CBS SportsLine founder Mike Levy is preparing to announce his newest venture, OPEN Sports Network.
The company’s website is still being built out but based on their description, it aspires to be a sports-oriented social network featuring betting-enabled fantasy sports games, rich news content, and perhaps most importantly, a game platform with open APIs.
Fantasy sports leagues are incredibly popular but many of them are still locked in archaic walled gardens. If OPEN Sports Network makes good on their promise of open APIs, they may be able to differentiate themselves from other, established, sites.
OPEN Sports Network, located in Deerfield Beach, Florida, was founded in 2007 and the company says that it will launch in August 2008.
Levy founded SportsLine, his former project, in 1994. It was acquired by Viacom (then the parent company of CBS) in 2004 and is now the flagship sports site of the CBS network.
This news comes only a day after AOL’s acquisition of fantasy sports site Fleaflicker - clearly this market is poised for a shakeup.
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This has been done to death already. I would guess that if it does get picked up, it will be on the clout of the president.
Yay to all sport fans!
Regards
Syed
http://sirehdancengkeh.com
hey i love football iam a big fan
Anyone else getting a 404 when you try to join the mailing list?
2 of the 3 whopping comments on the TC50 blog are spam
Is it going to be free to use or will it be a pay site?
404 on mailing list whats up with this websites today they are full of bad luck first the proxy errors on presdo and now this!!!
today is not a good day.
Deerfield Beach? That place is just like a college town except for grandmas.
The description of what they do seems very cryptic.
Cryptic is an understatement.. and so last year.
It’s hard to get excited about this when there’s a 404 on the mailing list, their blog is empty, and their logo is so dated and uninspired.
Granted, they may have not been prepared for the TC coverage, but not even much to speculate on at this point.
This is a ridiculous statement:
“If OPEN Sports Network makes good on their promise of open APIs, the network could easily overtake competitors such as ESPN and Yahoo Sports.”
Easily? Since we did getting millions of users and generating revenue from an Internet social product like this “easy”?
C’mon. Try reading that out loud.
@Cody
I agree. My thinking was that their offerings could easily be better than ESPN and Yahoo, but you make a good point - they still have massive installed user bases.
I’ve gotta think it’s going to be an uphill battle to win converts and then get them to move their fantasy-league buddies over to a new platform. Good luck with that.
cody - agree. Jason, ???
lets wait until the application launches before we pronounce them the next king of sports.
@7 - we’re also based in Deerfield beach. Agree to the grandmas.
Check out fftoolbox.com They have a very high traffic site (I think they are 50 million+ hits since 2004). High Alexa rank (7,500-50,000 depending on the time in the year) and from what I gather have a couple dedicated people to the site including “side/free” reporters. Their big thing is that they provide custom cheatsheets for free and make money from advertising.
If you look at the architecture of the site, Coldfusion/bad HTML and it still succeeds in being pretty good. It doesn’t even look like a good designed site from the year 2000. Can’t knock it, cuz the site prolly brings in several thousand dollars a week.
I don’t know what made me think of it, but this somewhat reminds me of this week’s episode of The Office when Dunder Mifflin (sp?) wanted to launch a social network on their new website.
ESPN will eat them alive. They have critical mass, the best sports content, and can win if go after it.
I think it will take them a while to beat sites like ESPN or even come nearer them unless they have something unique to offer.
I will keep an eye on the site when it launches in August and hopefully it will have good football coverage.
Users spend a LARGE amount of time on the fantasy sports sites and I see this idea as working EXTREMELY well. The only thing is that it must be advertised and apps must be built that synch it in with sites such as MySpace and Facebook. It must become viral and people have to see the network effect of it in order to build popularity so that people wish to play with their friends
nice blog, i come again