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April 25, 2008

CBS SportsLine Founder to Launch OPEN Sports Network

Jason Kincaid

27 comments »

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.

CrunchBase Information
OPEN Sports Network
Information provided by CrunchBase
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This entry was posted on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 7:27 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Chris

    April 25th, 2008 at 7:54 pm

    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.

  2. Syed

    April 25th, 2008 at 8:39 pm

    Yay to all sport fans!

    Regards
    Syed
    http://sirehdancengkeh.com

  3. Mark

    April 25th, 2008 at 8:46 pm

    Anyone else getting a 404 when you try to join the mailing list?

  4. damon

    April 25th, 2008 at 8:56 pm

    2 of the 3 whopping comments on the TC50 blog are spam

  5. The Little League Coach

    April 25th, 2008 at 8:58 pm

    Is it going to be free to use or will it be a pay site?

  6. JeremySpouken

    April 25th, 2008 at 9:14 pm

    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.

  7. Robert Lancer

    April 25th, 2008 at 9:17 pm

    Deerfield Beach? That place is just like a college town except for grandmas.

  8. Ultimate Football Network

    April 25th, 2008 at 9:24 pm

    The description of what they do seems very cryptic.

  9. Greg

    April 25th, 2008 at 10:02 pm

    Cryptic is an understatement.. and so last year.

  10. Ryan

    April 25th, 2008 at 10:09 pm

    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.

  11. Cody

    April 25th, 2008 at 10:15 pm

    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.

  12. Jason Kincaid

    April 25th, 2008 at 10:29 pm

    @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.

  13. Kyle M.

    April 25th, 2008 at 10:32 pm

    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.

  14. Michael Arrington

    April 25th, 2008 at 11:08 pm

    cody - agree. Jason, ???

    lets wait until the application launches before we pronounce them the next king of sports.

  15. Al

    April 26th, 2008 at 8:13 am

    @7 - we’re also based in Deerfield beach. Agree to the grandmas.

  16. Bart Czernicki

    April 26th, 2008 at 9:54 am

    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.

  17. Shane

    April 26th, 2008 at 10:59 am

    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.

  18. JohnnyRocks

    April 27th, 2008 at 5:18 am

    ESPN will eat them alive. They have critical mass, the best sports content, and can win if go after it.

  19. tippo

    April 27th, 2008 at 8:34 pm

    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.

  20. Miles (SEM iCluck)

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:20 pm

    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

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