Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Tollywood T20 Cricket Tournament
We all have waited for 5 long years and now T20 fever is catching the Tollywood and Andhra Pradesh. After the first trophy which was conducted in 2003 and the second in 2005 the third is on June 13th 2010 which needs to be added to our calendars, live and exclusively from L.B.Stadium. Spectacular, Entertainment and Extravaganza Rexona T20 Tollywood trophy is brought to you by Rexona 2nd Honeymoon and co-sponsored by Sriram Group and Fortune Butterfly City. Live and exclusive only on Gemini TV. Book Tollywood t20 cricket tickets online at Mera Events
Four teams with their captains being the Big Heros of Tollywood. Chiru’s team named as Chiru Cheetahs. Balayya’s team named as Balayya Lions. Nagarjuna’s team named as Nag Kings and Victory Venkatesh’s team named as venky Warriors.
Murali Mohan talking to the media said, before the start of the matches there would be anti-piracy run by members of all four teams holding placards in their hands. There would be two preliminary matches to be played and the winners from the two matches would clash for the Rexona T20 Tollywood Trophy.
Rumors are that there would be two heroines each for the four teams as brand ambassadors. 22 cameras would be eagle eying the players and the audiences on and off the fields and the broadcasters are the same who lend their support in the recently concluded IPL 3. The whole tournament is organized by Rhythm. Tickets are priced at Rs. 10,000 for VVIPs and Rs. 200 for Regular.
The funds amassed through the T20 Tollywood trophy would be utilized to build a building for MAA, and also to help the poor and deserving cine artists. Probable actors who would be participating in this event are Sushanth, Siddharth, Ahuti Prasad, Tarun, Sivaji Raja, Gautham Raju, Maharshi Raghava Rajiv Kanakala. The commentary will be performed by Paruchuri Gopalakrishna.
Team’s are as below, these are not confirmed yet and if you find any mistakes, please give us an opportunity to modify through your comments.
BALAYYA LIONS TEAM PLAYERS LIST NAG KINGS TEAM PLAYERS LIST VENKY WARRIORS TEAM PLAYERS LIST CHIRU CHEETAHS TEAM PLAYERS LIS
Balakrishna(Captain)
Jr.Ntr(Vice Captain)
Prabhas
Gopichand
Sushanth
Dr.Rajasekhar Reddy
Prabhu
Ravi
Dasri Arun
Navdeep
Sameer
Shashank
Gautham
Ali
Tanish
Baladitya
Kamalakar
Kalyan
Sharwanand
Bhupal Nagarjuna(Captain)
Vishnu(Vice Captain)
Naga Chaitanya
Sumanth
Rajeev Kanakala
Ravi Prakash
Taraka Ratna
Khayyum
Ravi Babu
Ram
Nani
Siddharth
Paruchuri Ravi
Raja Ravindra
Varun Sandesh
Venu
Paramesh
Uday Kiran
Raghava
Krishnu Venkatesh(Captain)
Tarun (Vice Captain)
Manchu Manoj Kumar
Srikanth
Kalyan Ram
Nara Rohit
Adarsh
Kaushik
Naveen Reddy
Raja
Aryan Rajesh
Rohit
Nikhil
Sivaji Raja
Allari Naresh
Chitram Srinu
Venkat
Srinivas Reddy
Sivaji
Ramana Chiranjeevi(Captain)
RamCharan(Vice Captain)
Ravi Teja
Akash
Rana
Ayyappa
Raghu
Sachin
Ajay
Allu Arjun
Vaibhav
Nitin
Raghavendra
Brahmaji
Siva Balaji
Srihari
Madala Ravi
G.V
Vadde
Naveen
Four teams with their captains being the Big Heros of Tollywood. Chiru’s team named as Chiru Cheetahs. Balayya’s team named as Balayya Lions. Nagarjuna’s team named as Nag Kings and Victory Venkatesh’s team named as venky Warriors.
Murali Mohan talking to the media said, before the start of the matches there would be anti-piracy run by members of all four teams holding placards in their hands. There would be two preliminary matches to be played and the winners from the two matches would clash for the Rexona T20 Tollywood Trophy.
Rumors are that there would be two heroines each for the four teams as brand ambassadors. 22 cameras would be eagle eying the players and the audiences on and off the fields and the broadcasters are the same who lend their support in the recently concluded IPL 3. The whole tournament is organized by Rhythm. Tickets are priced at Rs. 10,000 for VVIPs and Rs. 200 for Regular.
