We have reached a new stage in the establishment of Sportingo as equal players in the world of sport media. Sportingo was approved for official press coverage for several prestigious sport events. Through our partnership with FIBA we will be sending a fan on assignment to cover the semi finals and finals of the Americans Basketball Tournament in Las Vegas. For those of you that do not follow basketball this is the tournament which decides which teams qualify to play in the 2008 Olympics. We have launched a contest on Sportingo to determine the best person to cover the event.

For all you rugby fans we are offering a chance to report on the up coming Rugby World Cup in France. I will share some more information about our contest and the experiences of fans that get a chance to be part of the accredited media.

This is a good opportunity to praise the great work by Ed McGrogan who was sent to cover the Fed Cup tie between the US and Russia.

Managing Sport Rights follow up

A BBC reporter that attended the Sport and Technology Conference just published an interesting overview of the growing controversy about online sport rights. If you read all the way to the end of the article you can read some of what I was said at the conference.

Managing Sport Rights

A week ago I was invited to participate as a panelist in the Sport and Technology conference in London. The subject of the panel was protecting rights. There was a great panel and a very lively discussion. I think that we need to change the way we look at rights and start talking about managing your rights instead of protecting them. Right prosecution is only a small part of the equation and right holders that will focus on that aspect alone will find that the market has moved and they stay behind. In an economy that has so much to offer the main problem is gaining share of mind, making sure a fan spends time reading an article on Sportingo and not on any other sport site. The same is the case for any right holder, if you don’t’ make content available to your fans and potential fans they will easily find other ways to fill their time and end up spending more time watching another sport. That does not mean that if you own lucrative rights and have signed TV deals for hundreds of millions or billions of dollars you should just put all of you content out for free. It does mean that you need to be a lot more proactive about learning what your fans are interested in and figuring out a new model that can address this emerging need. Make video clips, highlights or archives available and figure out new ways to prove their value.

Assuming that the life time value of a sport fan is in the many thousands of dollars (if anyone has that number please email me) the focus of right holders should be on how do I use new media to acquire more customers so in the longer term I can be more profitable. The value of gaining another 100,000 fans around the globe that will spend the next 50 years following your sport, watching it, buying merchandize, attending events etc is by far larger then any possible loose of revenue in the short term.

My take from the conference was that most media right holders realize that the world is changing and that they have to experiment with new models and ways to enageage fans.