Sports Web ventures are on deck

Holy cow!" The familiar exclamation of the late Chicago Cubs broadcaster Harry Caray may describe the opportunities inherent to sports-related Web sites as well as a great play at Wrigley Field. But to keep the game going, the developers of these sites need access to some very deep pockets and a reliable network infrastructure that's always ready to play ball.

Fox Sports Online and CNN/SI, a joint venture of CNN and Sports Illustrated, are the latest entrants into the big league of sports Web sites. They joined ESPN SportsZone and CBS SportsLine, among many others, in playing to fans who thrive on event coverage, breaking news and interactive entertainment such as fantasy leagues.

Stellar performance by their predecessors may have lured these newcomers to the medium. SportsFan Online, for example, is growing at the rate of about 10% a month, which amounts to between 9 million and 10 million hits to its Web site. And advertising revenue on InterZine's iGOLF nearly tripled in 1997 compared with 1996 levels.

But don't misread these impressive statistics. Virtually none of the major sports sites has reached profitability yet. Still, the huge market potential has these producers betting on the future of the Net.

"Right now, the game is not about profitability," says Jonathan Goldman, executive vice president of SportsFan Enterprises. "It's about positioning to be in the right place when the market really develops."

The front line The foundation for any on-line site rests on the network architecture's shoulders. Some Web masters build their own infrastructure, produce the content, maintain the site and rely on an Internet service provider for the connection. Others focus solely on providing the content and leave operating issues in the ISP's hands.

In either case, a business' success rides on the stability of the network carrying its traffic. "In our business, you have various peak times," explains Ken Dotson, vice president of marketing for CBS SportsLine. "You have to be able to build a system that can sustain high-traffic events. For example, we have the Olympics and March Madness coming up. Those bring massiveamounts of traffic to the site. The infrastructure has to be scalable so that it can grow as volume grows and handle substantial peaks."

Failure to plan for the ups and downs of network traffic is likely to result in costly and highly visible system outages similar to commercial ISPs' past experiences. Customers left those ISPs in droves when system crashes denied on-line access. Once scorned, sophisticated customers may not revisit slow Web sites or those with outages.

In such an unforgiving climate, capacity rules. It's not just an issue of delivering razzle-dazzle on-line features. System capacity is vital to network reliability. UUNet, the world's largest ISP, increased its capacity by installing OC-12 links between its major hubs.

"It's important to understand the architecture of your service provider's backbone," says Dave Foster, UUNet's vice president and general manager of Web services business. "UUNet's backbone combines switching and routing. The impact of that is, if a particular link fails, the recovery takes place at the switch without disturbing the routing fabric. It will be relatively transparent to the end users."

Issues of system reliability run the operational gamut from hardware and software to power supplies. But the first level of defense is a redundant network. To be an effective safeguard, redundancy must extend beyond the architecture of the ISP into every leg of the transmission path.

"If you're running a site yourself and you have a single connection to your backbone provider, then no matter how well the network runs, if somebody digs in the wrong place and cuts your connection, you're badly out of luck," Foster says. "One remedy is to get multiple connections with physically diverse routing from your facility to your backbone provider. Another option is to have someone else host your site who already has multiple connections."

If you build it... Sports has long been the stuff that dreams were made of. The heyday of radio was driven largely by coverage of favorite teams, including the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Cleveland Indians. Thanks to the great American pastime, radio's popularity soared. Sports also propelled television's success, with some of the first color broadcasts featuring the boys of summer.

Little wonder then that sports is one of the most widely explored areas on the Internet. Unfortunately, popularity does not translate immediately into positive cash flow. Constant funding pressure can leave sites scrambling to survive. "We have to fight all the time," says Tom Hagopian, president and chief operating officer of InterZine. "We don't have established brands, so it makes it difficult to be noticed out there. We're building all our brands from scratch. It's a rewarding proposition once you get there, but it's a costly one."

Some of InterZine's investors-America Online, which owns a substantial slice of the company, and Tele-Communications Inc.-are intimately familiar with Web hosting. As a result, maintaining investor confidence is especially important for InterZine.

InterZine has geared its team of Web site products mostly toward participatory sports. Its first was iGolf, followed by mountain sports, including iSKI and iBIKE. Last year, the company added iRACE for coverage of auto racing. The package is rounded out with Sports Business Daily, an industry publication.

