Feature: What has technology done for my sport? Part 1 - April 2007  

Sport and Technology asked four rights owners to answer the above question. Two responses are included below, with the remaining two in the following feature.

Rick Burton, commissioner, National Basketball League Australia

"When I was recently asked the question 'What has technology done for my sport?', I was reminded of American President John F Kennedy's (pictured right courtesy of Getty Images Sport/Joseph Scherschel) inauguration speech where he posed his challenge, 'Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.'
Perhaps, I thought, I should ask not what technology has done for basketball but what basketball can do for technology.
The answer, I sense, is to provide a compelling global sport that is ever expanding in its relevance and always data rich. We are a sport that revels in our feast of performance-based statistics from points scored, rebounds, assists, blocked shots, fouls, three-point shooting percentages, victories, defeats and standings.
That sets the banquet table for media coverage and increasingly the commercial driver for basketball is digital media. Not surprisingly, broadband or 3G interest in basketball is growing rapidly and the potential now exists for a re-alignment from the traditional TV rights holder serving as our sport's primary financial backbone.
This should not surprise. All of sport is currently looking at how to best apply an integrated distribution approach that better includes the technology of telephony and broadband.
The challenge, however, is to truly understand the potential of our new opportunities. As with any new technology there is a period of uncertainty and this is evident in recent news coverage showing big players in the new media space posturing for control and debating respective technology rights.
In Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, the NBL, has taken its first steps to embrace these opportunities by creating a new on-line strategy.
The League will introduce a network of sites by including all 13 of our teams by next season to create economies of scale and increase commercial opportunities. This will create a dramatic new platform to provide us the opportunity to diversify our broadcast rights by selling the NBL's broadband commercial rights and in turn our telephony rights.
The NBL's on-line network, spearheaded by Jeff Dennis, our GM of Commercial, will increase data traffic by hopefully creating more fan friendly functionality and by introducing a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system across the NBL's on-line network. This has the potential to increase the rights value of this asset through the sale of advertising and video/audio/statistics content.
The end result, hopefully, is that the NBL, like FIBA worldwide, will create stronger personal relationships with our fans, increase sport loyalty while also providing stronger sponsor integration, better e-commerce occasions and new technology partnerships.
That is what I hope basketball and the NBL can do for technology."

Kieron Kilbride, general manager, FL [Football League] Interactive

"When it comes to football [soccer], whether through terrestrial TV, multichannel TV, the internet or other means, a variety of technological developments have helped to distribute the game to an ever growing and more globalised audience. In addition, the audience has been increasingly offered more choice within its own viewing experience, with matches available through a range of channels, across a variety of time slots and with a huge volume of supporting content and information. In recent years, more choice has also come to mean greater control, with supporters taking responsibility for when, where and how they interact with their clubs. The bottom line is that these advances have created, and continue to create, new opportunities to build value. Many of the same technological developments have, however, also given rise to substantial challenges, including the ongoing threat of piracy.
The changing technology has created tremendous opportunities to build a football club's profile and revenue. Clubs can currently through the internet establish cost effective platforms to communicate with supporters regardless of whether they are in local or distant communities. As such, official club websites have become important club media channels, which are authoritative and accurate, and when managed effectively can also be first with big news stories. Increased connection speeds have also ensured that content experiences have become increasingly rich, including the provision of exclusive club video content that can be used to generate advertising and / or subscription revenue. Finally, the same technology that has helped clubs to create first class communication channels has also provided a platform for ticket sales, merchandising and a great range of other club products and services.
Piracy is widely recognised as one of the most significant threats to the value that technological developments have helped to drive. Combating the activities of the pirates remains a huge and fast moving challenge, but in the meantime it is up to the game to ensure that the consequences are minimised by ensuring that packages of content provided through official channels are both of first class quality and add substantial value."

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