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http://www.slideshare.net/TrendBuero/identity-management-manifesto-presentation

In May this year, frog design founder Hartmut Esslinger spoke at the German Trend Day in Hamburg. The Trend Day is an influential annual forum that gathers thought leaders from business, media, and academia to discuss emerging social and cultural trends. This year’s theme was “Identity Management,” and other speakers besides Hartmut included Richard Florida, Danny Choo, and David Bosshart.

The organizers have synthesized the research, interviews, and lectures of the two-day symposium into a manifesto that is worth reading:

The paper argues that today’s “attention economy” will be succeeded by a “recognition economy,” in which opportunities for design will continue to increase: “Compulsory self-responsibility will force consumers to optimize their self. This self will call for deliberate decisions and new orientation frames. Identity will become a management assignment. Recognition will become the new key quantity.” The result is what the authors call “Egonomics – an economy geared to the own self.” Egonomics comprises of the following pillars: Body: Healthstyle; Security: Authentification; Relationships: Connectivity; Recognition: Reputation; Self-actualization: Creativity.

In fairness to Google, it did better than its competitors, according to a JPMorgan report issued Wednesday morning. (ComScore’s paid-click numbers are not typically issued directly to public. We hear about them when Wall Street analysts issue their own reports on the data.)

Analysts and Google pundits are split on what the ComScore numbers mean. Google maintains that its deceleration has more to do with its efforts to improve the quality of its ad leads (which should drive up average selling prices) than a broader economic slowdown. But disappointing numbers at all the major search sites may indicate that there’s a broader economic explanation than Google’s improved quality control. Is the paid-search advertising business as immune to a sour community as Google executives like to believe? We’ll find out tomorrow.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News.com)

In total, the market wasn’t healthy. In March, it declined 1.5 percent. For the quarter, it managed 0.3 percent growth, versus a 15.8 percent increase in the fourth quarter.

What will Google's Schmidt have to say about the first quarter? We’ll find out Thursday.

Paid-search clicks at Google were up 2.7 percent in March, compared to the same month a year ago. That means that growth for the full quarter was just 1.8 percent year over year, a rapid drop from 25 percent year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter. (Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider has a good take on the worst-case scenario for Google’s first quarter.)

Late Tuesday night, those Internet traffic trackers at ComScore put out some lousy news: growth in paid-search clicks in the United States is slowing down.

Google, of course, is one of those big tech companies people closely follow in order to get a read on the health of the high-tech industry. We watch Google’s results more closely than any other Internet company for good reason: because of its dominant search market share, Google is a good indicator of the health of Internet advertising. A slowdown at Google can be a sign of big trouble ahead for smaller companies.

What remains to be seen, of course, is whether the ComScore results have any correlation to Google’s financial results. Similarly disappointing news earlier this year led to a significant drop in Google’s share price. In fact, since November, Google shares have dropped about 40 percent since hitting $747.24.

So by the end of this week, we’ll have a better sense of whether it’s time for tech companies to batten down the hatches.

But competitors did worse. Yahoo paid clicks declined 3.1 percent year over year in March (all percentages are year-over-year comparisons), though for the quarter, paid clicks at Yahoo grew 5.4 percent, also marking a drop-off from the fourth quarter’s 9.8 percent growth.

Google’s first-quarter earnings report, scheduled for Thursday afternoon, just got a lot more interesting.

At Microsoft’s MSN, the news was flat-out bad. Paid clicks in March dropped 15.1 percent. For the quarter, paid clicks declined 12.3 percent. At AOL, March paid clicks dropped 2.3 percent. For the quarter, paid clicks declined 5.8 percent–a noticeable turnaround from the 29.3 percent drop in the fourth quarter.

So far, there’s certainly no panicking because of the ComScore numbers. Google was up about 2 percent to $456.20 in midday trading Wednesday.

On Tuesday afternoon, Intel executives signaled confidence in the coming year. IBM, another one of those tech bellwethers, reports its first-quarter earnings after the stock market closes this afternoon.

The installed application is a great improvement over the previously released web based version, which does not offer as high a level of functionality or as fluid of an interface. While I was initially skeptical as to the benefits to a standalone Facebook application, as opposed to just using the web based one, features like photo uploading and chat justify its existence.

