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NFL Report:
The Commissioner's View -- Fall 1999
You can’ t pick up a newspaper or magazine
or turn on television today without seeing some reference to the Internet.
The underlying theme of each message is the
same: The Internet is revolutionizing the way we work and live, and the
future is going to be dramatically different because of the Internet.
There is a famous scene from the classic
movie The Graduate in which Benjamin Braddock, the character
portrayed by Dustin Hoffman, receives a one-word piece of advice about the
future. If we were to remake The Graduate for the new millennium, we
know that word would not be “plastics.”
What does the Internet mean for the NFL and
its fans?
Internet use has increased dramatically in
the past five years and will grow even faster in the future. There are an
estimated 180 million Internet users worldwide today, including 70 million
in the U.S. The NFL
and its 31 clubs are serving fans online in a variety of ways. At the dawn
of the Internet revolution in 1994, the NFL became the first sports league
to create an Internet site for fans–nfl.com. Today, the NFL manages six
distinct World Wide Web sites and each of our 31 teams has its own site.
NFL.com is our hugely popular (more than 2
million unique users per month) and comprehensive fan site with links to
each team site and other related sites. NFLEurope.com focuses on our spring
European league, while SuperBowl.com offers complete coverage of the
playoffs and Super Bowl. NFLmedia.com serves more specific needs of the news
media that cover the NFL.
Two new NFL online destinations were added
this year. NFLsundayticket.com serves our satellite television subscribers,
and nflhsfb.com was launched as an information resource for high school
football players, coaches, and fans. These
sites and the popular NFL team sites are evolving from static information
sources to hubs of interactivity and commerce. They are connecting fans more
directly and personally with players, coaches, management, and the game.
Through the Internet, fans in cyberspace
now have unique access to the NFL. They can chat with players and coaches,
buy tickets to games, follow text play-by-plays of games in progress, watch
or listen to live press conferences, play interactive games, watch training
camp practices, see weekly video and photographic highlights, purchase
licensed merchandise, and send e-mail. The
Internet continues to be an area of rapidly changing technology. On the near
horizon is high-speed, two-way Internet access on broad-band digital cable
television lines. The Internet will be a future form of television as much
as it will continue to be a vehicle for publication and commerce.
The Internet of the future is an exciting
prospect and will further transform the way fans connect to professional
sports. The convergence of audio, video, print, and interactivity on the
Internet will have a dramatic impact on sports in the next century.
It is clear that for fans the Internet will
be as critical to the future of the NFL as television was in the 1950s. It
promises to be to the next half century what the development of television
was to the past half century. |