More Videos from FIS World Championships

Here's a great site with video interviews with some of the racers like Lindsey Kildow, Bode Miller, Julia Macuso and Swedish stars Jens Byggmark and Anja Parson. I can't find the source home page (one of the issues with a Flash-based site) but make sure to click on the home icon and check out the reporter on the Are 2007 Update. (Update: I found a link to the home page on Are2007.com)

Looks like the Men's Super G should be on in the morning. It's very cool to be able to experience something happening across the ocean.

Nothing yet on Flickr or YouTube (searching tags for Are, 2007, FIS). It would be cool to be able to add some citizen/fan reporting to the virtual web viewing experience.

More Links:

Are2007.com

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!