Olympic resolve: Why sports dot-coms are jumping through rings for media accreditation

The online sports media doesn't have it easy. Reporters can even have trouble getting in to stadia to cover events. But with the IOC warming to some prominent dot-coms, is that about to change? Leon Palmer assesses the form of the various players bidding for glory...

Last week, online sports media received a boost when Sportal.com and Sports.com gained official International Olympic Committee (IOC) accreditation to cover the 2002 winter games. In a sector dominated by global players - TV heavyweights such as the BBC, NBC and News Corp, as well as national newspapers and hundreds of sports magazines - getting to cover (albeit not broadcast) any major sporting event is a big achievement. The decision should be seen as a major milestone in the slow process of gaining credibility for online sports media. But what have they had to do to get this far? Are traditional sports media and their fresh-faced online rivals operating on a level playing field? When you look at the short history of online sports companies they have done well to get this far in such a competitive market. Online players have never received IOC accreditation until now. According to Gavin Chittick, CFO at Sports.com, governing bodies like football's FIFA and the IOC represent the establishment and consider internet companies as young upstarts. However, he believes there is a "valid and important audience which is very keen to get information from the internet". But while the TV networks already have huge established audiences and equally huge sums of money to wave around, online sports media have to rely on lobbying and strategic alliances to gain favour. For example, Sports.com built and maintained the French Olympic Committee's Sydney 2000 web site - and was paid £1m for doing so. This gave them tremendous respect within the IOC as a whole and it is this respect that did as much as anything to get them five places at the Winter Olympics. Sports.com, through lobbying and the ability to deliver a popular web site at the right time and in the right place, was given a seat at the top table of sports coverage. So they can't broadcast any action from the Games - but that would be a miracle at this stage. Rebecca Ulph, analyst at Forrester Research, reckons recent developments are "a step in the right direction but [these companies] are still unproven until they deliver good content". The main player blocking their route has a proven track record to deliver good content and it pays the IOC heavily to do so. A massive portion of the $2.6bn in revenue the Sydney Olympics garnered came from one US broadcaster, NBC. And until the online companies can match this kind of figure and the TV quality that comes with it, traditional media will remain top of the coverage league. Sports.com rival Sportal.com is putting up its own brave fight. The agreement it reached with UEFA to sponsor the Euro 2000 football championships is rumoured to have cost the three-year-old company £10m. Part of the deal was also to host the official web site. The heavily Sportal-branded www.euro2000.org went on to become one of the most heavily trafficked web sites ever but at some cost to Sportal. Whether this gamble paid off has yet to be seen but it gives some idea of the lengths online companies will go to to get a strong foothold in the market. In the long run, new media companies will have to find other ways of impressing governing bodies like FIFA, the IOC and UEFA. At the moment, these organisations don't want to upset existing partners such as NBC and ITV, according to Forrester's Ulph. She said: "They are pricing many young internet players out of the market. The sports governing bodies are over enthusiastic about the prices they can charge for their sports events." Technology is also a big issue. From the broadcasting point of view it's a Catch-22 situation. Bodies such as the IOC won't make online sports companies a realistic offer until a track record of content provision is there. And that depends on the success and availability of broadband access technologies. At the moment the signs are not good. Not enough people have broadband to make delivery of events user-friendly and of suitable quality. It's no surprise, then, that at the recent IOC World Conference on New Media and Sport the IOC conference executive chairman, Richard Pound, referred to the financial gulf between old and new sports media. "I don't see a big revenue stream in the short term through the internet. There isn't really a reliable revenue model," he said. So is the high-tech sports push worthwhile? Technology providers such as Cisco and Intel are spreading their logos all over the world of sport, but ironically high-tech sports media companies may not even be officially invited to cover many of these events. (See http://www.silicon.com/a39223 .) For the time being, the likes of Sportal.com and Sports.com are happy just to get to go to the 2002 Winter Olympics and if that goes well accreditation at the summer games two years later will surely be a formality. The internet can only increase exposure to major sporting events. At the same time, it could also destroy the value of the TV rights that bankroll global sporting events. As the technology improves and web audience figures grow, the question becomes how long internet upstarts will be able to accept playing second fiddle to the BBCs and NBCs of this world? The future size of their respective wallets will probably hold the key to that.