Sporting News/Comcast Local Sports Tablet Product Bursts Out of the Gate
As local newspapers and broadcasters ponder what to do with the iPad and its cousins, Comcast and Sporting News are moving quickly into the local sports market.
Today came the announcement that Comcast and Sporting News are putting a set of new local sports products, aimed at the emerging tablet reader. It’s a perfect demographic, more male than female, younger than older, and one that you can bet is up for the kinds of tantalizing sports tablet products that we first saw demonstrated when the SI demo video first took flight, way back in January (yes, of this year).
It’s a logical step for both companies. Already a local Philly product is launched, with others to come soon. It’s a paid product — subscriptions to the local editions, accessible on Macs, PCs, iPhones and iPads, cost $3.99 per month, one dollar more than Sporting News’ national edition. Comcast will send local ads; the Sporting News will sell national.
Many may be confused about Comcast being a “content” player. Certainly, the trials and tribulations of its NBC purchase have been well-covered, and that’s where the talk of Comcast becoming a content company has gotten the most play. In 2010, though, Comcast has already become a significant content player — in local sports.
The company now has five major news operations, under its Comcast Sports Group, with major plays on TV and online. Its flagship site is in Comcast’s hometown of Philadelphia. In addition, Boston, Chicago, Washington DC and the Bay Area have been built out as well – all strong markets for Comcast’s regional sports networks (RSNs), where it has good, though varying market to market, rights for cablecasting local teams’ games. It plans to add nine other cities in which it has RSNs as well.
In each market, Comcast has built teams of 12 to 15 staffers, among them four to eight journalists.
“We want to provide value to the core business,“ Eric Grilly, executive vice president and chief digital officer of the Comcast Sports Group, told me recently. That means that the sports build-out of 50+ hours of programming a week and video-heavy online sites, helps Comcast sell and retain cable customers. Some of the content is online-only, some cable-only, much of it shared. The news sports services are a differentiator against other satellite and other offerings.
Grilly is an alumnus of the newspaper world, having served as a digital executive with both Philadelphia Media Holdings, under now-departed CEO Brian Tierney, and the MediaNews Group. In total, his Comcast operation now numbers 82 people.
The new sites are growing audience well – Grilly notes a 274% increase in unique visitors between September 2009 and September 2010. He’s got a digital sales manager, working with Comcast’s cable-oriented sales teams, and several notions for other revenue generation as well. For now, though, the goal is audience growth – and support of that Comcast core business.
The Sporting News, too, is throwing off its old roots. I covered its reinvention (“The Newsonomics of Satisfying Sports Fans“), under Jeff Price, and its changes have been remarkable and forward reaching. They include:
- A free website — Sporting News Feed — heavy on breaking news, trending topics and lots of sports video.
- A newer paid product — aimed at tablets and smartphones, but also to web users — called Sporting News Today.
- And the continuation of its biweekly sports magazine, its flagship product, which reaches 500,000 readers.
Price has restructured the operation, going digital-first, increasingly video-heavy — and pricing appropriately.
His goal: 250,000 paid subscribers to Sporting News Today by mid-2011; he’s about a tenth of the way there.
For newspaper companies, believing they have time to wait and see and wait and see some more, before launching tablet products, today’s announcement is another warning sign. Early tablet adopters will win early audiences — and it will be hard to take those audiences away with lesser products. As importantly, we’re seeing two companies on the move — personality- and video-heavy Comcast and a reborn, digital-first Sporting News combining efforts. In the process, they are redefining local.
It’s happening in sports. Expect it to happen in local news, in business and in lifestyle and entertainment categories of all kinds. 2011 is beginning now.