NET SPORTS
The noise about San Francisco's Quokka Sports (www.quokka.com) - known best for its coverage of the 1997- 98 Whitbread and '98 -99 Around Alone sailing races - might make you think the company has already gone public and established itself as the undisputed champion of online athletic programming. The IPO story could happen soon - CEO and president Al Ramadan says an offering "is not out of the question in 1999." But the rest of the tale - building what Ramadan calls "The Wide World of Sports of digital media" - is in prologue.
Ramadan, an Australian, comes to media with a résumé blending high tech and sport - most notably in his work as a technology director for oneAustralia, a boat that raced in the 1995 America's Cup. He sums up Quokka as delivering an "experience through the minds and the hearts of the athletes" - a description that makes you wonder whether you can stream the agony of oxygen debt. In practice, Quokka Sports Immersion is real-time data, news, first-person accounts from ships and sailors, and mind-intensive media.
Quokka's concept has drawn $37 million in three rounds of investment from partners like Intel, BancBoston Robertson Stephens, and MediaOne Interactive Services. The money has built a 140-person management, editorial, and production staff, the nucleus of a team Ramadan says will move over the next several years toward continuous programming that could feature a wider selection of undercovered sports. On that path, Quokka has created the corporate site for the International Olympic Committee, and Ramadan says the company's talking to potential partners for a piece of the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney. The next event on the company's schedule is the Marathon des Sables, a 150-mile foot race across the Sahara. Ramadan promises to carry live feeds from runners' heart-rate monitors.
Ramadan sees Quokka's race as a long one in which TV/Net convergence and wider consumer access to bandwidth and processing power create ever greater opportunity. That's one reason for investor enthusiasm. Another: On the Net, Quokka is competing mostly against itself. Even the most ambitious sports sites have only nibbled at the edges of the you're-in-the-cockpit immediacy Quokka is aiming for. TV is another matter: Disney's ESPN2 stands out for its tech-smart coverage of events the broadcast networks wouldn't dream of scheduling - The X Games, America's Cup, and Eco-Challenge, for instance. Upshot: Quokka's challenge lies ahead, when it confronts competition in the coming converged world.
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