If that sales pitch convinces you, the HBO subscriber, to fire up HBO Go and check it out for yourself, then my apologies. You can’t see the show on HBO’s excellent digital service, because HBO doesn’t have the rights to show it there.

That’s because unlike nearly every original show HBO airs, “Hard Knocks” isn’t actually an HBO show.

It’s a co-production with NFL Films, and NFL Films owns the show’s digital rights, including mobile rights. And HBO Go, for the purposes of rights deals, is considered a mobile service.**

So that’s annoying. On the positive side, “Hard Knocks” appears to be the only glaring hole in the HBO Go lineup. So its absence makes you appreciate just how comprehensive the HBO digital catalog is. Digital media in general has been plagued by rights gaps, but they’re getting smaller all the time.

More good news: Even if you don’t pay for HBO, you can see the show’s first episode, online, for free. (But that’s a one-off sample, HBO confirms — you’ll need to subscribe and watch the show on a television set if you want to see the rest of the season.)

And if you’re willing to poke around YouTube, you can watch a good chunk of the series, too. Here’s the highlight of last night’s show — and perhaps the entire series: Former star receiver/current Twitter celebrity Chad Johnson getting cut, following his domestic battery arrest.

*Alternate description, via Bloomberg’s Keenan Mayo: “The best business show on TV.” I’m not sure about that. But it is pretty great.

** Calling HBO Go a mobile service makes sense, of course, because it works on iOS and Android devices. But it also works on any machine with a laptop, which points out, yet again, how the legal definition of “mobile” is becoming less and less useful.

And if you like that idea, then you’ll love watching a promotional video for the app.

Hey! Isn’t the The Daily owned by News Corp., which also owns this Web site? Yes, yes it is. Good of you to notice, so we can deal with the disclosure here.

The Daily is also the real point of this post: The tablet newspaper is quietly getting into the custom publishing business.

Putting out other publications using the infrastructure you built to put out your own stuff is a mainstay of lots of traditional newspapers and magazines. But it wasn’t something that was in The Daily’s original business plan.

A year after launch, though, The Daily has put out several standalone apps, using the same Web app publishing system it built in-house in the fall of 2010. Most are put out using The Daily’s name and branding, like the gadget guide it published last fall.

Last month, though, The Daily helped the NFL put out a commemorative Super Bowl mag/app, and publisher Greg Clayman says more of this stuff should be coming down the line.

Right now, he says, the don’t-call-it-a-newspaper is using its existing staff to put out the new publications. Which must make News Corp. execs happy, since that means more revenue without more costs. But Clayman says he can envision building a standalone custom pub staff if this stuff takes off.

Big like a big-data and analytics problem, the kind that IBM is making a name for itself in tackling. That’s exactly what Big Blue has agreed to do for the Miami Dolphins, the company said today, in the latest announcement by its Smarter Cities unit.

The Dolphins have tapped IBM to help the team operate Sun Life Stadium. The Dolphin’s home field during the regular season, it also has been known, over the years, to host the Super Bowl and the Orange Bowl. It has 1.5 million square feet of space, 75,000 seats and 24,000 parking spaces. Just try keeping track of it all by yourself.

The team has taken software that IBM developed for running cities, known as its Intelligent Operations Center, and put it to work in managing the stadium, and to trying to make the experience of attending a game more interesting for fans.

The IOC software is in use by several cities around the world, not the least of which, I’m told, is New York City. It’s typically used to view interconnected operations around a city, and monitor in real time for problems, but also to analyze underlying data to indicate where problems are cropping up.

If you think about it, a football game is just a great big business transaction that, like any other, generates a lot of data that’s just begging to be analyzed in order to make it more efficient and less costly, and to help it run smoothly. The IOC software, IBM says, provides a window into ongoing stadium activity and helps manage traffic flow, even to tracking where visitors like to eat before or during a game.

Aside from the tickets themselves, the big business at any stadium is in concessions, and the team is always looking for a way to nudge fans to buy food and drink while they’re in their seats, enticing them with specials. But if you’re the kind of fan who wants to have a sit-down rather than grab a beer and a brat during game, it makes sense for the team to try and know that about you, and act accordingly when you get to the stadium. IBM had more to say about it in a short video, which I embedded below.

This is the second major engagement for IBM’s Smarter Cities group in as many weeks. Last week, Big Blue was tapped by the Chinese city of Zhenjiang to help it modernize its public transportation infrastructure. To get the job done, IBM created a software platform that is aimed at increasing how much traffic the city can handle every day while also anticipating and preventing traffic jams before they happen.