The funds amassed through the T20 Tollywood trophy would be utilized to build a building for MAA, and also to help the poor and deserving cine artists. Probable actors who would be participating in this event are Sushanth, Siddharth, Ahuti Prasad, Tarun, Sivaji Raja, Gautham Raju, Maharshi Raghava Rajiv Kanakala. The commentary will be performed by Paruchuri Gopalakrishna.
Team’s are as below, these are not confirmed yet and if you find any mistakes, please give us an opportunity to modify through your comments.
BALAYYA LIONS TEAM PLAYERS LIST NAG KINGS TEAM PLAYERS LIST VENKY WARRIORS TEAM PLAYERS LIST CHIRU CHEETAHS TEAM PLAYERS LIS
Balakrishna(Captain)
Jr.Ntr(Vice Captain)
Prabhas
Gopichand
Sushanth
Dr.Rajasekhar Reddy
Prabhu
Ravi
Dasri Arun
Navdeep
Sameer
Shashank
Gautham
Ali
Tanish
Baladitya
Kamalakar
Kalyan
Sharwanand
Bhupal Nagarjuna(Captain)
Vishnu(Vice Captain)
Naga Chaitanya
Sumanth
Rajeev Kanakala
Ravi Prakash
Taraka Ratna
Khayyum
Ravi Babu
Ram
Nani
Siddharth
Paruchuri Ravi
Raja Ravindra
Varun Sandesh
Venu
Paramesh
Uday Kiran
Raghava
Krishnu Venkatesh(Captain)
Tarun (Vice Captain)
Manchu Manoj Kumar
Srikanth
Kalyan Ram
Nara Rohit
Adarsh
Kaushik
Naveen Reddy
Raja
Aryan Rajesh
Rohit
Nikhil
Sivaji Raja
Allari Naresh
Chitram Srinu
Venkat
Srinivas Reddy
Sivaji
Ramana Chiranjeevi(Captain)
RamCharan(Vice Captain)
Ravi Teja
Akash
Rana
Ayyappa
Raghu
Sachin
Ajay
Allu Arjun
Vaibhav
Nitin
Raghavendra
Brahmaji
Siva Balaji
Srihari
Madala Ravi
G.V
Vadde
Naveen
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Information, Communication & Entertainment
The ICE industry (Information, Communication and Entertainment)
The ICE industry in India is undergoing rapid change and organizations across the sector face the following common issues:
1. Business Transformation: In this rapidly changing environment there are three kinds of companies - shapers, adapters and followers. The first two categories need to change in order to either adapt to the changed rules or shape the rules themselves. For the followers the prospects for survival are slim.
2. Customer orientation: Increased competition is giving the customer a variety of choices leading to diminishing loyalty and high churn. Customer retention assumes equal if not higher importance than merely winning customers.
3. Scalable technical architecture: Rapid technological change and piecemeal solution development has resulted in unwieldy legacy applications with no integrated view of the customer.
4. Convergence and the impact of digitization: The advent of packet switched technologies has led to the convergence of voice, video and data, with a blurring of boundaries between fixed, wireless, cable, content and media. Any piece of content that can be converted into bits and bytes can now be pushed through digital networks.
5. Need for bandwidth: Consumers are in need of fast access to rich interactive content. The data transfer needs of corporations are increasing exponentially. As the required infrastructure gets established, it forms a vicious cycle with demand feeding supply feeding demand....
Approach
Our ICE practice offers end-to-end services and strategies to address the above issues, supported by a team of consultants with global exposure and in-depth industry knowledge.
Strategy and Business Transformation
Facing rapid deregulation, continuing technology advances, intense competition and increasing customer sophistication, organizations in the ICE sector in India are now facing the same issues in strategic planning as their international counterparts:
- Is our vision powerful enough?
- How do we convert perceived threats from discontinuous change into realistic opportunities?
- How do we create value from our current resources (physical and intangible)?
- How do we transform promises made to shareholders into tangible sources of value?
Our approach to crafting strategy involves powerful visioning workshops, creative opportunity generation, rigorous value propositions, analysis of physical as well as intellectual capital, new business model generation and business transformation planning.
Our key deliverable is executive alignment with a confirmed vision, a portfolio of value propositions, an enabling business architecture and an agreed road map supported by a robust benefits case.