Viewing Facebook photos is really great in this app. They have implemented the same “flick” style of navigation that the
iPhone uses and photos flip over to reveal comments. Overall, the UI is pretty intuitive and uses a lot of the same conventions that Apple does. Taking photos and uploading them to Facebook could not be simpler. Just tap the camera icon, take the picture, and tap to upload.

Facebook's iPhone app gives you access to Facebook Chat.

Along with over five hundred other applications, Facebook’s
iPhone app made its debut today. The application gives you easy access to your friend’s updates and profiles, along with Facebook Chat and your inbox. Facebook’s app also lets you take and upload photos directly to Facebook.

Facebook has built an extremely slick iPhone application. My first impressions are extremely positive and Facebook has definitely earned a spot on my first page of icons. Its navigation is very fluid and the feature set is complete and easy to use. It was important for Facebook to have an application at launch for the iPhone App Store, with competition coming from a variety of other social networks, MySpace included, so it’s good to see them bring such a solid offering to the table.

MTV might’ve strayed away from music these days–My Super Sweet Sixteen, anyone?–but the entertainment mainstay’s latest project aims to both bring it back to its roots and propel it into the social Web. Ambitious, yes.

But MTV also hopes that Soundtrack, which will be worked into the main MTV.com site soon, will become an important promotional hub. There’s a ranking of the top songs and artists–and it’s a lot more obscure than iTunes or MTV’s own TRL charts–and indie bands can create profiles to amass fans.

The indie band promotion may remind you a bit of PureVolume, which thrived for a while as a music promotion and discovery site before MySpace and an army of popular music blogs far surpassed it in influence. And MTV, too, has heretofore been a series of misses in the Web 2.0 space: Viacom lost out to News Corp. in the bidding for MySpace, which had fast become the Web’s center for finding new music. The company also failed to jump on the music blog trend, which start-up Buzznet has quickly been amassing. The Twittering Moon Man didn’t do much either.

Soundtrack, however, is MTV’s most targeted and relevant Web 2.0 effort yet, and will likely be an appreciated attempt to bring at least some of the network’s focus back to music. Considering how many people watch The Hills, it could make a difference.

It’s called “Soundtrack,” and it’s an “interactive music guide for TV.” If you’re watching a heated moment of cattiness between Lauren and Audrina on The Hills and are dying to know what song’s playing in the background, you can log on and find out exactly what it was. Then you can purchase the MP3, thanks to MTV’s partnership with music service Rhapsody, as well as look up more soundtrack information from past programming. You can, of course, network with other members–this is powered by Flux, the social-networking technology that MTV Networks parent company Viacom built when it acquired a start-up called Tagworld.

(Credit:
MTV)

'The Hills': Now telling you what you want to listen to.

Let’s also hope MTV somehow ties Soundtrack into its most shining success of the digital age: video game Rock Band.

Radio stations have been doing the “look up a song” gimmick for years, which makes it not particularly jaw-dropping for MTV to institute the same thing. But it does tap into a host of extremely popular and influential cable shows (for better or for worse) and cross-promotion on TV will likely boost traffic. Plus, it should be said that television soundtracks have become a crucial spot for music discovery–remember when The O.C. propelled California indie-pop bands to the heights of coolness a few years ago?

Think wishful: concept dream designs of the mysterious Apple Brick have surfaced on blogs.

By now you’ve probably heard the rumors that Apple is having an event on October 14, where Steve Jobs will introduce new Apple laptops to the world. At this point, it’s unclear whether the lines will be refreshed with new processors and configurations, or whether we’ll see a more substantial redesign to the MacBook and MacBook Pro. Then there’s the big secondary question of what’s going on with the MacBook Air.

Read the full column here.

(Credit:
Yves Behar/OLPC)

(Credit:
Anthony Park / www.anpark.com)

Users navigating from their computers can also partake in Netflix’s streaming service, letting them watch movies without having to wait discs to come in the mail. Because of the reliance on software, users enjoying Media Center via extenders (read: the
XBOX 360) cannot partake in the streaming–that is, unless they’ve got their PC hooked up directly to the TV, or are planning to get one of those newfangled Netflix Watch Now-enabled set-top boxes due to arrive later this year.

Watch your 'Watch Now' streaming movies from Netflix on big TVs in a more eyeball-friendly manner with this Vista Media Center plug-in.

The software is in “beta” and we haven’t tested it out, but if you’re a Netflix user who happens to use Media Center, this is definitely the missing link.

