>And what happens when wider direct distribution means that the sports world no longer needs ESPN's cable reach to get to viewers?
Its not the viewers the sports leagues value ESPN for. Its the money ESPN pays them for the right to broadcast to their viewers. That's why the NFL Network is a step-child network that can't maximize its value as the NFL can't make more from it that they can selling to ESPN, Fox, CBS and NBC
Its the money ESPN pays them for the right to broadcast to their viewers
What? No. The cable companies pay ESPN for the privilege of carrying them. It's a revenue share, that's why ESPN is a part of basic packages: cable companies using their billing base to increase the cable company's profit margin on the extortionate amounts they kickback to the network. You think ESPN doesn't use sports agent techniques in their business development department?
I would classify this as the most rational "insider alarmist" version of the anti-unbundling argument. There will certainly be discomfort upon the arrival of unbundling, but this article ignores long-term adjustments of the ecosystem. Here's five gaps that aren't considered:
1) Bundling will still exist, but just not in the current 100 channel, one-size-fits-all variety. Media conglomerates will bundle directly to consumer - that's how Disney gets distribution for the SOAP channel, they bundle it with ESPN to the cable provider. Various channels may team up. Bundling across media types will happen (MSNBC + NYTimes; Fox News + WSJ). Massive direct-to-consumer marketing groups will be formed.
2) Sports Rights will cost less, not more - Sports leagues know hoe much ESPN makes, and they make sure they get their cut. Eventually, costs will decrease.
3) Sports providers will differentiate their product offering, and be free to sell different subscriptions to different tiers of fans (TV, internet streaming, mobile devices, value add services). The same, to a lesser degree, will apply to other genres
4) The average cable bill may be $40, but the key is what is the LTV of a cable customer (including all services - cable companies make profit in other areas like internet and phone that help keep that number down.
5) Companies will manage their bottom lines, revenue be damned. If ESPN can cut costs (rights, headcount, production, distribution) as it loses revenue, there's still hope. Maybe its not as huge of a profit, but it can hang pretty close and probably become significantly more capital efficient.
*I worked at ESPN as a Director of Finance & Strategy, and founded Fanvibe (YC S'10) that partnered with the NBA, NHL, and Comcast. And I can't wait for unbundling.
There are tons of people paying $30 a month for ESPN or $10 for AMC, or more, because of bundling. The bundling is designed so that if you want a single channel, you have to jump up an entire tier of service. This means that if you want basic channels plus ESPN, you have to jump up to that first tier, going from $16 a month to $64 a month.
That first non basic tier has options for me. There are two versions of it, one with kid's shows and one with ESPN. So if I want Nickelodeon and ESPN, I have to jump up another tier and I'm not paying $80 a month and I still don't get Game of Thrones.
Generally speaking, stats are public domain as they are a public event that occurred. Because a sports league may disagree with this position doesn't mean that it isn't true. However, its entirely possible to violate a given site's TOU by scraping the data, it doesn't mean the data itself isn't allowed to be compiled or distributed.
IANAL, but I worked at ESPN and founded Fanvibe (YC S'10), and worked quite a bit with the leagues and lawyers on rights-related topics.
>But seriously, ditch the real time sharing stuff. I don't know why so many todo lists focus on that.
I think what you're missing here is THE TRACTION. They have 10s of thousands of users already, and they are using the app, as explained in the article. I would imagine the team has enough analytics in there to know what features people are using, and talks to their customers to understand the analytics better.
What's the reason for your suggestion? What you envision? Or what people actually do with an app based on thousands of users? I would guess the Anylist guys use the latter.
I always take what founders (including myself) say about traction with a grain of salt.
I can only make suggestions based on my experiences and the problems I see. If they have data to prove otherwise then by all means discard my suggestions ... I don't take it personally :).
Plenty of things go wrong everyday at companies like FB that people don't see from the outside. If tons of things go wrong, and FB fails (whatever that means), entrepreneurship is the biggest thing Zuckerberg will have left.