If that seems a little dull, consider the numbers: Cities struggling to get their traffic under control — and thus allow people to be more productive — are willing to spend billions to get the job done. One estimate by Pike Research suggests that cities in Asia will spend $36 billion on this problem between now and 2020, or about $5.5 billion a year. IBM doesn’t say how much Zhenjiang is spending with it, but these deals are rarely small.

I recently had a chance to visit with Karen Ann Parrish, the IBM VP who runs the Smarter Cities program, and while it doesn’t take much to get her talking at length about it, once you do, you can’t help but walk away from the conversation realizing that Smarter Cities is kind of a big deal. Oddly enough, the needs of New York to respond to a terrorist attack quickly are similar to the needs of Rio de Janiero in Brazil, which needed to respond to life-threatening floods. It’s all about finding patterns, Parrish says. “We sat with a number of clients and asked if we could find some ways to codify the best ways to respond to these emergencies and other problems that come up. If we learn from these patterns, we can solve these problems a lot more quickly,” she told me. Thus the Smarter Cities business was born.

There is at least a future to this business. Projections show that 70 percent of the world’s population is going to live in cities by the year 2050, which basically means that the cities themselves are going to have to tackle an ever-growing set of problems in the coming years. They’re going to need all the help they can get.

You’ll have to take my word for this, but this is exactly what it looks and sounds like on my phone — there’s no drop in quality in this YouTube upload.

What’s truly bizarre is that the live NFL streaming that Verizon does provide is actually pretty good. Or at least it was, when they were offering it for free at the beginning of the season. I don’t know why they’d want to promote it with something that looked like it was made on a Commodore 64.

Also odd: Verizon has made competent, attractive ads for its NFL offering in the past. Here’s one from 2011:

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Neil Webster)

And for those who are into both football and geekery, tomorrow is kind of like the Super Bowl. Well, technically speaking, I guess tomorrow is like the Super Bowl for everyone.

Anyhoo. For everyone looking for some tech to go with their gridiron, there are lots of options.

First of all, NBC is streaming the Super Bowl live over the Internet, for those who can’t make it to a television or want a second screen to enjoy even more of the action.

ESPN president John Skipper said at D: Dive Into Media that he thinks giving away the game for free is a bad idea, but NBC paid for the rights, so they get to do what ever they want.

Verizon is also broadcasting the game live to the smallest of screens via its NFL Mobile service. (However, Peter Kafka notes their marketing of said service could use some work.)

Second, there are a ton of Super Bowl apps, including the official ones for both iPhone and Android, as well as a game program. Peanuts are still not downloadable, but content-tagging app Shazam is offering a variety of commercial tie-ins. Check here for even more game-day apps.

And of course, the big game will be the talk of Twitter, to be sure.

Lastly, as a special treat, AllThingsD will be offering live coverage of the game, the commercials and the social-media hoopla. We had so much fun in January with Footballmer, our liveblog mash-up of Steve Ballmer’s final CES keynote and the BCS championship, that we decided to do it again.

This time, though, I’ll actually get to watch the game, rather than having Ballmer duty. I’ll be commenting on the game, the commercials, the tech and the Twitter commentary. Check back tomorrow before kickoff for that.

But for those more interested in the postgame highlights and analysis, the inaugural Super Bowl XLVI app from NFL Magazine might do the trick.

The tablet app is meant to be more commemorative than anything else — think of those dust-gathering magazines you collect each year — and it won’t stream the game live.

The app will offer image-rich season recaps for both teams, player highlight reels, polls and Super Bowl history. (No word on whether it includes a slide show of Tom Brady’s hairstyles throughout the years.)

After the game, the app will be updated with 15 to 20 minutes of highlight clips, breakdowns of key plays, interviews with players, NFL.com articles on the game and 360-degree photos.

The video available on the app during and after the game will be “clean” game highlights from NFL Network. Later on, extended highlights from NFL Films, with NBC logos and graphics, will be made available through the app.

The app, which is available on the iPad and on Android tablets, is selling at a pregame discount of $2.99 — which is less than half of the postgame price.

“We’ve seen a lot of fan demand for this,” said Jeff Berman, general manager of NFL Digital Media. “We plan to keep the app fresh for several weeks as we introduce new content, and ultimately provide a kind of lifetime digital keepsake.”