Do you find Windows Media Center’s blue, remote controlled fa?ade easier to navigate than the cold red, white, and yellow world of Netflix? Then check out Andrew Park’s new plug-in for the Vista version of Windows Media Center called MyNetflix. The plug-in lets users link to their Netflix account, search for movies, and make changes to their queue without leaving the couch.

[via Engadget]

I asked Ellison about the growing market for on-demand software and about SAP’s problems getting its on-demand enterprise application suite, Business ByDesign, to market. Ellison said that SAP’s problems indicate how difficult it is to develop on-demand software.

While the two companies are growing, and taking advantage of the heightened interest in on-demand software, neither company is the kind of profit engine that excites Ellison.

At the party, I talked for a few minutes with Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison. The book party was hosted by Ellison’s novelist wife, Melanie, and HuffPo’s Arianna Huffington. It turns out that Zittrain and Melanie Ellison met in junior high school.

(Credit:
Dan Farber)

Ellison doesn’t appear to be in a hurry to cash out or bring them into Oracle’s orbit. It’s been 10 years since NetSuite and Salesforce.com were founded, and there isn’t a standalone billion-dollar on-demand software company, he told me. He noted that Oracle revenues are around $26 billion and said that Oracle has built the biggest on-demand software business.

The Oracle Web site claims 3.6 million users of hosted applications, middleware and database. However, if on-demand is more narrowly defined as multitenant, shared environments, Salesforce.com takes the enterprise software crown.

This weekend I attended a book party in San Francisco for Jonathan Zittrain. His book, The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It, was recently published and received good reviews. I will be interviewing him at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society 10th anniversary conference on the future of the Internet this week.

Ellison invested early on in two of the current on-demand software leaders, NetSuite and Salesforce.com. He is the majority stakeholder in NetSuite and owns a few percent of salesforce.com, both of which are public companies.

Despite the large year-over-year revenue growth of his two investments, Ellison said that on-demand enterprise software is growing slowly, comparing it to how open-source software has evolved. It all depends on your point of view. Most people would agree that on-demand and open-source are gaining market share at the expense of the incumbents, especially among smaller businesses.

But Ellison is playing in a different league. He looks at MySQL, which Sun acquired, and doesn’t see it eating his lunch. He looks at Salesforce.com and NetSuite with his parental, velociraptor eyes and doesn’t see them as worth pursuing at this time. That may change down the road. Oracle has consumed most of its worthy competition from the old world, and it will get hungry again, especially if it wants to expand its market downstream from the large enterprises.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison

NetSuite lost $23.9 million on $108.5 million for 2007 (revenue did climb 62 percent), and Salesforce.com reported $748.7 million (a 51 percent increase from the previous year) in revenue and $18 million in net income for fiscal year 2008, which ended January 31. Salesforce.com is projecting that it will break the $1 billion revenue barrier for its current fiscal year.

First, an “inner sandbox” scrutinizes the instructions contained in the module, which programmers must create using specially modified programming tools that ensure the module can be scrutinized before running. “Our validator can…insure that the executable includes only the subset of legal instructions, disallowing unsafe machine instructions,” according to a Google Native Client research paper (PDF). This stage also takes advantage of a feature built into 32-bit x86 chips called segmentation that keeps programs from making improper use of memory.

Indeed, Google engineers call Native Client security software before they call it anything else. Google engineering manager Brad Chen heaped praise on the discovery of the first Native Client vulnerability. Likewise, there is a contest to find Native Client security holes, with cash prizes of $16,384 (that’s 2 to the 14th power), and the latest Native Client release includes four fixes from contest entries even though the contest doesn’t close until May 5.

“It took two days to port Quake source code, which had more than 100,000 lines,” Chen said.

“There are things you can do in desktop apps that you can’t do in Web apps. We’re working very hard to close that gap, so anything you can do in a desktop application you can do safely and securely from a Web application,” said Linus Upson, a Google engineering director.

Recycled software
One of the promises of Native Client is the reuse of existing software, though modifications are required to ensure adherence to the security rules.

Alchemy, too, can handle computationally intense chores, such as running the Ogg Vorbis audio format decoder that’s not natively supported in Flash, said Tom Barclay, a senior member of Adobe’s Flash Player team. And Adobe demonstrated Quake with Alchemy. “The idea with Alchemy is to let people reuse logic and libraries,” Barclay said.