If you read my other comments carefully you will see that I think he is under enormous pressure to shoot the moon and stay there. I guess this comes down to personal taste, and if you want you can be in his position. I'm saying there's a better 'canonical example' than facebook as of today, for the parent comment I originally used to put after his or her ellipses.
For Fanvibe (YC S'10) we looked at a variety of sports stats providers, including TSN, Stats, and SportsDirect (who we used). These are the guys that license all the structured data to ESPN and others. No matter who you work with, its pretty painful to use this data and their schemas. And they all make you sign paying contracts before you can play with the data.
We used services like Superfeedr to grab a variety of RSS feeds, including ESPN's, to grab headlines.
ESPN, CBS Sports, the Yahoo Fantasy Football API are all middlemen when it comes to sports. The only thing they own is original video content (talking heads, not highlights) and their headlines & articles. Don't look to them for the solution. Its a big step forward for an organization like ESPN to do this, but its going to be much slower than the speed of tech-focused companies that are the usual on HN.
From my experience, better to build around ESPN and others than to try to work with them to push innovation forward.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders of Fanvibe, and also used to work at ESPN.
beRecruited.com (http://berecruited.com) is disrupting the high school to college athletic recruiting market. We connect high school students to college coaches across the country, helping students earn scholarships. We're the largest company in the space, with room still to grow.
We're 3 YC founders, we've got over 1 mm registered users, revenue via our freemium service, and plenty of funding from relevant investors. We're relaunching the site in just a few weeks, and this is a chance to get on board and drive meaningful product development and influence what we do next.
We're a small team of 5 looking to add another full-stack RoR developer.
Definitely get in touch if you:
* Combine a strong overall computer science background with a passion for web development, particularly Ruby on Rails
* You're equally at home writing complex SQL queries, architecting scalable rails services, and building beautiful html/css/javascript interfaces
* You've demonstrated your abilities writing top-quality web or open source software
* You have a strong product sense and excellent technical judgement.
"This means that the intellectual average of student athletes is highly likely to be lower than the average of non-athletes"
This applies to Michigan specifically. They are willing to make academic sacrifices for the sake of their athletic programs and (maybe) a well-rounded student body. Not all schools operate this way.
Even so, the rubric only shows that Michigan is willing to overlook academic shortcomings in their efforts to recruit athletic talent. Academic and athletic talent still might be correlated in the general population, while sampling bias from the university admissions process over-represents dumb jocks and under-represents dumb non-jocks.
For example, suppose the academic ability of jocks is normally distributed about 105 with a std dev of 15, whereas non-jocks are normally distributed about 100 with the same std dev. If the cutoff for admission is 110, but athletic talent gives you a 20 point bonus, then you're your comparing mean aptitude in a sample of non-jocks, given that every observation is >= 110, to the mean aptitude in a sample of jocks, given that every observation is >= 90. Under those conditions, you'll find a 10 point difference in favor of your sample of non-jocks, even though the population mean for jocks is higher.
I think you alluded to this point in an earlier reply, but it's worth spelling out.
That's awesome to hear. Would love to hear more about your experiences. We hear from student athletes all the time asking for advice on how to manage school and sport. Drop me a line at vish AT berecruited DOT com.
While there might be a slight amount of skewing due to the fact that we're an online service, we have a very large data set relative to the population we're speaking about. Also, given the process of college admissions today, its fair to say that most people applying to college have access to a computer.
In addition, there is more than the NCAA, such as the NAIA and Junior Colleges. We take all that into account.
Interesting. If I were interested in the current recruiting landscape for high school athletes, do you happen to know of any good survey or review-type sources? I'm curious about the context surrounding your company's service.
Its not the viewers the sports leagues value ESPN for. Its the money ESPN pays them for the right to broadcast to their viewers. That's why the NFL Network is a step-child network that can't maximize its value as the NFL can't make more from it that they can selling to ESPN, Fox, CBS and NBC