Just
over 75 years ago, the country’s first radio station (KDKA) aired the medium’s first professional baseball broadcast — a
game from Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field between the hometown Pirates and the
neighboring Philadelphia Phillies. Providing reportage that was nearly live,
that revolutionary August 5, 1921 broadcast forever changed the way sports
information was to be disseminated, and more importantly, it created a
marketable demand for away-game coverage. But because the press boxes in most
ballparks didn’t have telephone lines (the cost of long distance charges would
have been prohibitive anyway), most of baseball’s distance broadcasts were
“re-creations”– where a telegraph wire from the ballpark spit out
pitch-by-pitch statistics to an announcer (like a young Ronald Reagan)
comfortably ensconced in a radio station studio. While the announcers and their
shills in the ballpark duped listeners with an imminently entertaining display
of news reporting and theatrical performance, they also created the need for
better and more timely coverage in the daily papers and eventually, on
television. The beauty, of course, was that sports fans could now follow their
favorite team without a trip to the ballpark. “In a funny sense, we’re just
re-creating the re-creation days today,” says Instant Sports founder David
Barstow, “only with a computer.”
Realtime Without Radio
For nearly two Major League Baseball seasons, Barstow’s World Wide Web site(http://www.
InstantSports.com) has brought simple 1921 re-creation
technology to a complicated computer age, allowing any team’s fan, anywhere, to
follow along with the game in nearly real time at no charge. In Barstow’s
system, a data collector at the ballpark sends, via modem, a pitch-by-pitch
account that is encoded into a computer database and broadcast on the Instant
Sports site just one to two minutes behind real play — in either a text
account or at an animated Instant Ballpark. Already, advertisers, technology
experts, and sports pundits are calling the Austin-based firm a leader in next
phase of the “sports broadcasting revolution.” And if the site’s 50,000
visitors a week aren’t proof enough that Instant Sports is on the ball, try
last July’s announcement that Barstow’s technology had been awarded a pair of
patents — making him the proprietary owner of the broad rights to broadcast a
live event with a computer-coded description destined for a computer
simulation.
“The essence is a dynamic database about sporting events while they are going
on,” say Barstow, a Stanford graduate and Ph.D. in artificial intelligence who
created the technology as a hobby. “The information not only reflects the
current situation, but also a representation of every play and pitch that led
to the situation. So we have a complete detailed history of that game up
through any real-time situation that can be transmitted through a number of
distribution mechanisms — be it interactive television, wireless pagers and
computers, or home computers with Internet access.”
For now, Barstow and partner Tom Fornoff are using the patent almost
exclusively for the Instant Sports site, where a computer database creates a
new Web page for each play, in each game — amounting to nearly 6,000 new pages
a day. The key to Barstow’s system is that baseball itself employs only 78
possible plays, which allows a domain-specific language to form a narrow string
of raw statistical data provided by baseball statistics megaprovider STATS,
INC. in much the same way the teletype providers gave re-creation announcers
codes like “S1C” for “strike one on the corner.” Baseball may be slow, contends
Barstow, but typically something has happened in the minute or so it takes for
the browser to check for a new development. And because the ballpark action is
condensed into such a sleek data string, each play, and therefore entire games,
are cheaply saved in Instant Sport’s memory for recall and replay minutes,
days, or even years after the initial live event.
“Our research shows that most fans sit and watch the game as it happens, but
there’s a VCR control panel that allows the fan that arrived midgame to go
backwards and see how the four runs from the top of the first happened,” says
Fornoff, a marketing expert who honed his skill with IBM for 13 years before
joining Barstow last spring. “Then he can pick up the live coverage again
without missing anything. A lot of our fans told us they don’t want the final
score right away. They wanted to watch the game from the beginning, and feel
the tension and excitement.”
Last season, when Instant Sports officially launched with the 1995 All-Star
game, the tension could only barely be felt through the basic text description
the firm offered. But with the widespread use of Java, a recent Web language
development that combines interactivity and animation, Instant Sports started
this season with the Instant Ballpark — a patented computer field that moves
the ball, runners, and position players around the diamond as the action is
downloaded. The field itself (called an applet), takes five minutes to load on
most Windows 95- equipped PCs and is so complicated, says Barstow, that
Netscape chose Instant Ballpark as a key Java product to test the compatibility
of its standard 3.0 browser update. But even as advanced as the technology is,
this is no field of dreams. In fact, the actual diamond graphics are more like
a crude Atari or Intellivision rendering than something you’d expect on a Sega
or Nintendo, let alone typical PC baseball software.
