ESPN

Lost among the regular sports hoopla of the Super Bowl, Brett Favre’s retirement, and Lebron vs. D-Wade, was ESPN’s acquisition of the company Vistas Unlimited.  Vistas Unlimited specializes in dealing with virtual insertion of advertisements during sportscasts.  More details from MediaPost,

The acquisition of Vistas Unlimited could help ESPN financially, if it doesn’t have to license the embedded-advertising capability it already uses.

Within a 24 hour period this week, the brand value sport of professional soccer in the United States took a huge jump.

I came across this list in both the sporting news and The Sports Business Journal. At first glance it is a pretty good list, but several things about it really intrigued me.

First and foremost the Commissioners of the five big sports leagues (NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, and NASCAR) varied widely in the rankings. Respectively these commissioners were ranked 4th, 3rd, 13th, 6th, and 9th. In my mind that seems out of order. When I think about sports business I always think of the NFL first, then MLB, NBA and the NHL seem to me to be on the same level, and then NASCAR.

ESPN has bid a whopping 125 million dollars per year to get the broadcast rights to the 5 BCS games. As of right now Fox currnetly pays around 82.5 million per year for the rights to those same games. What we have to consider is that their is a bigger force a play here and it is one of partial deception.

I was sitting at home wondering ow a company that has just 77 in 31 states plus large direct mail and online business could afford to sponsor so may different things in NASCAR. In case the news hasn’t reached you yet Camping World has agreed to become the title sponsor of the NASCAR truck series. They will be replacing Craftsman Tools who has been the sponsor of that series since it’s inception in 1995.

How can you have 1 million hours of Olympic coverage, and still manage to piss people off?  NBC shows us how.

As some of you may have heard, there is this thing called the 2008 Olympics going on over in Beijing right now.  As some of you may have also heard, there is this Jamaican sprinter, Usain Bolt…he’s pretty fast.  He ran in the 200 Meter finals today at 10:20 am (10:20 pm Beijing time).  Viewers that wanted to watch tuned into NBC for their psuedo-live coverage.  Only problem?  It wasn’t on.  From The Big Lead,

What’s next?  Brett Favre coming out of retirement?  Oh…wait. riiiiight. The NFL, yes the same NFL who attempted to block viewings of the Super Bowl at a church, will be working with NBC Sports to webcast 17 NFL games during the 2008 regular season.  More details from Paid Content,

Alex Rodriguez is back in the news again. According to ESPN.com, A-Rod and the Yankees have reached a deal that could raise the value of his contract to $305 million dollars!