Your Basketball Highlights
The NBA is looking for your finest moves.
That would be your basketball moves. The league announced a new partnership with YouTube on Monday and invited fans to “Post Up the NBA” on its new NBA Channel on the popular video sharing Web site.
Fans are invited to upload clips of themselves shooting hoops onto the site through the rest of this season. Fans can rate the clips and each week the top entries will be included in a “NBA Top 10 on YouTube.”
The league hopes the partnership will allow it to continue to broaden the NBA's reach around the world.
“NBA fans will be able to interact and share their passion for the game by posting the ‘best moves,’” NBA Commissioner David Stern said in a statement. “YouTube’s popularity and wide-reaching community of users provides the NBA with another unique way to reach our fans.”
The NBA will also post its own select nightly highlights on the site. Currently, visitors will find highlights and behind the scenes clips from the NBA All-Star Game in Las Vegas, including the impromptu dance contest between Shaquille O’Neal, LeBron James and Dwight Howard during the East team’s practice, and players trying their best Elvis Presley impersonations during the weekend’s festivities.
The partnership allows the league to protect its copyrighted video, which it can either remove or share in any revenue generated by advertising appearing around it.
In November, the NHL became the first pro sports league to strike a deal with YouTube. Game and other highlights are posted within 24 hours of game broadcasts at the NHL channel on the site.
TICKETMASTER
Also on Monday, the league forged a partnership with Ticketmaster, which makes the company the NBA’s official “ticketing provider” and official “secondary ticketing provider.”
Already 26 of the league’s 30 teams contract with the company to sell their tickets. The Heat and Phoenix Suns were the first teams to sign up for the company’s Ticket Exchange service that allows season ticket-holders to post tickets they can’t use for sale on their team’s Web site.
The arrangement, team officials say, provides a safe marketplace in which fans can purchase tickets and ensure that seats not only don’t go empty, but fans can recoup some of their costs. In all, 16 teams use the ticket exchange service and the Heat, Suns and Los Angeles Lakers are among the top sellers on the secondary market, according to the league.
CRAIG DAVIS In more than 33 years at the Sun Sentinel, Craig Davis has written about a wide variety of sports topics from baseball to yachting, fishing to triathlons, and also worked as a copy editor and page designer. Recently he reported on local sports, including running, swimming, cycling, equestrian and beach volleyball. He enjoys sports as a participant as well as a spectator, is active in the South Florida running scene plays in the curling club at Saveology Iceplex. This blog offers a glimpse at the business side of sports in the interest of enhancing enjoyment of the games and sporting options as a spectator as well as a participant.
