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By GREG AUMAN
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 13, 2001
The landmark Webcast of tonight's Kings-Mavericks game at NBA.com isn't so much sailing into uncharted waters as a league dipping its toes to check the temperature.
Even the NBA's announcement of the 8:30 p.m. Webcast -- the first major pro sports event to be shown online in its entirety -- called it an "experiment," and league officials aren't as concerned about how many people tune in as what those viewers do after they're connected.
"It's our first chance to test this out, and we want to see how fans approach it," said Brenda Spoonemore, NBA vice president of Internet services. "Do they watch the whole game? Do they stay for 10 minutes? What are the patterns? We haven't set any threshold of what is a success, so my main goal is to ask, "How are fans using this?' "
That answer depends on how fast a connection you have. The site will send out a TV-quality broadcast, but only visitors with high-speed connections might be able to receive sharp images. Spoonemore said dial-up customers with 56K modems should have a "decent experience" with the Webcast.
Last fall, Fox Sports had a Webcast of a Nebraska football game, which some low-speed viewers compared to watching a game under water. The best approach is to not go in with expectations too great: Remember, you're watching a live basketball game, for free, on your computer.
The Webcast is also a foreign policy move for the NBA, and this game showcases the league's most international teams, with players hailing from eight countries. They include Dallas' Dirk Nowitzki (Germany) and Sacramento's Vlade Divac and Predrag Stojakovic, both from Yugoslavia.
The newest import is China's 7-foot-1 Wang Zhizhi, who joined the Mavericks last week and developed an instant fan base in Dallas by scoring the Mavs' 100th point in his first game, clinching free chalupas for everyone in attendance through a fast-food promotion.
By no coincidence, tonight's Webcast also will be available in Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. NBA.com gets about a third of its traffic from outside the United States, thanks to parallel sites in Japanese and Spanish and for fans in the United Kingdom and Canada.
TID-BYTES: How's this for a new Sports Illustrated jinx: The magazine recently ran a feature on baseball-reference.com, a site named by webcriteria.com as the Internet's best resource for baseball statistics. As a result, the site's traffic grew so much the company providing its server shut it down. "It got a little too popular for what we had, which was supposed to be unlimited bandwidth," said site creator Sean Forman, who is upgrading to a new server and expects the site to be back up next week. ... The home plate used in the first game at PNC Park, the Pittsburgh Pirates new stadium, has been autographed by the team and is up for bid at auction.mlb.com. Impressively for the low-budget Pirates, bidding was at $1,730 on Thursday.
-- If you have a question or comment about the Internet or a site to suggest, send an e-mail to staff writer Greg Auman at aumanac1@aol.com.