YouTube’s Modest Proposal: Sports Online (Almost) Instantly
Friday brings the opening of cricket’s wildly popular Indian Premier League and with it, hopefully for sports fans, a window into the future of international sports broadcasting. (NBC Sports executives, please keep reading).
IPL, which has quickly become one of the most popular forms of one of the world’s most popular sports, has new wrinkle this year. Google’s (GOOG) YouTube unit has purchased the world wide Internet rights to the event and plans to use them in a way that many sports fans wish NBC uses its rights to the Olympics. NBC ultimately put footage of all Olympic events on its Web site, but in many prominent cases it did not carry live footage online in an attempt to maximize its audience for prime time television.
