Yahoo! Sports goes long to woo Super Bowl fans
'Hours' screenplay was time well spent for Hare
Jan 17, 2003
Before football fans cozy up to their TV sets with friends, pizza and a keg on Super Bowl Sunday, Yahoo! Sports is hoping that they will make an online visit for some insightful pregame analysis.
The interactive experience will feature football analyst Craig James hosting an on-demand television-style webcast, including predictions, live interviews with coaches and other features that leverage the company's production resources. The program presages Yahoo! adding more original content throughout not only sports but all of its entertainment offerings.
Yahoo! Sports first tried "The Craig James Show" on Dec. 11 with a pregame webcast to kick off the college bowl season. General manager Brian Grey, while declining to give specific metrics, said the webcast was a successful enough project to try a version for Super Bowl XXXVII.
That mid-December effort was "the first time we'd gone to the one-hour format and used our production platform of satellite and audio remotes," Grey said.
No ads were sold then, and Yahoo! has not yet determined whether it will sell them for the Super Bowl version of "The Craig James Show." A spokesman, though, said sponsors are, of course, something they are looking into for future efforts, assuming this second one is popular to spur more.
For the upcoming webcast, Grey said there will be an extensive rich-media environment and even more emphasis on a distinctive editorial voice sharing an informed viewpoint.
It's all part of Yahoo!'s ongoing effort to differentiate itself from the search engine and portal's competition. "Our audience is people who want more information, to know who's going to win ... and why," Grey said.
Sports is something Yahoo! knows well, said James Moloshok, senior vp in the media and information division of Yahoo!
Yahoo! Sports presents coverage and live streaming audio for an average of 60 games on each day of the football season, sometimes offering overlapping streams so that fans may have a choice.
Sports webcasts and the "The Craig James Show" are just a couple of first steps in making Yahoo! "not just a conduit to events but the events themselves," Moloshok said.
"We're really making an effort to bring more personality to Yahoo! -- both figuratively and literally -- and more content across all of our divisions," he added. "We want to become more than a retrieval base. We want to present more and become more of a content-delivery network."
The interactive experience will feature football analyst Craig James hosting an on-demand television-style webcast, including predictions, live interviews with coaches and other features that leverage the company's production resources. The program presages Yahoo! adding more original content throughout not only sports but all of its entertainment offerings.
Yahoo! Sports first tried "The Craig James Show" on Dec. 11 with a pregame webcast to kick off the college bowl season. General manager Brian Grey, while declining to give specific metrics, said the webcast was a successful enough project to try a version for Super Bowl XXXVII.
That mid-December effort was "the first time we'd gone to the one-hour format and used our production platform of satellite and audio remotes," Grey said.
No ads were sold then, and Yahoo! has not yet determined whether it will sell them for the Super Bowl version of "The Craig James Show." A spokesman, though, said sponsors are, of course, something they are looking into for future efforts, assuming this second one is popular to spur more.
For the upcoming webcast, Grey said there will be an extensive rich-media environment and even more emphasis on a distinctive editorial voice sharing an informed viewpoint.
It's all part of Yahoo!'s ongoing effort to differentiate itself from the search engine and portal's competition. "Our audience is people who want more information, to know who's going to win ... and why," Grey said.
Sports is something Yahoo! knows well, said James Moloshok, senior vp in the media and information division of Yahoo!
Yahoo! Sports presents coverage and live streaming audio for an average of 60 games on each day of the football season, sometimes offering overlapping streams so that fans may have a choice.
Sports webcasts and the "The Craig James Show" are just a couple of first steps in making Yahoo! "not just a conduit to events but the events themselves," Moloshok said.
"We're really making an effort to bring more personality to Yahoo! -- both figuratively and literally -- and more content across all of our divisions," he added. "We want to become more than a retrieval base. We want to present more and become more of a content-delivery network."
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