“This is acknowledged as the best there is right now using today’s browser
technology,” Fornoff says of the Ballpark, while promising that by next season
the Java applet download time will be significantly decreased. “But the key to
Dave’s patent is that we won’t have to change the data feed at all to deliver
Sega-style animation when it’s available. That’ll just be a matter of lining up
the right delivery mechanism, not the game data.”
In theory, Instant Sport’s aesthetic problems could also be solved by the
introduction of still or moving photos of the players — images owned and
licensed by Major League Baseball (MLB). Fornoff says he’s been in negotiations
with MLB itself for months, in talks that have moved along “nicely, but
slowly.” But the timing couldn’t be any better for their discussions, since a
pair of federal lawsuits between the National Basketball Association (NBA) and
America Online (AOL) questions the rights to the crux of Instant Sport’s system
— the actual live broadcasting of professional sports scores. As such, the NBA
recently began a campaign to claim that they own the proprietary rights to
their association’s scores, including the concurrent updates during the course
of league events. In July, the NBA sued Motorola for transmitting live scores
to its digital pager customers. The contention of the pager firm, and similarly
AOL in their separate counter suit against the NBA, is that sports scores are
“factual” and “news,” thereby covered by the First Amendment. Although a New
York federal court’s ruling in favor of the NBA in the Motorola case has been
stayed pending an appeal, the court’s decision is being viewed by legal and
multimedia experts as a potential landmark that has already paved the way for
the outcome of the AOL suits.
Although Fornoff contends Instant Sports is in a different legal boat than AOL
because STATS uses an accredited member of the press working at the stadiums
under the auspices of Major League Baseball, he also believes that the
company’s best route to avoid the lawsuits (and generally beef up business)
would be to seek to become an official MLB licensee, at the same time taking
advantage of the league’s ties to major sponsors. This way, Instant Sports
would enhance their own service with properties (photos, logos, etc.) of the
league, and at the same time, set up better barriers for unauthorized real-time
competitors.
“It’s just good business for us not to take sides,” Fornoff says. “The leagues
are telling us we add a lot of value to the game, in new products and new ways
to get through to the international audiences and those that work late or can’t
otherwise catch games on television. So they [MLB] see the value of our
technology. And we’re lining up with the league assuming it’s good business to
work with them rather than against them. On the other hand, if it turns out
that legally they can’t stop people from reporting realtime data it can only
open up the market for us. So we feel we are very well-positioned either
way.”
Regardless of the outcome of the AOL and NBA lawsuits, Instant Sports may
actually have a jump on other potential licensee contenders in that the firm’s
only other online product this year — an online scoreboard — ran within the
Florida Marlin’s homepage, and therefore has been officially sanctioned by a
Major League Baseball team already. “Being associated with the Marlins can’t
hurt our cause, but from our point of view, the thing we wanted most is just to
have the rules settled,” says Fornoff. “However it settles out, we’ll have
value to add.”
Marketing From
Tech Town
Austin has had its own value to add as Instant Sports’s home town. With localproviders OnRamp Access housing their servers and local Web developers
providing freelance support on the Java applets and data modes, Instant
Baseball’s creators say Austin has turned out to be a surprisingly productive
center for every aspect of their business other than sales and marketing — the
area that has most directly affected their financial bottom line after the
initial design of the patented data system.
“From a technical side, Austin’s been a good fit,” says Barstow. “But it’s not
a media town. Part of the challenge is to find the right kinds of alliances
with sports media companies, which is a lot easier to find in New York, Los
Angeles or San Francisco. So we’re traveling to the coasts quite a bit.
Unfortunately, a lot of this is a media proposition and Austin can feel like
the media boonies. We don’t even have a professional baseball team here!”
