Mavericks-Kings webcast is nothing but Net

From...

by Terry Lefton

(IDG) -- Continuing to position itself as the most Web-savvy of professional sports, the National Basketball Association will become the first major sports league to webcast a live game on Friday.

The game, a Dallas Mavericks-Sacramento Kings match, will be streamed with a team of announcers from the league's NBA.comTV cable network. It will be webcast without commercials.

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Mavericks owner Mark Cuban made his fortune by selling radio Web-streaming company Broadcast.com to portal giant Yahoo for $4.9 billion.

"This is an experiment to find out what fan-usage patterns are because that's something we really don't know yet," said Brenda Spoonemore, the NBA's vice president of Internet Services. "Are they going to watch the whole game or just five minutes? And which five minutes?"

Spoonemoore said the league also wanted to find out whether omnibus versions of games are more user-friendly over the Internet. "We might find out that a 15-minute condensed game is more appealing to fans than a whole game," she said.

While the league isn't about to incur the wrath of its broadcasting partners by streaming any playoff games, the information gleaned will be put to use in the NBA's new developmental minor league, which debuts in November. ESPN will broadcast 27 games for the new league, but most of the games will be webcast.

Friday's webcast will allow RealNetworks to leverage further the two-year sponsorship deal it signed with the NBA earlier this year. Viewers will need to use the Seattle-based company's RealPlayer to see the game.

The league chose the Dallas-Sacramento match with an eye toward the 33 percent of NBA.com traffic that originates from outside the U.S. The Mavericks feature the recently signed Chinese phenom Wang Zhizhi.

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