LOS ANGELES – What's left of the battered online sports industry gathered here this week to lick its wounds at the fifth Interactive Sports West conference.
The depressed attendance figures told the story. The conference was held in a hotel meeting room that was smaller than one that was used to house some of the break-out sessions in earlier years. In keeping with the shifted buzz, some of the stars of recent years declined to make the trip. Neither Mark Cuban, indisputably the biggest winner in the Internet sports segment, nor Goldie Hawn, who graced last year's festivities while mulling a Net sports startup of her own, were anywhere to be found.
This Year's Model
Because even ESPN.com and SportsLine, the respective Nos. 1 and 2 sites, are still in the red, the value of subscription models was a frequent topic.
"We have to stop giving everything away if we want to have a real business," said Ross Levinsohn, senior VP and GM of FoxSports.com. That site has pulled out of the original content business and will relaunch as an adjunct to the Fox TV sports properties.
However, Mark Marianni, who heads sales and marketing for CBS SportsLine, said that without widespread broadband, the opportunities for paid sports content are limited.
"Until you've got a high-speed network in place that most of your customers can use, you've got a problem," he said.
Yahoo Sports is looking to design a subscription package around the streaming audio sports programming that it acquired from Broadcast.com. The demise of some big college sports sites, such as Rivals.com, might leave an opportunity for Yahoo to package radiocasts of collegiate sports with appropriate editorial content, in order to give displaced college fans a package they'll pay for.
ESPN has maintained its "insider" subscription business since 1995, but its base of subscribers has remained at roughly 35,000 people. Next month, the company is relaunching "ESPN Insider" to include a personalized Weblog of daily sports content, possibly some streaming video and more gossipy content about sports, now that ESPN is digitizing all of its TV highlights.
Pricing is still being tested, but Senior VP and GM John Skipper said "a reasonable goal" is to get 80,000, or 1 percent of ESPN's 8 million unique monthly visitors, to sign up within a year.
Hey, Who Used the P-Word?
Although the conference was supposed to focus on "the new business fundamentals," only 1 panelist in 7 in an opening panel on "Survival of the Fittest" would answer this reporter's question about when they would be profitable. Presumably that has become a familiar query. SportsLine's Marianni reminded the audience that CNN lost a billion dollars before turning a profit, adding that SportsLine will be cash-flow positive by the end of the year.
NFL No-Show
Notably absent from the conference was Chris Russo, the NFL's senior VP of new media. Russo was scheduled to speak on a panel about the digital-rights deal between his league and the NFL Players Association. Not coincidentally, the NFL is close to completing a six-figure deal for its Internet rights. The finalists include AOL, SportsLine and MSN, the first two of which had representatives at the conference.
The NFL is likely to split its rights between a company with Web expertise and one with NFL TV rights. That would lend creditability to SportsLine's bid because it is 20 percent owned by CBS. Sources at the show also indicated that if SportsLine does land the coveted NFL rights, CBS would buy the remainder of the company as a complement to its own NFL TV rights. A new deal is expected to be discussed at the NFL owners meeting next week in Chicago.
Meanwhile, the value of those rights is debatable. Most of the traffic will go to NFL.com, so the site that snags the rights has to build sports credibility. That's a strategy that worked for incumbent NFL rights-holder ESPN early on, but