Nielsen data shows that 70 percent of tablet owners and 68 percent of smartphone owners use their devices while watching TV, while a poll conducted by Velti and Harris Interactive shows that nearly 60 percent of mobile users plan to look at or use their mobile device during the game. We’ll likely see some interesting data after Sunday, as well, about mobile usage during the Super Bowl. These metrics are key for advertisers as they try to gauge how many eyeballs are on second — and third, and fourth — screens during big television events.

And what about those Super Bowl ads, you ask? NFL Magazine’s Super Bowl app won’t feature any third-party ads this year, but it will include NFL promotions, as well as ads for The Daily, the tablet newspaper owned by News Corp. (which also owns this site), since the NFL is using The Daily’s technology platform to power the app.

Berman said that since this is the first time NFL Digital has done a commemorative Super Bowl app — it’s the NFL’s first tablet-only app, as well — they’re not focused on signing up a bunch of ad partners to start, though it’s a possibility for future versions of the app.

Revenue generation aside, the app means something else for rabid sports fans: The ability to call up key plays on your tablet whenever you feel like watching them. And rewatching them. And showing them to your friends. And discussing the nuances of the plays.

And unlike a commemorative magazine — which, by the way, the NFL will be producing, as well — the app provides an interactive and updatable experience. Look, Ma, moving pictures!

But if you watch the game on the Web, your eyeballs are worth a whole lot less. NBC, which is streaming the entire thing for the first time ever, will be lucky to get anything near a million dollars for that same ad when it runs online.

So why is Comcast’s broadcast network putting the game on the Web, period? Isn’t this the classic analog-dollars-to-digital-dimes trade that Big Media strives so hard to avoid?

Nope, says Rick Cordella, who runs digital for NBC Sports. The network assumes that nearly every eyeball — and every ad dollar — that it gets from the Web this week will be a bonus, because whoever watches online is simultaneously watching on a big TV, the way football is supposed to be watched.

This is supposed to be the classic “second screen” experience that Twitter’s Dick Costolo and so many other digital folks are excited about.

And that makes plenty of sense to me. Many TV guys have gotten plenty comfortable with the idea of streaming their most valuable live sports events online, for free. In most of those cases, the general assumption is that anyone who’s watching on the Web is someone who can’t watch the game on a TV to begin with — see the CBS/Turner Sports livestreams of the NCAA March Madness tournament.

And in NBC’s case, it is packing the Webcast full of extra camera angles and other goodies, including a feature that will let you rewatch every Super Bowl commercial once it’s aired. The assumption is that you’re holding the TV remote in one hand, and controlling your laptop with another.

NBC already does a version of this with its Sunday Night Football broadcasts during the regular season, and the network says it draws between 200,000 and 300,000 unique viewers per game (that’s the source of that Vikings-Saints screenshot, above).

Meanwhile, those broadcasts are the networks’ best-performing shows by a long shot, so it doesn’t seem to have slowed them down. The NFL, meanwhile, reports that Web companion streams of the Thursday night games it shows on its own channel averaged 450,000 uniques.

So Cordella argues that putting the biggest TV show of the year online, for free, is really no big deal. But I’m pretty sure that this attitude isn’t shared by everyone in the TV business, and we might hear a bit about that today at the D: Dive Into Media conference. Curious to see what ESPN boss John Skipper thinks, for starters.

Electronic Arts is predicting that the New York Giants will defeat the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl, by a single field goal.

For the past several years, the videogame publisher has been using its hit title Madden NFL to simulate the outcome of the Super Bowl — and in six out of the past eight matchups, it has guessed correctly.

But unlike the camel in the New Jersey zoo that has picked the winner of five of the last six Super Bowls, EA breaks down the score quarter by quarter.

EA simulates the Super Bowl by using artificial intelligence and real data from each team. It even includes variables such as injuries. The simulation is powered by Madden NFL and Xbox 360, the official console sponsor of the NFL.

EA replays the game’s highlights in a video, including Giants quarterback Eli Manning being named MVP for completing 25 of 39 passes with two touchdowns, and the Patriots’ Tom Brady throwing for 327 yards and three touchdowns.

Spoiler Alert: To win the game, Giants kicker Lawrence Tynes will make a 40-yard field goal, with the final score 27-24.

The spot depicts a batch of assembly-line robots busily building cars, as an instrumental version of the 1979 Gary Numan hit “Cars” plays happily. All is well until one of the robots experiences trouble and complains to the others, “I’m broken.” No problem, one of the others says, fixes his stricken comrade, and all is again well. Cue the voice-over, saying something about assembly lines that repair themselves. Then cue the corporate logo, aaaand … out.

