FIS Ski Racing on Internet TV

I blogged about this more than a year ago when I first found MediaZone's coverage of FIS World Cup Ski Racing on the web. Now they've got competition. WCSN.com apprears to have secured the rights to most of the FIS season for a $4.95/month subscription fee for both same-day delayed (usually 6 hours later) streaming plus archived on-demand viewing. I'm an ex ski racer and easily got hooked.

The FIS World Championships were scheduled to start this weekend (first two events were postponed due to weather) and it did not appear that WCSN was providing coverage (though they never communicated that clearly on their web site) - a few Google strokes later and I found that MediaZone had the World Championships both live and delay for $19.95. Both WCSN and MediaZone use the Windows Media Player which can be flakey. If I were running one of these businesses I'd be looking at moving my infrastructure over to Flash as soon as I could. Flash just works.

Internet Broadcast Rights will create a whole new revenue stream for sports and events that have not been able to garner enough of an audience to make it on the traditional networks and cable systems. It will also keep the lawyers busy as the contacts for these rights must be getting extremely complicated.

What about VOD on cable? There's also no reason why content aggregators couldn't also try to get distribution on cable systems. Seems like the cable guys could significantly increase their revenues and possibly fend off IP-based video delivery if they could provide enough content with a reasonable search and discovery system. Would I be just as happy paying Comcast $19.95 for the FIS World Championships as I am MediaZone?

All I can say is thank you WCSN and MediaZone for pushing the edge of this new revolution of Internet TV - I'm enjoying every minute!