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Online Sports: First online video service (YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, etc.) to secure the exclusive...

...live broadcast rights to the National Football League (NFL) or National Basketball Association (NBA) for at least an entire season (including pre-season, play-offs, and the championship game) and then air the season ONLY online.  To win this challenge, the games must be offered free over the Internet.  Commercial breaks during the live coverage would naturally be allowed.

[When this challenge is accomplished, it will herald the true rise of online TV.  Only by moving either the NFL or NBA to online-only will it force America to hook up their living room TVs to the Internet.  A mega-hit drama or reality show will not cause this shift since people will likely still just watch such shows on their desk/laptop computers, tablet PCs, and/or cellphones.  Sports is different.  With many men and women, watching a sports game is a group activity and that isn't possible using a computer monitor.  You need to show such programming on a big TV so everyone at the party can sit around and watch it.  And due to the popularity of the NFL and NBA, this challenge will cause a paradigm shift and that will very likely be the tide that rises all ships.  Once people's living room TVs are hooked up to the Internet, watching other online shows on it will start to happen.  Online shows promoted to viewers watching the online NFL/NBA games.  And since YouTube is owned by super-rich Google, this has a very real chance of happening.  Google just needs to decide when it is ready to capitalize on this big shift.  If Google gets NFL or NBA for only YouTube, the era of online TV will have moved out of its infancy and will rapidly achieve adulthood in no time.]

Future Challenges: For at least an entire season (including pre-season, play-offs, and the championship game) and then air the season ONLY online, first online video service (YouTube, Daily Motion, etc.) to secure the exclusive live broadcast rights to the:

1) Other professional sport not secured above.

2) Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA; the international league for soccer).  [As NFL/NBA will do for online TV in the USA, this future challenge will do for online TV for the rest of the world.]

3) First of the above three professional sports leagues (NFL, NBA, or FIFA) to cut out the middleman and air their games over the Internet themselves.  [Broadcast and cable TV networks as well as online video services (YouTube, DailyMotion, Hulu, Netflix, etc.) are simply a middleman between these leagues and advertisers.  These middlemen take their cut of the action.  A cut that the leagues could pocket themselves.  Eventually, one of the leagues' business managers will realize this and how airing their games online frees them from gatekeeper broadcast and cable TV networks.  The league then only needs to employ its own ad salespeople and they're that much richer.]

Discussion:
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