We wrote about Twitter’s collaboration with a startup called Snappy TV and Turner Broadcasting that allowed the NCAA to tweet out highlight clips from March Madness throughout the annual college basketball tournament, with the clips sponsored by AT&T and Coke Zero, and a Twitter spokesperson confirmed Monday that the ESPN clips will appear in a similar manner inside Twitter Cards. The report indicated that Twitter will be selling advertising specifically around the sports clips that are tweeted out.

The company announced major updates to its Cards technology in early April that allowed for more types of content to appear in the tweets and more app promotion for third-party apps cross-posting to Twitter. The key to Cards is that a user never has to leave Twitter to view the content the Cards contain — everything is viewable directly in stream, which encourages users to stay on Twitter’s website.

My colleague Mathew Ingram and I have written about Twitter’s transformation over the past year or so to become more of a media company, and Twitter’s partnerships with television, music and video outlets are numerous. There were rumors of deals with Viacom and NBC, a partnership with Nielson to measure user activity around television, the launch of the Twitter #music app and following music entertainment show.

For Twitter, all of this content could make tweets more engaging for users who become captive audience members participating in live events. But perhaps more importantly for the company, if it’s gearing up for the IPO everyone expects, video provides an excellent platform for advertising and big brand partnerships that could make Twitter a lot of money.

It is buying German sports portal operator Sportal, as part of its ongoing effort to build out its global audience.

Perform already bought Spox.com and Mediasports in Germany last year. Sportal.de claims 800,000 unique monthly users, and operator Sportal GmbH already provides content and services for  Spiegel, Süddeutsche, RTL/sport.de, Motain and Sportal Media gruppe Switzerland

Perform did not disclose an acquisition price to the London stock Exchange. Sportal did €1.4 million in revenue in 2011, Perform said.

Perform  raised £72.5 ($116.26) million in its London IPO float in April 2011, since when it has:-

• Taken full ownership of the Watch&Trade online sports betting service.
• Taken control of soccerway.com publisher, Holland’s Global Sports Media.
• Bought Germany’s Spox and Mediasports for up to €16 million.
• Offered €120 million for sports data group RunningBall
• Snapped up Turkish sports websites mackolik.com and sahadan.com.

Perform’s most game-changing deal happened prior to the float, when it bought Goal.com.

Company execs have benefitted from being public now. Last week, Perform made more shares available, so that they could reap windfalls. Co-CEO Simon Denyer made £4.1 million, co-CEO Oliver Slipper made £1.2 million, CFO David Surtees made £1.7 million.

Denyer and Slipper sold around five percent of their total holding. Denyer also gave shares worth £1 million to the charities Richard Thomas Leukaemia Fund, Great Ormond Street Hospital and WorldVision.

That game was watched by 30,000 baseball fans across the globe. Those 30,000 fans have turned into millions of fans across the world and that little experiment is now a mega-million dollar business. Since its launch, the service has broadcast 1.5 billion live video streams and has accumulated a total of 3.7 million subscribers.

Today in order to succeed, services need to go beyond the web. And ubiquity means being on multiple devices.  Like, Netflix, MLB.tv, got that right very early in the game. MLB Advanced Media is one of the more progressive online services as it has evolved with the times, adapting to viewing behavior of its customers. When broadband speeds increased, MLB.tv increased its online video quality. When tablets became popular, it created apps for the iPad and later for Android devices including the Kindle Fire.

As popularity of Roku and Apple TV grew, they made apps for those platforms as well. It is on XBox live and is slowly making its away to all sorts of connected devices. For 2012, MLB.tv is streaming 1.1 million live video streams per day. So far in 2012, MLB.tv has seen 27.3 million mobile live video streams. In the first week of 2012 baseball season, MLB saw 3 million downloads of its At Bat 2012 iPad app. At present there isn’t a professional sports league that holds a candle to MLB’s online arm.

From a personal perspective, during the baseball season, I don’t think I can last a single day without MLB.tv. Being a participant in a fantasy baseball league, I use the service and its advanced features to keep an eye on some of my players. (I am second to last this season, but can’t blame the streaming service for my picks and their injuries.) I can safely say, had it not been for MLB.tv, I wouldn’t have been an early (perhaps earliest) cord cutter. I hope these guys keep making baseball more fun in years to come.