The spot — which has exactly 100 percent less Ellen Page than the last series of Cisco TV ads — is part of a significant new advertising offensive that Cisco is launching today on television, in print and online. The TV spots will appear during the NCAA basketball games, the National Hockey League’s All-Star Skills Competition, and on CNBC and other business-oriented programming. However, it notably won’t appear during the Super Bowl.

Those robots will be seen again, disassembling and reassembling sections of certain Web sites as part of a series of “site takeovers,” including CNBC and The Street, among others.

The print portion is a six-page “manifesto” that explains ways that Cisco’s “Human Network” plays important and unexpected roles at banking companies and companies that sell chutney, and helps the National Basketball Association push its video around the world. The manifesto will appear in The Wall Street Journal (which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.), the Economist and the New York Times.

There will also be a social campaign via LinkedIn that goes after 140,000 C-level executives registered on that network. It will be the first time that embedded video will be used in a LinkedIn campaign. More TV ads will come later this year, as will localized versions of the campaign for international markets.

Last week, I talked with Blair Christie, Cisco’s chief marketing officer, who said that the manifesto in particular is about using the voice of its customers to show how Cisco’s technology can help companies do things they couldn’t do before. Of course, the point they’re supposed to get is that a Cisco intelligent network is what’s enabling them to do that.

Christie says it’s all part of Cisco’s effort to simplify how it communicates about itself. There’s no more muddling of the message. There’s no more consumer division to eat into the perception that Cisco is anything but an enterprise- and service-provider-focused networking company, so no more need for cute ads that overdo awkward jokes about teleconferencing, or showing a giggly twentysomething woman in a virtual fitting room. Cisco is now about transforming how companies do what they do, either by doing it better, or seeing new opportunities. It’s a big message, and a tricky one to get across in 30 seconds during a football game.

I asked Christie about the state of Cisco’s brand before this campaign, and whether or not there were any perceived weaknesses, given its recent troubles, that this ad effort is meant to shore up. “There was actually a lot that was right with our brand,” she told me. “The opportunity we had was clear and simple. Our customer voice is our talent, and that’s what we’re showing, and it’s consistent with our strategy. We use our customers as a test bed, so why not use them as a reflection of our brand? It wasn’t rocket science. But it was the customer voice that was missing.”

Simplifying and streamlining are themes that Cisco is certainly acquainted with of late. It has been doing a lot of those, and indeed, even shrinking itself as part of a broad-based restructuring. The results of that effort are starting to show up in Cisco’s results.

Time will tell if this new advertising campaign will help Cisco effectively reintroduce itself to its core customers; fight off strong competitive thrusts from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, whose networking division marketed itself aggressively against Cisco in 2010; and perhaps press a perceived advantage against Juniper Networks, which has been having its own problems.

What I find notable, or maybe missing from the campaign, are recognizable names of customers doing innovative things. Yes, there’s the NBA, but in the print manifesto, who’s the bank that’s using Cisco’s video TelePresence to interact with customers? Who’s the small chutney company that turned “browsers into buyers”? And who’s the car company with such smart assembly-line robots? It’s a good message that, to my mind, could be made a lot more effective with more specific examples.

And while I grant it’s often difficult to get customers to agree to be named in ads like this — you could almost hear CEO John Chambers’s frustration about not being allowed to name a certain banking customer, about which he was obviously proud, on a recent conference call — the biggest networking company in the world shouldn’t have such a problem. It should be able to brag that this or that household-name bank is an enthusiastic Cisco customer, and that Cisco networks powered the manufacturing of that popular car everyone is talking about right now. That would add some real oomph, and really serve to remind potential customers that Cisco is still, despite its recent missteps, the networking world’s alpha dog.

Anyhow, my critique aside, here’s the robots spot. Enjoy:

Cisco Robots from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

Phew! The NFL kicks off tonight, on schedule, on NBC, when the Saints play the Packers. Which means that some of you, for various reasons, are going to watch it on the Web.

And you can! Even better, you can do it legally, for free: Comcast’s broadcast unit is offering a complete stream of the game, via NBCSports.com, along with additional camera angles and other digital goodies. From the press release:

Sunday Night Football Extra employs a full HD-quality player, which includes a draggable picture-in-picture feature for any of the online-only cameras, plus full DVR functionality allowing the user to pause and scroll back-and-forth – even review plays in “slo-mo.”

