Sport & Internet With Enthusiasm, Pragmatism.

Last November, Sportel forced its participants to take into serious consideration the impact that the Internet will have on sports rights, and the way in which consumers will use the Internet to enhance TV sports viewing.

These were subjects that many market participants would have preferred to avoid for two reasons: one, content owners do not have clear ideas on how to license Internet rights, and two, TV networks have not yet discovered how to monetize the digital signal and interactivity.

Top-level representatives from the sports and television industries gathered in Monte Carlo, as they have for the past 11 years, at Sportel, now the largest annual market for sports TV rights. This principality also organizes SportelAmerica, which takes place in the spring in Miami Beach, Florida.

At Sportel, two seminars received particular attention because they promised to stress the pragmatic, though convoluted, state of sports rights in the Internet era. "Sports TV and New Media -- Creating Opportunities, Adding Value and Enhancing the Sports Experience" was a roundtable discussion held on the first day of the market. "Sports and Television in the Multimedia Age" was held two days later.

During the first session, Guy Blair, an engineer who directs the Intel Architecture Labs in Oregon, explained some of the enhancements that digital technology and the Internet could offer to sports TV programmers. Blair's presentation sparked a conversation among the five panelists, one of whom was a lawyer specializing in intellectual property rights.

The Intel Architecture Labs were created by the Intel Corporation to find new uses for microchips in the television industry and, conversely, to explore whether consumer television would require the development of special chips. For these experiments, Intel Labs chose sports -- soccer in particular -- as the programming drive.

The concept introduced by Blair consists of placing two dedicated digital TV cameras in a stadium for the interactive soccer game. The digital images produced by these cameras are electronically converted into animation so that viewers can monitor the action, select any angle and, if desired, change the results of the game -- essentially a virtual "what if" game.

However, even though Blair stated that "every pixel could be monetized," the panelists were not able to propose a workable financial model nor a viable way of securing the rights to these sports viewing "enhancements." To the panelists, it was also unclear whether viewers would be willing to change the traditional passive TV experience into one of active participation.

The Sportel floor proved to be a forum for talk about how the discouraging time-difference of the Sydney Olympics make sports via the Internet a reality. It was also noted, however, that only four percent of adult Americans sought Olympic information online (approximately 50 percent of U.S. TV households are connected the Net). In comparison, 58 percent of Americans sought Olympic information from television, 12 percent from newspapers and seven percent from radio.

Nonetheless, even the sites for sports that were not related to the Olympics registered a noticeable increase of visitors. For example, it was pointed out that last September, ESPN.com (one of the top ten sports sites) registered over 7.5 million viewers, compared with 6.2 million the previous month.

The U.S. basketball league, the NBA, recently produced a series of programs exclusively for NBA.com which feature highlights on the Web 30 minutes after games. On the international level, considering that 37 percent of NBA.com traffic is outside of the U.S., the site will provide commentary in Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and German.

Sportel attracted more than 600 companies from 70 countries with a total of 1,500 participants. Sportel also christened the Grimaldi Forum, an ocean-front, high-tech conference center built near the Grand Hotel. The Forum's glass windows made the exhibition hall sunny while -- like an iceberg -- the larger part of the structure (containing meeting rooms and offices) was constructed well below sea-level.

Some grumblings were directed at the Forum's technical inadequacies. Complaints were heard from a few French delivery services about the lack of a suitable docking area. Attendees also complained about the long detour required to walk from the main hotels to the Forum when the connecting Japanese garden was closed.