On digital revenue

paidContent was first to report NBCU’s $25 million in digital revenue for Beijing and that the network was more than doubling that revenue for 2012 to $55.5 million, based on $900 million in overall ad revenue. NBC announced Wednesday that it has passed the $1 billion mark in ad revenue and digital revenue rose with it. Lazarus told me six or seven percent of that is from digital. The new number is more than double that of Bejing, about $60 million, and if it winds up on the higher end, will be nearly triple. It’s small compared to the overall revenue number — but serious.

Lazarus calls it proof that advertisers not only want linear on broadcast and cable, but also online and mobile. The bulk of that is from desktop or laptop; mobile continues to be the least monetized, he added.

On streaming

In previous years, NBC has been both willing to experiment and uncomfortable giving full live access to the kind of events that would be in the prime-time spotlight. NBC offered 2,200 live hours from Beijing and only two events — curling and hockey for Vancouver, about 400 hours. The barrier to watching events that were being offered live in other countries drove Olympics fans crazy. For London 2012, NBC is going all in. I asked Lazarus if that was a decision he inherited or one he made.

“We made those decisions when I got into the role. They had a working plan that was not as ambitious as it sounded. We had a straw-man discussion about how people were consuming media and watching the games — and we made the decision to stream everything live.”

The reasoning? Lazarus explained: “There are a certain number of fans who want the immediacy of watching it live. Since most of it will have to be authenticated or verified, it brings value to our cable and satellite partners.” Plus, he believes “people will still gravitate to our primetime programs.” That’s not just a gut feeling. “All the research we’ve seen and all the trends in the industry show that putting things more out there leads to greater and wider interest.” He expects the live streams to lead to more buzz and energy for primetime, not detract from it.

“The Super Bowl is a good example. It was the biggest digital event with 2 million uniques and 750,000 on concurrently — and also the most watched television show of all time. Of those 2 million uniques, 1.6 million were watching television while having a digital experience.”

On authentication/verification

Why keep most programming on over-the-air NBC behind an authentication wall? The vast majority of NBC viewers watch via cable or satellite operators paying for rentransmission consent.

What about people who don’t pay for broadcast access? Of 114 million television households, Lazarus says roughly 100 million are cable or satellite subscribers. “Maybe 14 million don’t pay,” he added. “When you’re doing 5,500 hours live, if there’s five or 10 percent [of streaming programming] you don’t need to verify, that’s a whole lot of hours.” That would be 250 to 500 hours.

“We also have more Olympic coverage on free TV than ever before ever before –270 hours.” So cordcutters will have some streaming access without doing backflips and those who don’t pay for TV will be able to watch some of the Olympics on their sets.

The time delay made it even more important to Lazarus and company to provide the live streams.

NBCU is pushing all of its primetime Olympics viewing to NBC. The other channels set for multiplexing during the day — NBC Sports Network, CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo — will have their regular programming. “During the day we have a lot of options for people but there’s a lot of content. In prime time, the only place to watch the Olympics will be NBC.” (Well, the only legal place. I’ll bet digital dollars to your digital donuts that some people will spend a lot of time trying to watch through other means.)

Why not offer a digital subscription? “We think the verification process is that form of payment,” Lazarus said. “We don’t think they should pay twice.”

What would he tell peers making similar decisions about whether to go the authentication route?“We all have our own business models. We each have different events we do our own ways. As an industry, we have to push to simplify verification so our customers can consume all this. Let’s make verification easier for the consumer — as an industry.”

On social media

In recent days, NBC has announced partnerships with Twitter, Facebook, Storify and more. I asked if there is any incremental revenue in the Twitter or Facebook deals or is it all about marketing? Lazarus was quick to reply: “Marketing; it’s not a revenue play for us. We’re using them to market and promote the games, to personalize, make a connection. We have a unique opportunity to utilize some of the biggest talents in the world of sports, in some cases, entertainment and news … In a way it’s a personal plea — even though it’s one to many, you sort of feel it’s one to one.”

For Lazarus, it’s all a work in progress:

“This is a grand experiment. This is a billion dollar laboratory. We’re playing with a lot of things for the first time and on this scale.”

On success

How will Lazarus gauge success? “The overall measure for me for success is more than 200 million Americans watch some portion of the Games, which would make it a top five American all-time event.”

He also would like to surpass the Beijing digital assets by 50 percent and on mobile, would like to have a significant number of people use the smartphone and tablet apps.

“Some measure is making all of this technology work together. Looking at total uniques and page views and how many streams, we think we’ve got enough technology… if we’re pushing the limits, that will be a success.”

