dot-com boom, millions of venture capital dollars were needed to get a site online. With revenues being very small in the old dial-up world, the dot-com companies were burning way too much cash to ever be profitable. Today, the cost of starting a major online venture has gone through the floor. In Kevin’s case, it cost him $1000 for a programmer to sketch out the site and one of those $99-a-month dedicated web servers. The second thing was that if you harness the power of the simple, personal recommendation and multiply that; you end up with an information filter much more powerful than any computer algorithm. It’s the ‘Wisdom of Crowds‘ being put into practice. Users submit information, if people like that information, they recommend it by “Digging it”, the more Diggs, the more prominent it becomes. The collective wisdom of millions of users then becomes the editor. Kevin decided instead of reporting the tech news on Tech TV, I’m going to join the ranks of the entrepreneurs.

The site, Digg.com, went live in December of 2004. I became a registered user 1 year ago this month when it was still pretty much a geek hangout. Today it is the 24th largest site on the web serving 1 million users daily, and growing exponentially. The New York Times, one of the largest and most trusted brands in news is number 19, and about to be eclipsed by something started with a burn rate of $99 a month.

The great thing that this article from Business Week magazine points out, is that now there is lots of venture capital financing available, but the new players in the Web 2.0 space aren’t burning money fast enough to sell off large chunks of the company just to raise the money. They can now afford to refine their product without the pressure of the cash burn. At revenues of $3 million per year, which is just scratching the surface of what could be done with a daily audience of 1 million, Digg can innovate on their own schedule in a very sustainable fashion.

The barriers of entry into previously unreachable market segments are dropping fast. If the New York Times or Reuters could be replaced by a great idea and $99 a month, there is something exciting going on here.

Take the time to read the article, the story is one that should be taken to heart by old media people everywhere.

read more | digg story

There is a growing trend of large sporting events to be broadcast for free over the Internet as a compliment to the regular television broadcast. Earlier this year, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament delivered the full CBS broadcast of every game online. At the time, the NCAA/Sportsline site set a record of delivering 19 million video streams over the course of the tournament.

On the heels of the success of that venture, the PGA Championship is now going to broadcast 11 hours of coverage over the internet. As broadband penetration is now reaching the point where a mass audience can be had, advertisers are starting to jump on board. At this point, the broadband audience is a compliment to the broadcast show, but the future of alternative distribution is being shaped through events such as these.

Check out the news item here

And another article about broadband sports broadcasting

Here’s something that’s really interesting. The Guardian has written an article about something they call the 1% rule. It generally works like this.

If you get 100 people online, one person will generate content, 10 people will interact with it (leave a comment on the blog, etc), while the other 89 people will just view it.

The conclusion?

“Only that you shouldn’t expect too much online. Certainly, to echo Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come. The trouble, as in real life, is finding the builders.”

While the tools and distribution will be democratic, the professional content creator will not necessarily be overrun with user-generated YouTube videos. 

Read the article here