InterZine differs from the rest of the pack in that it combines these events in a single bundle. Instead of relying solely on advertising and subscription fees, InterZine has widened its revenue stream by marketing all the bells and whistles that go along with a good game.

"Participatory sports offers a wide range of content and revenue opportunities," Hagopian says. "Golf, for example, isn't just who won the tournament, but it's instruction, improving your game, travel and merchandise. There are a lot of football fans, but they don't buy many footballs. They don't necessarily travel to games to the same degree that golfers buy equipment or play golf."

Fans of the nationwide talk radio show SportsFan Tonight can connect to SportsFan Online to follow hockey, baseball, football and basketball. As the country's largest syndicated sports talk radio show, SportsFan brings a heavy following to the on-line community.

But even a large following can't promise Web success. "Until the Internet truly becomes a mainstream media channel that stands on its own like TV, it is critical that serious players aggressively explore strategic partnerships," says Goldman. "Without the traditional media partnerships, it's difficult to drive enough dollars to the on-line area to cover the expense of producing a high-quality product. The road to profitability certainly lies through either partnerships that deliver accelerated distribution and visibility, or through a huge investment to buy distribution and visibility," he says.

"The advertising marketplace is beginning to take the Internet very seriously," Goldman adds. "That is a good thing, but it also means that the folks who are fringe players are going to be increasingly challenged to survive. Advertisers are demanding high numbers of Web visits, which are commensurate with some of the bigger sites in each category. In other words, if you're the 15th largest site in sports or anything else, it's going to be hard to make any money."

An uphill race With the global acceptance of the Internet, can fiscal success be far in the offing? Until this new media reaches that plateau, Web players must peddle hard and fast to keep up with the changing times. They will have to continuously reinvent their sites in response to customer demands in a way that is completely foreign to the television and radio experience.

"The rate of change is far greater for the Internet than it is for more traditional media," CBS SportsLine's Dotson explains. "Radio and TV obviously continue to progress in terms of technology. But they are relatively mature medium.

"The Internet is still in its infancy, and the rate of growth and change is phenomenal," he says. "A lot of things we're doing today weren't even on the horizon six months ago in terms of technology or opportunity. Keeping pace with that dynamic, rapidly evolving industry is the challenge."

In the early days, Internet sites resembled little more than bulletin boards that were more akin to vanity pages than reliable sources of information. Setting up the stationary graphics and a few lines of type required merely a Web server and an access provider.

Now that era is as passe as a 12-inch screen full of black-and-white television. To keep customers logged on, Web sites have to entertain with animation, audio output and multimedia possibilities. They must keep content fresh to survive.

"Web pages are very often dynamically generated," says Dave Foster, UUNet's vice president and general manager, Web services business. "Instead of having the page just sit there, you may generate a custom page based on who is looking at it and what they're interested in. For instance, on a sports site, I might pick my three favorite teams. Whenever I log on, the site pulls together a bunch of related news stories and statistics and displays them for me.

"To do that, you need to run a database server as well as a pure Web server because the information that's being pulled together is typically stored in a database."

The smorgasbord of equipment needed to maintain a competitive edge likely would include a commerce engine for credit card acceptance, catalog display and a shopping-cart model to track purchases.

To keep the sponsors happy, tack on an ad rotator to ensure that competing advertisements don't appear at the same time. A chat and threaded discussion server will bulk up interactivity among Web visitors. The chat rooms link current on-line visitors, while the threaded discussion area receives comments that the Web host can respond to any time in the near future.

Music videos are a natural application for streaming media-the blending of audio and video in an on-line format. Multicasting, another application, is ideal for live performances.

"The way the normal Internet works is that if there are 4000 people listening to someone's voice, there are actually 4000 copies of that data being sent to each person, even though the copies are exactly the same," Foster explains. "In multicasting, you transmit one copy of the stream, and it flows across the backbone network. Then copies are made at the points of presence where the dial-up users actually access it."

The large chunk of change needed to buy and install all these routers may make it cost prohibitive for some Internet service providers. Such high-tech applications may not be possible for some ISPs, but they are a yardstick to measure expectations for the future.