Was there anything you couldn’t do with digital? “We’re streaming more content, more simultaneious streams than ever before. We’re challenging the technical limits. It’s not about what we couldn’t do. it’s about focusing on delivering.”

Me, too. If you pride yourself on not paying for cable or satellite, you will be scrambling to watch. But, if you are one of the nearly 100 million households that get ESPN, you still might be scrambling — unless your cable provider or ISP has the right deal.

To be sure, ESPN’s 2012 Wimbledon presentation is a milestone (and people who know me know how much I resist calling anything on the Internet a “milestone”). When ESPN starts its 12-year exclusive run June 25th, U.S. fans will, for the first time, will be able to watch every possible Wimbledon match in real time coast to coast. No tape delays.

NBC, which held the rights for 43 years, also held us in thrall, manipulating a mix of live and tape delay to avoid preempting some of its lucrative Today Show hours and refusing to allow other rightsholders to carry the matches that didn’t fit. Particularly galling in this social media age: the practice of airing matches live in the east and tape delaying them for the west.

But NBC had one aspect in its favor: when matches were live they were broadcast and available to anyone with a signal. The current version of NBC Sports probably would spread matches across NBC and its cable networks, as it did to mixed effect for the Stanley Cup playoffs and will for the Olympics, but the major matches would be broadcast. This year’s finals will be broadcast, too — but they will be taped and aired later on ABC. All the live action is pay-for-play in one way or another.

NBC started to stretch the live streaming boundaries in 2009, streaming all of its broadcast hours plus some concurrent matches.

Now ESPN is pushing it even further. Here’s how Wimbledon 2012 will be shown on U.S. digital platforms — and who will have access:

ESPN3: More than 800 hours covering matches on all available TV courts (up to nine) will be live streamed “first ball to last ball each day” and available on demand. It includes multi-screen viewing.

• Who can get it: The live and on-demand broadband network is available to about 73 million video and ISP subscribers whose providers have deals with ESPN. Another 21 million U.S. college students and U.S.0based military personnel have free access through campus or base networks. But paying for ESPN through cable or satellite is no guarantee; ESPN covers nearly 100 million households and a lot of those will be left out if there is no deal in place.
• Video affiliates: Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks, Verizon FiOS and Comcast Xfinity TV.
• ISP affiliates: Here’s the full list. You can also check by zip code and provider and follow instructions to complain if you don’t.
• How: WatchESPN.com. Video subscribers and Verizon broadband can access through WatchESPN apps on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Android. Also ESPN on Xbox LIVE for Gold members.

WatchESPN: In addition to ESPN3, video subscribers can watch linear channels ESPN and ESPN2 live on the WatchESPN apps and at WatchESPN.com. Most Wimbledon coverage is on ESPN2.

ESPN Mobile: If you don’t have WatchESPN, the mobile experience will be all about info — point-by-point coverage on mobile browsers and the ESPN ScoreCenter app (iPhone, Android, Windows) plus some video highlights. Unless you pay for ESPN MobileTV through AT&T ($10/month), Alltel, Sprint TV (free with certain data packages and devices) or Verizon ($3/day, #10/month). Then you get 105 hours of live ESPN/ESPN2.

More details here about all the coverage, including the second year of ESPN 3D, multi-screen access on DirecTV.

ESPN is working closely with the BBC, which also outlined its plans. That includes two full matches on the iPlayer every day, the BBC Sport app for connected TV, and up to six live matches streams on the BBC Sport site.

Not a cord-cutter’s Wimbledon

Intrepid fans who don’t pay for video and don’t have access to ESPN3 through ISPs will find ways to watch matches but there is no easy, legit solution other than the limited amount of mobile TV video. No other standalone subscriptions. ESPN needs to provide value for its high-end fees and does so, in part, by protecting how its programming is distributed online and across devices. Offer Wimbledon outside that ecosystem and the value starts to dissipate.

Live sports continues to be one of the top reasons people will pay for video and ESPN is doing everything it can to protect that, including airing everything it can. Tennis Everywhere, as long as someone pays.

The United States Golf Association is streaming the competition live starting Thursday at 7:33am PT. Friday, streaming will start at 7:44am PT. There will also be live streaming on Saturday and Sunday, but the exact times haven’t been made available yet. A complete schedule of the live stream can be accessed on the official U.S. Open website, and the live stream is available here.

The video streams are powered by IBM, which promises “near-HD quality,” whatever that means. The U.S. Open site also comes with a play tracker that gives fans overview of the course, live scores and additional statistics.

