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The NHL tries to get kinetic - June 5, 2008

As a life-long and avid hockey fan, I congratulate the Detroit Red Wings on their triumph over the Pittsburgh Penguins last night in the Stanley Cup Finals. As a die-hard New York Rangers fan, however, I have to admit I didn't watch much of the series. That's how it goes in the NHL. Hockey is a tribal sport, built on ancient rivalries and blood feuds: Montreal and Toronto; Boston and New York; Rangers vs. Islanders; Philly vs. everyone. Once your team is out of it, it just doesn't feel right to take in interest in another series.

For years, however, the NHL has tried to change that bedrock principle, with decidedly mixed results. It expanded rapidly in the 80s, adding teams in such unlikely hockey towns as Nashville, Tenn., and Phoenix, and chasing after network TV deals to try to get more exposure for the game. That netted some new fans but the watered-down game and the de-emphasis of regional rivalries also led to hard times in the heartlands of Winnipeg, Calgary and Minnesota.

Now the league is trying again with a new approach built on leveraging digital technology to cultivate interest among its existing fans in out-of-market games, while stoking hard-core fans with new, in-depth, behind-the-scenes video coverage of their favorite teams. The NHL formally unveiled a deal this week with digital supply chain company Signiant to rapidly compile and distribute HD highlights from games in progress around the league to Jumbotrons in other arenas using the NHL's existing IP connectivity in all 30 league rinks. Signiant will also provide the distribution backbone for serving the behind-the-scenes footage through online destinations such as the NHL Network Online.

The key in both cases, according to Signiant marketing VP Tony Lapolito, is speed.

"Content does get stale, especially sports-related content," Lapolito told Media Wonk this week. "You need to have the flexibility to move it around quickly to where it can be monetized or where it has the most value."

To that end, Signiant will use its platform to rapidly ingest HD highlight footage from arenas around the league and funnel it to a central location where it will be prepared for distribution and pumped out to other arenas. At the same time, it can rapidly transcode and reformat video content for distribution across multiple online platforms.

"We call it 'kinetic content,'" Lapolito said. "It's content that may have value with a very narrow window, but that window could recur at any time. A team gets into the next playoff round and suddenly all the footage you have of that team against the team it's going to play is valuable. But if it's sitting around on a shelf somewhere, on tape, you're not going to be able to realize that value. It's 'kinetic content.' It's only valuable if you can move it quickly."

Kinetic content is not confined to sports leagues, according to Lapolito. Signiant, for instance, handles digital supply chain duties for Hulu, the online TV platform jointly owned by NBC Universal and News Corp. If an actor dies, or a show wins an award, archival footage can suddenly become valuable, but its value dissipates quickly.

"The real question is what does the business model look like for that kind of long-tail content?" Lapolito said. "You take someone like Hulu, they have a huge aggregation problem. We see this with a lot of portals. They're receiving content from so many different sources, in so many different formats, and right now it's a very manual, labor-intensive process to ingest all that content and turn it into something you can use.

"There's a lot of stored value in that long-tail content," he added. "The key is, can you get your marginal costs of ingesting it and distributing down to where you can unlock that value?"

Meanwhile, hockey season starts again in October. Let's Go Rangers!

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