In order to deliver this, our strategy engagement teams comprise a mix of strategists, business modelers, industry specialists and technologists. We draw on international experience coupled with local understanding.
Customer Management
Market and environmental forces are shaping the competitive landscape in the telecommunications industry and are likely to result in:
* Price wars for market share between new entrants and existing players
* Declining customer loyalty
* Declining average revenue per customer and customer profitability
This makes it imperative that organizations understand their customer needs and customer economics better. To be successful in the future, companies in India would need to address some key issues:
* How to identify attractive customers from the current customer base?
* How to retain attractive customers?
* How to increase average revenues per customer?
* How to reduce costs of acquiring new customers?
* How to reduce recurring costs related to customer interaction?
Our approach to customer management assists organizations successfully leverage customer information to manage marketing, sales, and service activities in order to identify, attract, and retain profitable customers. In our experience, successful customer relationship management lies in implementing multi-component end-to-end services. Accordingly, our modular approach assists companies not only in developing a customer management strategy but also in architecting and implementing specific customer management initiatives arising out of the strategy phase.
IT Strategy
In today's challenging financial environment, many organizations are questioning their investment in information technology:
* What are we actually spending on IT and what benefits are we getting from this?
* How can we make the IT expenditure in line with our business strategy and priorities?
* Can IT change the way we do business?
Our approach to address these issues focuses on redefining the IT function from one of application provider to a source of competitiveness for the enterprise. Our assessment of current IT operations, future views, technology architecting, investment options, outsourcing and governance involves robust metrics, international best practice and knowledge of global industry models. This is tempered with a trade-off of risk and cost to provide the level of IT service and flexibility required by the business. We take a complete business perspective that includes skills and competencies, strategic intent, value-chain analysis, five forces analysis, gap analysis and sustainable competitive advantage scenarios. Our understanding of your business strategy drives our formulation of your IT strategy.
The key deliverable is to develop a Road Map for the strategic use of IT - pragmatic action plans that balance critical operational needs with strategic investment priorities. We help guide the transformation of IT by addressing culture, competitive issues, economic constraints, resources, relevant technologies and the ability to adapt to change.
Our approach for building the IT strategy is based on the unique personality and environment of your business. Further:
* it creates the building blocks needed to translate high level strategies into action oriented plans
* fosters involvement and consensus at all levels to build the commitment needed to implement the IT strategy
Digital Supply Chain
The Internet and related technologies have had a far-reaching impact on the entertainment sector. Any content that can be converted to bits and bytes can be channelised through a digital network. Two key trends will fuel the need for digitisation of the entertainment value chain:
* Increasing broadband access encouraging the use of rich content
* Competitive pressures forcing the reduction of operational costs and opening up of new revenue streams
In this scenario, KPMG offers the following services to the entertainment/media industry:
* Strategic consulting services to help players enter and develop new media properties and change the way they do business
* Systems Integration to bring together and seamlessly integrate various digital media technologies to deliver an end-to-end Digital Supply Chain solution to:
a. Realise operational efficiency
b. Develop new distribution architecture for delivery and transmission of content both within the industry and to the end consumers
The ICE industry in India is undergoing rapid change and organizations across the sector face the following common issues:
1. Business Transformation: In this rapidly changing environment there are three kinds of companies - shapers, adapters and followers. The first two categories need to change in order to either adapt to the changed rules or shape the rules themselves. For the followers the prospects for survival are slim.
2. Customer orientation: Increased competition is giving the customer a variety of choices leading to diminishing loyalty and high churn. Customer retention assumes equal if not higher importance than merely winning customers.
3. Scalable technical architecture: Rapid technological change and piecemeal solution development has resulted in unwieldy legacy applications with no integrated view of the customer.
4. Convergence and the impact of digitization: The advent of packet switched technologies has led to the convergence of voice, video and data, with a blurring of boundaries between fixed, wireless, cable, content and media. Any piece of content that can be converted into bits and bytes can now be pushed through digital networks.
5. Need for bandwidth: Consumers are in need of fast access to rich interactive content. The data transfer needs of corporations are increasing exponentially. As the required infrastructure gets established, it forms a vicious cycle with demand feeding supply feeding demand....
Approach
Our ICE practice offers end-to-end services and strategies to address the above issues, supported by a team of consultants with global exposure and in-depth industry knowledge.