Want to watch the U.S. Open on the go? Then download the free app either from Google Play for Android phones, or from iTunes if you have an iPhone

For more on watching sports online, without the need for a cable subscription, check out our new e-book: Cut the Cord: All You Need to Know to Drop Cable

After online sports broadcast specialist Perform Group went public a year ago, it promised it would succeed its acquisition of Goal.com by buying more sports sites.

Now it is making a big one - Perform has offered up to €120 million ($153 million) for Switzerland-based sports data provider RunningBall.

The company employs match scouts to log over 1,000 in-game events for over 30,000 soccer games annually and is also growing in to logging data for others sports.

The company’s Pushing Feed, Trader Client and Performance Video packages are provided to clients like media outlets and live betting operators.

Reasons for the deal:

• Perform wants to tie RunningBall data in to its existing sports video services, many of which it syndicates to online publishers. That includes plugging live match stats in to Goal.com, Soccerway.com, Sportal.com.au and Spox.com
• It will also start selling RunningBall data to customers of its own existing GSM sports data syndication business.
• And it wants to integrate the data in to its own Watch&Bet and Watch&Trade online sports gaming services.

Led by joint CEOs Oliver Slipper and Simon Denyer (pictured left and right), Perform is one of the most interesting businesses out there, ploughing ahead with building the foundations of a natively online sports media business that looks well placed for the digital years ahead.

The company is set to ride two waves – the connected TV boom (it wants to go to screens with its own-brand proposition) and the liberalisation of online gaming (bingo has proved huge online thanks to TV advertising being permitted, and betting is moving from high street to sofa).

The acquisition sees it go head-to-head with the big live sports data provider Opta, but add its video and editorial experience to the mix.

The stock market likes the deal. Perform shares jumped almost eight percent when the deal was announced in London Wednesday morning.

The price of up to €120 million is 9x RunningBall’s anticipated 2012 EBITDA, which was €7.2 million on revenue of €16.1 million. In other words, RunningBall’s margin is high.

Perform only raised £72.5 ($116.26) million in its London IPO float. But only €20 million of the RunningBall offer is made from available cash – €50 million comes in Perform shares given to RunningBall and Perform will take on debt to pay an extra up to €51 million in deferred payment.

Release.

According to tickets’ entry terms for event spectators:

“Images, video and sound recordings of the Games taken by a Ticket Holder cannot be used for any purpose other than for private and domestic purposes and a Ticket Holder may not license, broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the Internet more generally.”

Athletes, too, are prohibited from taking still photos, video or audio for anything but personal use, according to guidelines which date back to 2010.

It may seem incongruous for the emerging social media generation, but the IOC wants to protect the broadcast rights won by license holders including NBC, which is paying $4.38 billion for exclusive U.S. coverage of four Olympic Games.

And it also wants to ensure the hundreds of accredited journalists who will descend on London get their money’s worth, retaining their historic role as documenters-in-chief. The committee’s guidelines for athletes warn them off overlapping media, too:

“It is acceptable for a participant or any other accredited person to do a personal posting, blog  or tweet. However, any such postings, blogs or tweets must be in a first-person, diary-type format and should not be in the role of a journalist.”

In a world where lines between consumers and producers have blurred, the Olympics is relying on familiar old lines of demarcation to safeguard the Olympics as we know it, bankrolled by large broadcast deals and massive sponsorship arrangements.

But that doesn’t mean the Olympics is trying to smother social media entirely…

• It has launched its own Athletes’ Hub to aggregate tweets and Facebook status updates from over 1,000 participating athletes.
• And, showing it does want fans to post some photos, the tournament has launched a web contest called ICopyU (ironic, given the broadcast copyright concerns) that encourages viewers to mimic famous athletes’ poses.

Will this officially-mandated social media strategy win out over the threat of crowd-produced content? The IOC says it “will continue to monitor Olympic on-line content”.

But even the tournament appears resigned to losing some control. The chairman of local Olympic delivery agency Locog, Keith Mills, tells BBC News:

“Media rights are sold – can we police everything these days? Absolutely not, the internet has changed the world and we’re not going to be silly.

“But the reality is that we live in an internet world where Facebook downloads and uploads are happening every day of the week and there’s not much we can do about it.”

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [anbibyte].