After tonight’s game, NBC will offer the free streams for every game it broadcasts this season, every Sunday night.

It’s the fourth season in a row that NBC has done this, and I’m always surprised that more people don’t make a big deal out of it. NFL TV rights are the most valuable thing in video, and they only get more expensive each year — Disney just agreed to pay nearly $2 billion a season for Monday Night Football rights.

So the notion that a broadcaster would put this stuff up for free on the Web at the same time seems counterintuitive. (Note that Monday Night Football, for instance, is one of the only things you can’t watch via ESPN’s excellent new iPad/iPhone app.)

The only conclusion I can draw is that there just aren’t that many people watching the live streams — because really, if you have the option, you want to watch this on your big HD set, right?

OK. So what about the rest of the season? Well, you can watch that on the Web, legally, too. But it will cost you: Head over to DirecTV to see how much they’re charging for access to their “Sunday Ticket” package, which now includes unlimited access on your laptop, as well as iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, etc.

(FYI: If you’re willing to shell out for Sunday Ticket but don’t want a two-year DirecTV commitment, and you have a Sony PS3, try out the game device’s new service, which will let you order a season’s worth of football for $340. Pricey, but it will give you more flexibility and you don’t have to worry about installing a dish. Hint: When it asks you if you are able to receive DirecTV where you live, say “no.”)

I don’t condone stealing this stuff off the Web, of course, and those of you who want to do that don’t need my advice, anyway.

I will note, however, that readers who live outside the U.S. and want to stream the games can buy what appears to be a very reasonably priced package directly from the NFL. It looks like $150 for a basic package with all the games, though that may change depending on what country you live in.

*I’m not supposed to do this, because it violates some serious ethical rules, but here goes: Go Pack Go! Except when you’re playing the Vikings. And if you think I’m the only Minnesotan with conflicted Wisconsin loyalties, well — you’re wrong.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

GMG is a publisher of digital currency cards and works closely with Facebook to manage, distribute, market and manufacture the cards.

The cards, which are sold at major retailers including Best Buy, RadioShack, Target and GameStop, are good for Facebook Credits, which is the digital currency used inside all games on the social network.

The digital currency market is growing as more games are played online for free and give players the option of buying virtual goods inside the game. Rather than having to enter a credit card number online, game cards can be conveniently purchased in cash and redeemed online. Another big player in the industry is Atlanta-based InComm.

Topps, which was acquired and taken private by Michael Eisner’s Tornante Company and Madison Dearborn Partners in 2007, says it will leverage the acquisition to enter the digital currency market, while bringing manufacturing, design and collectibility skills to digital currency cards.

Rob Goldberg, the CEO of GMG, will become the VP and general manager of the digital currency business, reporting to Topps CEO Ryan O’Hara. GMG will represent the company’s third business division in addition to trading cards and confections, such as Bazooka bubble gum.

GMG’s other executives, Tim Pechmann and Jeff Mickeal, will also join Topps.

GMG works with about 45 clients, including the NFL and game companies like THQ.

When the selling of Myspace winds down in the next week or so, it’ll probably attract a spate of comments about what a failure the whole social networking enterprise turned out to be.

And — especially when you recall what a Web phenom the social networking site was before it got blown out of the water by Facebook — it was.

That is, unless you think of the mob of former execs who have worked at the company over time, many of whom have moved on to some more golden opportunities after leaving the News Corp.-owned property.

That includes, most recently and notably, former sales head Michael Barrett, who is about to score big as CEO of AdMeld, which is reportedly in the process of selling to Google for $400 million.

Also a big winner: Former Myspace CEO Owen Van Natta, who was fired from that job in one of its many putsches and who quickly rebounded to a top job at online gaming powerhouse Zynga.

So, while it is one of the more overused memes of Silicon Valley, the “mafia” analogy — which has been applied to fertile entrepreneurial breeding grounds such as PayPal, before its acquisition by eBay — is useful when thinking about Myspace.

It is also a good thing to keep in mind about any tech company that goes off the rails: There might still be a silver lining, even if the start-up never sees the light of day again.

As proof, herein is a list I created after pinging a bunch of former Myspace folks:

Jason Oberfest: Former SVP of business development. Now, VP Ngmoco, which was sold to Japanese gaming giant DeNA for $400 million last year.

Dmitry Shapiro: Former CTO, Myspace Music. Now, at Facebook competitor Altly.

Adam Bain: While at Fox Interactive Media, he ran the ad platform for Myspace. Now, head of sales at Twitter.