It’s Instant Sport’s focus on the marketing side of the business, say the Web
experts, that has made the site a virtual household name despite what the
pundits once considered a relatively small demographic marketplace of diehard
baseball fans displaced from their hometowns and fantasy (rotisserie) league
players looking for statistics. Simply by hiring a New York publicity firm to
tout the product in off-line magazines and newspapers like The New York
Times, USA Today, and Newsweek, Fornoff says Instant Sports
has nearly doubled its hits per week. “The day we launched, we had a story in
The New York Times about our All-Star game coverage. And while
online can be an overwhelming place to find new sites, we’ve found the off-line
publicity to be invaluable, he adds. “With just Newsweek, The Discovery
Channel and Good Morning America we’ve seen significant jumps.”
In the short term, Fornoff says he’s looking for the overwhelmingly positive
publicity and hits-proven user loyalty to spur advertising sales for the
individual page and the animated field’s back fence. “We’re absolutely
generating revenue,” says Fornoff. “We’ve been selling ads to consumer brands
like Ace Hardware, Microsoft, IBM, and AT&T because these types of brands
are starting to recognize the value of getting through to the upscale Internet
customer — one who has computers, and spends money. And because our service
generates so many pages, and so many page impressions that contain their [the
customer’s] ad, we’ve had a good value pitch for potential advertisers.”
Although they refuse to give specifics, Instant Sport’s partners aren’t shy
about goals of eventually becoming an Internet publisher and of using the
patents to collect money from other websites who use their information and
packaging. And despite their success at branding Instant Sport’s name, Fornoff
and Barstow say that as a provider the actual typing of `Instant Sports’ name
into the browser will be less important to the company than the fact that the
system in use will have been provided by them. “Our aim is to serve the
industry, so our name may have to take back seat to the publishers we’re
helping,” says Fornoff. “Today we’re on the publishing side of an entertainment
product. We think our model will move towards being a producer of content, like
Starwave, [the company] who produces the [official] NFL and NBA sites.”
Off-Season Instant Replay
With the World Series approaching, it would seem that Instant Sport’simmediate goal would be to find ways to keep their audience’s attention in the
off season. The Fall Classic itself should be no problem, because despite the
offering of just one nightly game rather than the usual 14, usage during last
year’s Series and All-Star game indicated only a slight drop-off. Originally,
in a series of July press releases, Instant Sports announced intent to cross
over into college football and basketball coverage (the two sports that
attracted the most post-baseball radio attention in he Twenties). Now, within
weeks of their planned off season launch, Instant Sports may be hedging their
bets. “The college football product is nearly complete,” says Fornoff. “We’re
just in the midst of how we’re going to roll it out and package it. As we
change the model of what values the company delivers, we’ve got to be more
careful with our approach. We’ve also talked about the importance of lining up
the rights appropriately, and there’s another couple of stars we want to line
up in the sky correctly before we launch this service.”
As for the college basketball product, Barstow is willing to concede the
announcement may have come before they knew for sure if the technology could
work. “It’s a more fluid sport,” he says. “Baseball has a sequence of discrete
events, so there’s a pause for the reporters to enter information as it
happens. Football is similarly workable, but basketball and hockey are a little
more challenging technically.”
So what’s there to do for the Instant Sports regular inherently frustrated by
the off season? “Our motto is `any game, any time, anywhere’, so we expect
that, as they did last season, a lot of our visitors will be checking in and
replaying old games,” says Fornoff. “We’ll be doing some special events, but
baseball is a big sport and with the product we have, we’re already negotiating
with products and sponsors for next year’s offering. We’d rather not have off
time, but we also aren’t willing to launch a service that’s not complete, not
properly marketed, and not properly lined up with the rights holders.”
Instant Sport’s handling of the off season appears to be a risky approach, say
insiders, but it could pay off if attention paid to improving coverage further
cements Instant Sports reputation as the baseball site. Already the firm
is promising more user-specific statistics next season. On a wider scale, the
company has game plans that should further increase personalized service and
address the growth of cable capabilities and direct satellite outlets. “We have
a fairly broad patent,” says Barstow. “So our strategy is that because we do
this better than anybody else, there is a real value in us doing it. The patent
helps us protect that piece of the market, but our focus will be on doing what
we do even better. And so ultimately, our goal is to build a business around
the technology and be the key to the sports broadcasting revolution. How that
plays out, only the future can determine.”
And because even the latest technological breakthroughs have precedent,
Instant Sport’s best-case scenario may just be a future as influential as
radio’s past. n
This article appears in October 11 • 1996 and October 11 • 1996 (Cover).