The $2.15 billion sale price of the Los Angeles Dodgers this week came as a shocker to some people. But a likely bidding war for the team’s soon-to-expire TV licensing rights should turn more heads than an unassisted triple-play. There was widespread speculation Wednesday that the team’s next TV deal would go for around $4 billion.

Yes, subscriber growth has slowed down for cable and satellite operators, and ratings are down for cable programmers. But operators of regional sports channels are bullish enough about the long-term vitality of the multichannel business to sign sports teams to huge deals.

And the Dodgers, whose current TV deal expires in 2013, are poised to become a major beneficiary of that dynamic. Here’s how the bidding war shapes up:

The incumbent Fox (NSDQ: NWS) Cable Networks recently extended the region’s other Major League team, the Los Angeles Angels, to a 20-year, $3 billion agreement to stay on Fox Sports West, the fourth-biggest regional sports cable network in the U.S., with revenue of more than $282 million last year, according to research firm SNL Kagan. But next year, Fox will lose longtime tenant the Los Angeles Lakers, who signed a 20-year, $5 billion deal to help Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) launch two new regional sports channels.

Losing the Dodgers would have a far-reaching impact on Fox, which could no longer justify charging cable, satellite and telco TV operators hefty carriage fees for spin-off channel Fox Sports West 2. In fact, Fox’s parent company, News Corp., actually bought the Dodgers in 1998 to justify the launch of that second regional channel. (News Corp., whose ownership of the Dodgers was never embraced by local media or fans, sold the team to real estate tycoon Frank McCourt for $430 million in 2004 — another ill-fated ownership run that ended Tuesday night when a private equity group fronted by Lakers legend Magic Johnson made its purchase.)

Fox has an exclusive negotiating window with the Dodgers through Nov. 30, but don’t be surprised if the team waits to test the open market. Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) Cable also wants to be able to charge operators for two channels. And having the Dodgers — whose summer schedule compliments the Lakers’ winter campaign — would justify paying a hefty license fee.

McCourt had a notoriously rocky run as owner of the Dodgers — a term that bottomed out a year ago with the near-fatal assault of a rival fan in the Dodger Stadium parking lot during opening day. His very public, very messy divorce from former wife Jamie, meanwhile, not only hurt his public image, it compromised the financial resources needed to run the team.

But not only is the Dodgers’ brand equity restored overnight by Johnson — who has parlayed local sports heroism into a solid reputation as one of Los Angeles’ bigger business power brokers — the ownership group he fronts seems more than poised to capitalize on the huge TV licensing opportunity.

Not only does Chicago-based investment firm Guggenheim Partners have experience with negotiating media deals, the ownership group also includes former Sony (NYSE: SNE) Pictures chairman and CEO Peter Guber, as well as Stan Kasten, a former baseball executive who has, in the past, carved out TV deals for the Atlanta Braves and Washington Nationals.

So stay tuned to the Dodgers’ upcoming media deals — the team is about to put up some big numbers again.

The soccer club sent an infringement notice to Google in February to request it remove from Android Market (now called Google Play) apps that contain its famous crest.

Many apps on Google Play here re-use the logo, which Manchester United says is registered as a trademark.

It is the latest case in which intellectual property law may be broken in arenas like Google Play before proprietors step up to complain.

In January, paidContent reported how dozens of top-tier novels had been repackaged and were available in free, ad-supported Android Market apps without authorisation. Google later removed the apps.

Google’s laissez faire Android app entry process differs from Apple’s famously stringent rules for approval to iTunes Store.

Google, Twitter and other online services are receiving a growing number of takedown requests under the U.S. DCMA law, disclosed on ChillingEffects.org. They are engaged in a continual post-publication moderation firefight.

paidContent has asked Google if it intends to remove the apps containing Manchester United’s logo.

Google executives got a rough ride from a House Of Commons committee in January, when they declined to systemically filter law-breaking web pages from search results, before takedown requests need to be lodged.

Much to the disbelief of MPs, Google’s associate general counsel Daphne Keller told the joint committee on privacy and injunctions that algorithmic filtering-out was technically feasible but not something the company wants to do.

“If a user has their privacy violated by a web page and wants that removed, we have a public-facing web form that they use to let us know. We have removed hundreds of URLs in this case so that they no longer show up in our search results.”

“I don’t dispute that someone could perhaps build something (to remove results prior to publication). My policy point is that doing so is a bad idea.”

Manchester United allows re-use of the logo for school projects but says schoolkids must seek permission from its brand protection office. That hasn’t stopped it being used all over the web.