Broadband Sports

» see broadbandsports.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

broadband sports was a north-american sports-media product. the official sites of nba and nfl stars were not in my orbit on a turkish dial-up in 2000. i was reading donanimhaber and trying to get counter-strike to run at a passable framerate on a pc i had built from parts. the american web's idea of paying $60 million to operate hundreds of athlete homepages was distant from anything i would have used or registered for.

the company started in 1998 in santa monica as athlete direct, founded by tyler j. goldman. the model was simple to describe and brutally hard to monetize. acquire the digital rights to a famous athlete's name and likeness. build them an official website with stats and forums and merch, then sell ads against the traffic at the scale of hundreds of athletes in parallel. by the late 1990s the portfolio had grown to more than 250 athlete sites covering nba, nfl, nhl, mlb, tennis, and racing. troy aikman, kobe bryant, kevin garnett, brett favre, mia hamm, and anna kournikova were among the names with broadband sports addresses. the company rebranded to broadband sports as it expanded into general programming.

the funding total ran past $60 million across multiple rounds. in november 1999, peak confidence, broadband sports offered $53 million in stock for stats inc, a data provider it wanted to bring in-house. the offer fell through. in september 2000 the ceo publicly stated that the company was financially stable and did not need to ipo. on 16 february 2001, five months later, the company laid off all 160 employees and shut every athlete portal down.

~ the case file ~

~ what the model was ~

athlete-as-portal was a 1999 thesis. give a popular athlete a co-branded site, route fans into it. monetize the resulting eyeballs through display advertising and merch affiliate revenue. the athletes got a cut and the portal kept the rest. the volume came from the long tail of fan loyalty across a couple of hundred names. it was the model espn would eventually run inside its own brand, except broadband sports was trying to do it as a standalone network with no editorial brand of its own.

the problem the deck did not solve was who reads two hundred and fifty athlete sites every week. fan attention concentrated on the top names, and the top names had their own teams that already had their own digital strategies. the long-tail athletes brought small audiences that did not move ad inventory. the math worked at the deck level and not at the page-view level.

~ the espn deal ~

on 20 november 2000 broadband sports and espn announced a partnership to jointly create and program an athletes channel inside espn.com. that was supposed to be the credibility moment that turned the portfolio into a destination. it was also supposed to clean up the ad-sales motion by letting espn's salesforce handle the inventory.

twelve weeks later the company was gone. the partnership had not started monetizing at the volume the model needed. by february 2001 the broader dot-com ad market had collapsed enough that the runway calculations did not survive contact with the next sales-pipeline review. shut-down was the responsible call.

~ the slide ~

five months between "we are financially stable" in september and "we are gone" in february is fast even for the dot-com bust. the spread tells you something. either the ceo was lying in september, or the ad-sales market caved so completely between september and january that no realistic plan survived. the second reading is closer to the truth. the post-april-2000 nasdaq drop had collapsed both the funding market and the cpm market in parallel. companies that needed both pipes to keep flowing ran out of options around the turn of 2001, and broadband sports was in the first wave of casualties.

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