Making it pay
According to Simon Van Wyk, managing director of Web design company HotHouse Interactive, commercialisation remains the holy grail of content-hungry Web sites. Having cut his teeth on a Rugby League site in the late 90's, Van Wyk went on to build a Web site supporting the Sydney 2000 Olympics, and currently works on i7, a joint project with AOL which provides support to Australia television network Channel 7.
-The Olympics site was an amazing experience just because of the sheer volume of information that was poured into the site, and the hits it received in such a short period of time," Van Wyk says. -We didn't do any streaming because we weren't allowed to, but the traffic levels were so high it would have been difficult anyway because from a logistics point of view we would have killed the bandwidth."
However, Van Wyk believes video streaming is not necessarily the key to online sports coverage, pointing out that those most likely to search the Web for information are committed fans who are looking for data they cannot find elsewhere.
-Sports sites are expensive because they require a lot of high quality exclusive content, and it is still difficult to find corporate advertisers interested in funding it," Van Wyk says. -There are also people already making money out of sports coverage and they are interested in maintaining control of the market."
There are a series of approaches which appear to be breaking ground in the brave new world of online sports coverage. In the post dot-com Web site wash-out, the few surviving stragglers are a mixture of paid, and joint production Web sites which share content with other media ventures, or are direct spin-offs from clubs.
At one end of the scale is www.theworldgame.com.au an editorial-rich soccer Web site associated with sports coverage on the SBS television station. Given its opportunity to share revenue with television advertising and cross promotional opportunities, www.theworldgame.com.au is not under intense pressure to commercialise on its own.
During the World Cup, the site will run media-rich, off-field coverage, as well as regular written updates on the event's progress. However, Paul Vincent, business development manager for new media at SBS, says the site is far from simply an adjunct to the television coverage.
-I don't think the way forward is through broadband, because the Internet is not simply another path to traditional coverage," Vincent says. -We are learning how to use interactivity on the Web. It is a test bed for what we will need to be able to do when everybody gets their [digital] set top boxes."
According to Vincent, the greatest challenge of media convergence is the structural integration, the changes to work practices and information gathering practices in such an organisation.
-Once the convergence takes place in the back end, migrating into a new medium should not mean you have to duplicate costs," Vincent says. -People are looking for the same thing across all media - people writing well about soccer - the fact is that with interactive media like the Internet and digital television we will need to know how to engage the audience, and enable them to engage each other."
While the site is enjoying significant success at the moment thanks to the World Cup, it is designed to appeal more broadly to the Australian soccer fan, which means covering the European leagues as well as the local competition.
-An overwhelming majority of fans want to know about the English Premier League, after that the Italian League is the next most popular and certainly attracts the most vociferous supporters to the online forum," explains theworldgame's editor Stuart Matters. -Most of the traffic comes in at 9 am on a Monday morning when people are just getting into work."
