If you been following any of our research or this blog over the past six months, you are already quite familiar with the commercialization of high school sports. We've detailed the current and past successes as well as future market opportunities for Internet media properties like CSTV's MaxPreps.com and Takkle.com. If you go all the way back to our 2007 Trends and Predictions report we made the call of the growing importance and value of niche social networking sites led by the sports category. Today's NY Times nicely sums up a lot of what we have been saying for the better part of a year. The parties that make up the high school sports engine, that is, the athletes themselves, their parents and coaches are a formidable force and one that marketers are increasingly trying to gain favor with. CSTV is aggressively building out its recently acquired MaxPreps franchise by offering a wide variety of on-demand offerings that will almost certainly provide us with a new crop of mini-celebs, many of whom probably aren't even old enough to drive to school. Given of all of this activity, you can bet that the worldwide leader in sports coverage, ESPN, has to have a few tricks up its sleeve so it to can join the next "it" thing: high school sports.
Have you seen the full game videos and massive expansion that HSsportsTV has seen since its start in Fall of 2006? Appears that 2007-2008 will be a huge year for them! I'm excited.
Posted by: RJ | June 23, 2007 at 11:23 AM