All Pro Sports Football Series/NBC is betting on pro football

All Pro Sports Football Series Four DVD Box Set
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The multi-award winning "All Pro Sports Football Series"

NBC hoping NFL, Internet will lead its comeback drive
Network stumbled through eight years without football
BARRIE MCKENNA
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
WASHINGTON — NBC is betting heavily on pro football -- on the air and on the Web -- as part of a strategy to return the once-dominant U.S. television network to ratings glory.
NBC, a unit of General Electric Co., yesterday unveiled a new sports website and acquired a leading fantasy sports site as part of a plan to leverage its return to football coverage this fall after an eight-year absence.
The moves come as all the major networks are preparing to launch their 2006-07 seasons amid continuing seepage of revenue to specialty channels and the Internet. NBC slipped to No. 3 in the ratings last season, boasting few of the top shows and routinely trailing rivals CBS and ABC.
All three networks are turning to the Internet to promote their shows and expand their advertising reach with audio podcasts, videocasts and new content. CBS, for example, began a live webcast of its CBS Evening News last night to mark the arrival of anchor Katie Couric to the show.
NBC executives acknowledged that the network has been an also-ran in the rapidly growing Internet sports market. NBCSports.com is not among the 20 most-visited sports sites -- a field dominated by Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN.com and News Corp's FoxSports.com. "This is a vibrant market, with dominance by our peers," agreed Gary Zenkel, executive vice-president of strategic partnerships for NBC Sports.
He said NBC's new website, slated to be unveiled in November, would focus heavily on the football. Last year, NBC struck a $600-million (U.S.) a year deal that gives it the rights to Sunday night games, two Super Bowls and a piece of the playoffs.
"This is going to be football heavy as we start," Mr. Zenkel said. "But it will expand to all the other major sports as we move along," he said.
The website will feature video and analysis from Sunday Night Football's on-air hosts John Madden, Jerome Bettis and Cris Collinsworth. There will also be blogs, e-mail questions and articles by a new roster of Web journalists.
Later, NBC plans to expand the website's coverage to nclude baseball, basketball, golf, tennis and the Olympics.
Sports is now big business for the networks, and a bright spot in an otherwise flat television market.
NBC generates about $50-million a year in on-line revenue from all of its websites, but it has an ambitious plan to grow that fourfold over the next two years. That's a small fraction of its total ad revenue. NBC Sports, which currently holds the rights to televise the Olympics, generates revenue of roughly $500-million a year. That triples to about $1.5-billion in Olympic years. Despite disappointing ratings, the Winter Games in February generated about $60-million in profit for NBC.
NBC Universal (which includes theme parks as well as movie production and distribution) generated a profit of $2.1-billion on revenue of $14.6-billion last year. Analysts expect a similar profit this year on $16.4-billion in revenue.
But NBC Sports has been on a downward slide in recent years. It lost the rights to air Major League Baseball games in 2000 and National Basketball Association games in 2002.
Also yesterday, NBC said it has acquired Allstar Stats Inc., based in Somers, N.Y., for an undisclosed sum. The company provides sports news, statistics and fantasy sports leagues at its Rotoworld.com and Sandbox.com sites.
"Knowing that fantasy is such an enormous driver of traffic and revenue in the on-line sports world, we wanted to get in aggressively in fantasy sports," Mr. Zenkel said. "With Rotoworld, there's a lot of fantasy competence that we can tap into immediately."
NBC said it plans to fold the fantasy sites into NBCSports.com. An estimated 15 million players a year join fantasy leagues, where they draft players, create teams and then track scores based on the actual performance of their players.
With files from Reuters.

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