Strategy and Business Transformation
Facing rapid deregulation, continuing technology advances, intense competition and increasing customer sophistication, organizations in the ICE sector in India are now facing the same issues in strategic planning as their international counterparts:
- Is our vision powerful enough?
- How do we convert perceived threats from discontinuous change into realistic opportunities?
- How do we create value from our current resources (physical and intangible)?
- How do we transform promises made to shareholders into tangible sources of value?
Our approach to crafting strategy involves powerful visioning workshops, creative opportunity generation, rigorous value propositions, analysis of physical as well as intellectual capital, new business model generation and business transformation planning.
Our key deliverable is executive alignment with a confirmed vision, a portfolio of value propositions, an enabling business architecture and an agreed road map supported by a robust benefits case.
In order to deliver this, our strategy engagement teams comprise a mix of strategists, business modelers, industry specialists and technologists. We draw on international experience coupled with local understanding.
Customer Management
Market and environmental forces are shaping the competitive landscape in the telecommunications industry and are likely to result in:
* Price wars for market share between new entrants and existing players
* Declining customer loyalty
* Declining average revenue per customer and customer profitability
This makes it imperative that organizations understand their customer needs and customer economics better. To be successful in the future, companies in India would need to address some key issues:
* How to identify attractive customers from the current customer base?
* How to retain attractive customers?
* How to increase average revenues per customer?
* How to reduce costs of acquiring new customers?
* How to reduce recurring costs related to customer interaction?
Our approach to customer management assists organizations successfully leverage customer information to manage marketing, sales, and service activities in order to identify, attract, and retain profitable customers. In our experience, successful customer relationship management lies in implementing multi-component end-to-end services. Accordingly, our modular approach assists companies not only in developing a customer management strategy but also in architecting and implementing specific customer management initiatives arising out of the strategy phase.
IT Strategy
In today's challenging financial environment, many organizations are questioning their investment in information technology:
* What are we actually spending on IT and what benefits are we getting from this?
* How can we make the IT expenditure in line with our business strategy and priorities?
* Can IT change the way we do business?
Our approach to address these issues focuses on redefining the IT function from one of application provider to a source of competitiveness for the enterprise. Our assessment of current IT operations, future views, technology architecting, investment options, outsourcing and governance involves robust metrics, international best practice and knowledge of global industry models. This is tempered with a trade-off of risk and cost to provide the level of IT service and flexibility required by the business. We take a complete business perspective that includes skills and competencies, strategic intent, value-chain analysis, five forces analysis, gap analysis and sustainable competitive advantage scenarios. Our understanding of your business strategy drives our formulation of your IT strategy.
The key deliverable is to develop a Road Map for the strategic use of IT - pragmatic action plans that balance critical operational needs with strategic investment priorities. We help guide the transformation of IT by addressing culture, competitive issues, economic constraints, resources, relevant technologies and the ability to adapt to change.
Our approach for building the IT strategy is based on the unique personality and environment of your business. Further:
* it creates the building blocks needed to translate high level strategies into action oriented plans
* fosters involvement and consensus at all levels to build the commitment needed to implement the IT strategy
Digital Supply Chain
The Internet and related technologies have had a far-reaching impact on the entertainment sector. Any content that can be converted to bits and bytes can be channelised through a digital network. Two key trends will fuel the need for digitisation of the entertainment value chain:
* Increasing broadband access encouraging the use of rich content
* Competitive pressures forcing the reduction of operational costs and opening up of new revenue streams
In this scenario, KPMG offers the following services to the entertainment/media industry:
* Strategic consulting services to help players enter and develop new media properties and change the way they do business
* Systems Integration to bring together and seamlessly integrate various digital media technologies to deliver an end-to-end Digital Supply Chain solution to:
a. Realise operational efficiency
b. Develop new distribution architecture for delivery and transmission of content both within the industry and to the end consumers
PVR announces entertainment city in Noida
Film company PVR Ltd yesterday announced the launch of an entertainment city comprising multi-screen theatres, a bowling alley, a skating rink and food plazas in the national capital's suburb of Noida.
The venture has been launched in partnership with the Logix Group. It will be a part of the shopping centre being developed at Logix City Center in Sector 32 here.
"The entertainment city will be a mecca of entertainment in the NCR (national capital region) as we will house all our formats under one roof," Ajay Bijli, chairman and managing director of PVR Ltd, said in a statement.