Jeff Berman: Former president of sales and marketing. Now, GM of the NFL’s digital media unit.

Jason Hirschhorn: Former co-president and chief product officer. Now, on MGM board, angel investor, and there are rumors of him working on a curation start-up.

Amit Kapur: Former COO. Now, CEO, Gravity, an information filtering service start-up.

Chris DeWolfe: Co-founder and former CEO. Now, CEO, MindJolt, an online gaming roll-up.

Ross Levinsohn: Former president of FIM, he was integral to buying Myspace. Now, EVP of Americas unit, Yahoo.

Mike Lang: Former News Corp. strategy exec also involved in Myspace purchase. Now, CEO, Miramax.

Aber Whitcomb: Former CTO. Now CTO, MindJolt.

Jim Heckman: Former chief strategy officer of FIM. Now, CEO of 5to1, recently sold to Yahoo for $25 million.

Dani Dudeck: Former communications head. Now, PR head at Zynga.

Travis Katz: SVP of international. Now, CEO of Gogobot, a social travel start-up.

Richard Rosenblatt: Former CEO of Intermix Media and Chairman of Myspace, he sold it to News Corp. Now, CEO of Demand Media.

Angela Courtin: Former SVP of marketing. Now, EVP at Aegis Media.

These folks should be on the call list of whoever ends up buying Myspace. Last week, I wrote that an investor group, including Activision head Bobby Kotick, is now in the lead for the deal.

As an update, according to sources, Kotick has gotten clearance from Activision’s major shareholder Vivendi to do the Myspace transaction as a passive personal investment.

My Twitterstream was dominated by snarky play-by-play, and the rest of the Web was doing the same thing. Even the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal put Grammy liveblogs on their homepages.

So now it might be nice to head online and actually see–and hear–what I missed. No dice.

The official Grammy site, run by the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, has plenty of clips, but none from the CBS broadcast itself–it’s all backstage, or red carpet or other footage I don’t care about. CBS.com doesn’t have anything, and neither does TV.com, CBS’s mini-Hulu.

Meanwhile, Google’s YouTube, the place where I really expect to see clips, is doing a very good/frustrating job of keeping the site scrubbed free of amateur uploads. You can find some stuff, but it takes work, and the quality is poor, and I’m pretty sure it’s getting removed quickly after it goes up.

So while I really want to see Arcade Fire’s performance–my Twitter pals were ecstatic about it–right now the only thing I can find is grainy footage of  Lady Gaga doing yet another Madonna…homage. This may or may not be available by the time you read this:

[UPDATE: Ask, and you shall receive! For now. Thanks to @colinparksfried, @tdotjdot and @nolaschott]

A CBS rep notes that Grammy performances “aren’t typically available online due to rights clearance issues,” and I’m sure that’s true. Any given song can have lots of different owners, and getting all of them to agree to put it on the Web can be a huge hassle. On the other hand, it’s not an insurmountable challenge–that’s why we have Vevo.com, a Web site dedicated to nothing but music videos.

Left unsaid here is that big live events like the Grammys are now TV’s most valuable commodity, and the people who produce big live events continue to struggle with the Web. But more and more of them are getting it–even the very uptight NFL is putting highlight videos up on its site while the games are in progress.

The Grammys are already being augmented very nicely by the Web, which provided it with endless free promotion last night. But now that the live event isn’t anymore, you’d think the music industry, which can use all the promotion it could get, would be pushing very, very hard to let people see what they missed last night.

Who knows. It might even prompt someone to, you know, buy some music.

I’ve taken a quick tour and can report that it’s more or less what you would expect: A filtered stream of tweets about next week’s Packers-Steelers game. Quite astutely, the biggest emphasis on the opening page is on tweets from NFL players themselves, who have embraced the platform even as the league has struggled to make sense of it.

And there are also some cool graphics that show off trending Super Bowl topics, sorted by time, geography, etc. I’m a little surprised to see Steelers talk so widespread throughout the country, but I guess that’s just my Midwestern bias poking through. (Seriously. Everyone’s rooting for Aaron Rodgers, right?)

Twitter did something similar last summer for the World Cup, but that effort didn’t seem to have been thought through very well, and very quickly became overwhelmed with spam and random chatter. I have a hunch Twitter has worked some of that out this time.

Also worth noting is that in the past, this kind of site might have had a hard time attracting much attention, but now Twitter’s ad platform can give it a real shot in the arm: A link to the site is today’s “Promoted Trend.”