NBC Puts New Web Portal in Play

By Karen Brown -- Multichannel News, 9/6/2006 9:44:00 AM MT

With the National Football League season now in play, NBC Sports is kicking off its new Internet portal, which features expanded content and video.

NBCSports.com (www.nbcsports.com) debuted Wednesday, focusing initially on in-depth football coverage, but plans are to expand the scope of the portal to include all major sports.

The site will offer news updates, analysis, live event coverage, a raft of video highlights and fantasy-football games.

To provide the live event coverage, including video, NBCSports.com partnered with global online broadcaster MediaZone.

For fantasy games, NBC Sports also announced that it acquired Allstar Stats, a popular Web fantasy-sports-game outlet. The deal brings NBC Allstar’s Rotoworld.com fantasy-sports Web portal (allstar.rotoworld.com).

Perkins Miller, recently named senior vice president of NBC’s digital-media group, will oversee the NBC Sports portal development, while Joe Gesue, NBC Universal’s director of Olympic Games research, will oversee the editorial content.

On a related note, the NFL reupped its contract with Motorola for another five years. Under that deal, Motorola will move from being a national NFL partner to a global one and will work with the league to test technology internationally. It will continue to provide telecommunications hardware to all 32 NFL teams, and it will boost that with newer mesh-wireless-networking systems on the field.