Pramod Arora, Group President, PVR Ltd, added: "The PVR Entertainment City will be a complete retail entertainment format which will showcase the best of lifestyle entertainment, leisure and casual dining formats...It will be the ultimate fun destination for the entire family."
Logix City Center is a mixed-use development project comprising shopping, office towers, entertainment and luxury hotels. It is spread across an area of 1.2 million sq. ft.
The project is in the planning and design stage and will open to the public 30 months from now.
The entertainment city will be spread over two floors in the shopping centre with a total area of 150,000 sq ft.
It will comprise a 15 screen multiplex with four gold class theatres, a 24-to-28 lane bowling alley, an Olympic size ice skating rink and food courts with restaurants, a microbrewery based Beer Island and food kiosks.
Commenting on the partnership, Shakti Nath of Logix Group said: "Logix City Center and PVR Entertainment City will be the finest entertainment and shopping destination in India.
"We have also signed one of the best hotel operators of the world to manage both hotels in Logix City Center. This will be a green building complex which will be at par with best of the buildings in New York and Las Vegas".
A similar format will be introduced across cities like Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chandigarh, Pune, as also other locations in the NCR, over the next three years, Nath said.
The venture has been launched in partnership with the Logix Group. It will be a part of the shopping centre being developed at Logix City Center in Sector 32 here.
"The entertainment city will be a mecca of entertainment in the NCR (national capital region) as we will house all our formats under one roof," Ajay Bijli, chairman and managing director of PVR Ltd, said in a statement.
Pramod Arora, Group President, PVR Ltd, added: "The PVR Entertainment City will be a complete retail entertainment format which will showcase the best of lifestyle entertainment, leisure and casual dining formats...It will be the ultimate fun destination for the entire family."
Logix City Center is a mixed-use development project comprising shopping, office towers, entertainment and luxury hotels. It is spread across an area of 1.2 million sq. ft.
The project is in the planning and design stage and will open to the public 30 months from now.
The entertainment city will be spread over two floors in the shopping centre with a total area of 150,000 sq ft.
It will comprise a 15 screen multiplex with four gold class theatres, a 24-to-28 lane bowling alley, an Olympic size ice skating rink and food courts with restaurants, a microbrewery based Beer Island and food kiosks.
Commenting on the partnership, Shakti Nath of Logix Group said: "Logix City Center and PVR Entertainment City will be the finest entertainment and shopping destination in India.
"We have also signed one of the best hotel operators of the world to manage both hotels in Logix City Center. This will be a green building complex which will be at par with best of the buildings in New York and Las Vegas".
A similar format will be introduced across cities like Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chandigarh, Pune, as also other locations in the NCR, over the next three years, Nath said.
World Cup helps ESPN's expansion plans
NEW YORK – ESPN marketers will fan out to bars in ethnic enclaves during World Cup matches to pass out schedules and posters, just one way the sports network is using the quadrennial event to build new audiences in both the U.S. and internationally.
The network's large presence of 300 staff members in South Africa for the soccer tournament could also be seen as a dry run to help a future Olympics bid.
Either ESPN, ESPN2 or corporate sister ABC is televising every one of the 64 scheduled matches in the first year the company has the American television rights to the tournament. ESPN leased rights to televise some games in 2006, covering some of the matches with announcing teams based in a Connecticut studio.
"We think it's a chance to advance the notion that we are a global entity," said John Skipper, the network's executive vice president for content.
One way to do that is to start at home. ESPN will promote itself heavily in areas where the network's emphasis on American sports makes it less interesting to residents. The Greek enclave in Queens, N.Y., San Francisco's Italian section, Boston's Portuguese neighborhoods and Los Angeles' Korean communities — all with fans keen on rooting on ancestral homelands — are among the areas that will get special attention.
Besides sending people to gathering places where the games are being watched, ESPN commissioned a South African artist to make posters honoring each of the participating countries, mixing historical and soccer themes. The U.S. poster, for example, commemorates George Washington crossing the Delaware, with soccer players standing in for his troops.
The network has equipped food trucks with a giant TV on the roof, passing out specialty foods from some of the participating countries in New York and Los Angeles, said Seth Ader, the network's sports marketing senior director.
Online and on ESPN Radio, the company will give fans the option of hearing broadcasts in different languages, including Chinese, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese.
In the U.S., Univision has the rights to Spanish-language broadcasts of the matches. Although ESPN can't offer Spanish-language broadcasts of the matches, it is moving into the territory by offering 10 hours a day of studio-based Spanish content on its ESPN Deportes network.
