The Week in Geek: Another reason to fear the Net

By Jonathan Blum and Seth Elkin

Does anyone quite know what to make of the Arena Football League? Somehow, these guys are now starting their third decade and they keep getting exposure.
ESPN bought a minority stake in the league, which came with perks for both sides. The league gets a game on Monday nights in prime time, which is a far cry from the Saturday nights where the league was stuck on ESPN during the 1990s or the Sunday afternoons on NBC the last couple years. And ESPN got the league to delay
the start of its season until March, by which time ESPN is pretty well wrapped up with college basketball. The Arena League used to start its season at the end of January. And here’s how you know the Arena League is more than just something on the fringe of the sports world: It’s got its own video game series. Yeah, series. EA Sports did a game last year that apparently didn’t flop too badly because they just released a new version for this year. You could argue that the Arena League is higher profile than the NHL, though some might say that’s not exactly a compliment.

MLB 2K7, which is due the first week of March from 2K Sports, announced its lineup of music. It’s always interesting to watch the music that ends up in sports video games. For a while, there was a real racial divide. The NBA games were full of rap and a few years ago, Madden and the MLB games were all hard rock. EA Sports has done a nice job of diversifying the music in Madden the last couple years. It’s great for the artists, who get exposure to a fan base they might not otherwise reach.

If you spent any time reading us over at Blumsday.com this week, you know we had a bit of a back and forth with the good folks here at Sports Video Group over the NBA’s big 3-D presentation in Las Vegas during the All-Star festivities. We’ll spare you a rehash of that great debate. But we do think 3-D is a great starting point for discussions about the future of sports presentation. The computing power of video game consoles like the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 could eventually have a significant impact on the way we watch sports. Both of those platforms are now offering video downloads, with the PS3 making an announcement just this week. And we’re starting to see applications that are very video-game-like, such as NASCAR’s new Race View. Once something like this migrates from the computer screen to the TV screen, how will traditional TV broadcasts compete? As traditional screens become more 3-D, gaming platforms will become more live.

It will be interesting to see how the planned merger of the XM and Sirius satellite radio services unfolds. It’s anyone’s guess at this point whether the companies will get regulatory approval. It didn’t work for DirecTV and EchoStar. But assuming the deal does go through, it seems likely consumers will start seeing a la carte programming choices, which presently don’t exist on either service. Sports programming, in particular, seems destined for its own tier. But with satellite radio’s struggles to add and retain subscribers, there’s a real question of whether that’s a smart move. Will people be willing to pay more on top of the base package so they can listen to games? We love having access to that much sports, but honestly, how many games can you really listen to?

You’ve probably seen “The Singhsons,” one of the latest viral videos that’s blasting its way around the Internet. It’s a spoof on the opening sequence of Fox’s “The Simpsons” that rips off both the characters and the music. With digital content, this type of thing is so easy to do, and we wonder how long it will be before there is some serious litigation. This is something the sports leagues will have to keep an eye on, and if they think they can have complete control of every video clip, they’re wrong. Of course, that doesn’t stop them from trying. The NFL last season started prohibiting the use of postgame interview footage on local news station Web sites. The NHL cut a deal with YouTube, but the rest of the leagues police the site to have their content removed. It doesn’t work, though. A couple weeks ago, we found the
Washington Redskins’ preposterous 35-point second quarter against the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXII on YouTube. The sports industry needs to track this
issue and eventually will need to follow the precedent that is set for how content is shared in the viral video age.