Inaugural Sports Business and Technology Summit Set to Showcase Tech and Television Improvements

The Inaugural Sports Business and Technology Summit, presented by Broadcasting and Cable, Multichannel News and TV Technology, is set to take place on June 19 in New York.  Top executives from NBC, ESPN, Fox, Turner and NBC will be present to discuss the ways monetize the new media savvy sports fan.
According to the Summits official website the panel will be set to discuss:

• The Sate of the Sports Business—Rights, Technology, Live Sports.
• Multiplatform, Multiscreen Experience—2nd screen and TV Everywhere
• Social TV—How Do You Engage Fans now?
• Sports Advertising
• 4k & Sports—The Future?

The Summit looks to provide a meeting of the minds to discover the best new ways to innovate an untapped internet market.  As technology changes so does the way fans interact with sports and this provides a new way for sports to create revenue.  

LeBron James is Hiring

LeBron James is currently looking to hire college interns for the spring, summer and fall semesters according to Chris Joseph of the Newtimes.  The internship is a real opportunity for college students to work for LeBron James by helping with his website LeBronJames.com.
James is currently seeking interns to work in the online content-development department as well as the digital sports marketing department.
This is a new step in sports technology and branding as James is technically hiring people to work for his own personal company all about himself.  Websites are now a way to help monetize an athlete's own personal brand and James is utilizing that in order to get a step above the competition.  In the ESPN 30 for 30 entitled "Broke," former NBA and NFL players spoke about how athletes compete everywhere even off the court, especially when it comes to money.
While, James may not need to monetize his off-court actions because of his sheer dominance of the game of basketball, he is surely taking every step to try to dominate off the court.

Change in Sports Marketing

As the baby boomers make their way out of the workplace and into retirement, the millenials are slowly sneaking up on the workforce and market area.  Sports teams have already started switching gears by marketing toward this new breed of sports fan.
According to Mandy Niad, a writer for Medill Reports Chicago, sports marketing teams already have targeted social media campaigns, events, promotions and enhanced in-game and at-home experiences.
The San Francisco Giants have managed to stay up with both the boomers and millenials because of the expectancy of crowds at games.  According to the article, the Giants understand that on Friday and Saturday nights they will have a younger, rowdier crowd than on Saturday and Sunday afternoons which tend to be more for the family atmosphere.
As technology continues to develop, there are numerous ways to maintain and monetize the new innovations that come with the sports marketing team.    

Advanced Statistics in the NBA

Ever since the Moneyball era of the Oakland Athletics other teams have tried to find success in Major League Baseball using the same method.  That method is advanced statistics that better show an athlete's worth than based off of traditional statistics.  This has transferred over to the world of professional basketball in the NBA.  Right now, the NBA is going through a 'Moneyball' era of its own trying to find a competitive advantage through adult statistics.  

The annual Sloan Sports Analytics Conference held at M.I.T illustrated the NBA's new advanced statistics era as 31 of the leagues 32 teams attended.  Only the Los Angeles Lakers were not in attendance.  This data-mining conference illustrates how valuable a player is to winning an NBA championship.  The goal of the conference and sports analytics is to come up with a single calculation to determine who is the best player in their respective sport.

Furthermore, the conference and advanced statistics in general increasingly changes how the public views the athletes.  No longer will athletes be looked at as a person but more as a commodity.       

MLB Umpires Need More Eyes

Accuracy has become one of the key principles during this age of technology in America and Major League Baseball is no exception.  Video replay has become more readily available now to viewers and reporters giving them more reasons to hate the umpire for blowing a call.  Tom Haudricourt, a sports writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, has called for the umpires to receive a fifth set of eyes. 

Hauricourt argues that it is long over-do for the MLB to put an umpire up in the booth to reverse any call that was made incorrectly on the field.  This could be the first stages of full replacement of human umpires that remain on field level.  The amount of video-coverage and video angles that is readily available at any given moment has moved the umpire blame game from he said, she said to concrete proof of a blown call.
The main reason to keep human umpires involved with the game is to keep the human element involved in the game.  This lack of willingness to change on MLB's part, comes at an inopportune time.  The MLB needs to go with how society goes and what society wants is 100 percent accuracy.

Sports Yapper: Creating an Online Sports Bar

Sports Yapper is one of the first businesses to try to utilize the social internet setting to create a space for sports fans.  In short, Sports Yapper is a place to go where you can talk sports with other sports fans.  The goal of Sports Yapper, according to co-founder Eric Goldstein, was to get away from Facebook, Twitter and texting.
The app, which is for both iPhone and Android, is essentially an online sports bar minus the drinks.  By giving a virtual space to voice an opinion about a sporting event that is on helps build a community where fans can go.
Sports Yapper is the first to harness this idea using the 'Game On' technology to essentially generate an ongoing commentary of a live sporting event.  However, I have yet to see it utilized in that manner yet.  The idea of generating a commentary of a sporting event by fans is one that has yet to be released by the media as a means to tell a story.

    

Building an Online Audience

The Brooklyn Nets' success of re-branding utilized a number of social media marketing strategies as well as the use of technology.  The YES network wisely sponsored a small-startup business called The Brooklyn Game, an online news outlet for everything Brooklyn Nets related.  I had the pleasure to work for this company and it provided Nets fans not only in-depth coverage but a way to see the full Brooklyn Nets fan-base on a regular basis.  

Both the YES Network and The Brooklyn Game utilized Twitter in order to see how far the Nets brand could go.  During Nets live-game broadcasts the announcers would reveal segment called, 'Where Brooklyn At?'  Fans would submit a picture of themselves wear Nets apparel in a remote location such as Europe, Alaska, and even Africa.  As for the Brooklyn Game, they published a series a of tweets, using storify, called 'Rep Your Nets.'  This application gave The Brooklyn Game essentially free content to utilize in their story-telling.  

The Brooklyn Game would collect tweets throughout the game that would develop into a game story with fan commentary.  This helped create a a large online community following The Brooklyn Game as they now became part of the story.