Getting an identification as a destination for soccer fans "is a long-term business proposition for us," Ader said. Showing the World Cup telecast can drum up interest in U.S.-based professional soccer, which ESPN has rights to televise. World Cup soccer is also expected to be a draw for ESPN's mobile business, too.
Soccer is also key to ESPN's efforts to expand in international markets. The network made a big move last year by purchasing the rights to show some games in England's Barclays Premier League.
"In order to get a foothold in a number of international markets, they need to get soccer content," said David Joyce, an analyst for Miller Tabak & Co.
Having a home team helps ESPN but isn't vital to success, the network's executives believe. ESPN's experience covering the European championship in 2008 was instructive: There was no U.S. team for which to root, but ethnic pockets of fans helped the network draw a strong audience, Ader said.
For ESPN, there's another important audience that will be watching. Following NBC's coverage of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, rights to future games are up for grabs, and ESPN is expected to be interested. A strong performance at the World Cup could show doubting Olympics officials that ESPN would be up to covering a large, multifaceted event.
"I never think of this as a dress rehearsal," ESPN's Skipper said. "We think this entity is special enough as itself to merit this sort of attention. If there were no such thing as the Olympics, we would do the same thing. Having said that, we do believe this will demonstrate to people what we can do with a big quadrennial event. That's an ancillary benefit."
(This version CORRECTS name to Ader, instead of Adler)
The network's large presence of 300 staff members in South Africa for the soccer tournament could also be seen as a dry run to help a future Olympics bid.
Either ESPN, ESPN2 or corporate sister ABC is televising every one of the 64 scheduled matches in the first year the company has the American television rights to the tournament. ESPN leased rights to televise some games in 2006, covering some of the matches with announcing teams based in a Connecticut studio.
"We think it's a chance to advance the notion that we are a global entity," said John Skipper, the network's executive vice president for content.
One way to do that is to start at home. ESPN will promote itself heavily in areas where the network's emphasis on American sports makes it less interesting to residents. The Greek enclave in Queens, N.Y., San Francisco's Italian section, Boston's Portuguese neighborhoods and Los Angeles' Korean communities — all with fans keen on rooting on ancestral homelands — are among the areas that will get special attention.
Besides sending people to gathering places where the games are being watched, ESPN commissioned a South African artist to make posters honoring each of the participating countries, mixing historical and soccer themes. The U.S. poster, for example, commemorates George Washington crossing the Delaware, with soccer players standing in for his troops.
The network has equipped food trucks with a giant TV on the roof, passing out specialty foods from some of the participating countries in New York and Los Angeles, said Seth Ader, the network's sports marketing senior director.
Online and on ESPN Radio, the company will give fans the option of hearing broadcasts in different languages, including Chinese, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese.
In the U.S., Univision has the rights to Spanish-language broadcasts of the matches. Although ESPN can't offer Spanish-language broadcasts of the matches, it is moving into the territory by offering 10 hours a day of studio-based Spanish content on its ESPN Deportes network.
Getting an identification as a destination for soccer fans "is a long-term business proposition for us," Ader said. Showing the World Cup telecast can drum up interest in U.S.-based professional soccer, which ESPN has rights to televise. World Cup soccer is also expected to be a draw for ESPN's mobile business, too.
Soccer is also key to ESPN's efforts to expand in international markets. The network made a big move last year by purchasing the rights to show some games in England's Barclays Premier League.
"In order to get a foothold in a number of international markets, they need to get soccer content," said David Joyce, an analyst for Miller Tabak & Co.
Having a home team helps ESPN but isn't vital to success, the network's executives believe. ESPN's experience covering the European championship in 2008 was instructive: There was no U.S. team for which to root, but ethnic pockets of fans helped the network draw a strong audience, Ader said.
For ESPN, there's another important audience that will be watching. Following NBC's coverage of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, rights to future games are up for grabs, and ESPN is expected to be interested. A strong performance at the World Cup could show doubting Olympics officials that ESPN would be up to covering a large, multifaceted event.
"I never think of this as a dress rehearsal," ESPN's Skipper said. "We think this entity is special enough as itself to merit this sort of attention. If there were no such thing as the Olympics, we would do the same thing. Having said that, we do believe this will demonstrate to people what we can do with a big quadrennial event. That's an ancillary benefit."
(This version CORRECTS name to Ader, instead of Adler)
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