JC / Railbird - Lucky Hockey Fans

Lucky Hockey Fans

And no, I’m not talking about Teresa getting a sweaty blue shirt, as fun as that sounded. Earlier this week PaidContent reported that the NHL is expanding its online presence with a video player that offers seven channels (more to come as each of the league’s teams add content) and deep archives:

The new channels, organized around themes, give the league a way to pull its digital content into linear viewing instead of piecemeal. At the same time, users have flexibility to pick clips and to go deep. For instance, click “more” under the results of a game in the Game Highlights channel and you can see a list of goals and click on the corresponding video as I did with Sunday’s 500th goal by Keith Tkachuk, then click on his name and see video clips for his goals stretching back to November 2005 after the hockey lock-out ended.

Imagine such a video player for racing. Or, something like MLB’s Mosaic. (Admittedly, Mosaic is problem-prone and not everyone loves it, but still — six games at once!)
One thing that struck me reading about the player is that its development was overseen by the NHL’s VP of broadband and new media production. That’s one benefit of having a real league office — your sport can hire someone to direct these sorts of fan-friendly innovations or, as MLB did, push for the creation of an entire division devoted to online and mobile development.

Posted by JC in Racing & Technology on 04/10/2008 @ 11:45 am / Follow @railbird on Twitter