“Google Native Client would open up the floodgates for Web-based application development, because in theory people could easily repurpose existing programs that were originally written for the desktop,” Muchnick said. Instead of programmers trying to learn Flash application programming, “they could use a language like C++ that they are already experienced with.”

Browsers today can run applications using a programming language called JavaScript, whose security is maintained through restraints that block programs from reading files on your computer or getting access to the memory used by other programs, for example. The problem, though, is that the separate engine required to run the JavaScript programs makes the language slow compared with native software.

The company has released experimental but still very much real software that brings in some of the power of the PC, where people often use Web applications. Google Native Client–first released in 2008 but updated with a new version Thursday–is a browser plug-in for securely running computationally intense software downloaded from a Web site. And on Tuesday, Google released O3D, a plug-in that lets Web-based applications tap into a computer’s graphics chip, too.

Spreadsheets can’t sort data well, there are lags between mouse clicks and the program’s response, graphics look Mickey Mouse rather than lavish. But Google, among the most aggressive cloud computing advocates, is trying to address some of those shortcomings.

“For us it’s more important we’re completely consistent across architectures and browsers and operating systems,” Barclay said.

“Much of the work that Google happened before browsers got as fast as they have, so there’s a good reason why they felt that they needed to implement so much of the code as native code and deliver it as a plug-in,” Blizzard said. “JavaScript engines have gotten a lot faster since they started their plug-in and we think that it’s time that we start using them.”

Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard suggested in a blog post that the suddenly accelerating JavaScript performance means a lot of higher-level work needed for 3D rendering can be handled in JavaScript from the Web page rather than through a plug-in module.

Overall, though, Mozilla and Google are more allies than rivals. Both want to advance Web application technology, and the main competition is a continuation of the status quo with its tall barrier between Web-based applications and native software.

Google does plan eventually to extend beyond 32-bit x86 chips to support other architectures, including ARM designs widely used in phones and 64-bit x86 chips that new PCs come with, said Henry Bridge, a Google product manager. “We believe the Web should portable, and don’t intend to change that with Native Client. We are evaluating a number of alternatives for supporting machines without hardware segmentation, but since we haven’t made any decision yet there isn’t much more I can say on what we will eventually do,” he said.

Adobe’s Alchemy
Google isn’t the only one eyeing the vast amount of software already written in C or C++ that could be brought to Web applications. Adobe’s Alchemy research project has a similar end, though instead of running the code natively as Google does, it converts it into the JavaScript cousin called ActionScript used by Adobe’s Flash and AIR software foundations.

O3D makes its mark
Whereas Native Client deals with software that runs on the central processing unit (CPU), O3D deals with the graphics processing unit (GPU). Computers these days typically come with both, but Native Client and O3D are separate projects for now, so programmers will have to deal accordingly.

So what actually could be done with the technology if it matures enough for mainstream use? Anything from photo editing to video games. Google has demonstrated Native Client by running the Quake first-person shooter video game and a fractal graphics explorer. The company conceives of it more as a helper for existing Web applications than as a full-fledged environment for creating and running programs, like Sun Microsystems’ Java, Adobe Systems’ Flash and Flex, or Microsoft’s Silverlight.

The second “outer sandbox” provides a second layer of security. It monitors the code as it runs, permitting it only to make a small variety of requests to the operating system.

Bridge, though, replied on Blizzard’s blog that JavaScript just isn’t fast enough for some 3D tasks. “Javascript is getting faster all the time and we love that, but until someone builds some apps it’ll be hard to know what’s fast enough,” Bridge said. However, he agreed that plug-ins are undesirable, saying that Google hopes to build support for both Mozilla’s technology and for O3D directly into its own browser, Chrome.

O3D lets browsers show accelerated 3D graphics such as this island scene.

The projects are rough around the edges, to say the least. Native Client–NaCl for short–is more security research project than usable programming foundation right now, and O3D exists in part to try to accelerate the arrival of some future, not necessarily compatible, standard for building 3D abilities into Web applications.

The idea, called static analysis of binary code, isn’t new, but it hasn’t made its way widely beyond academia. “It’s been a topic of interest in the research community for last 15 years,” Chen said. “It was in part our judgment that it had been sufficiently understood and studied that we could incorporate this.”

“We’re hoping to reveal our security problems before the system gets anywhere near an end-user desktop,” Chen said. Native Client is open-source software, too, which Google hopes will help the security community dig into the project.

“Web apps have been limited by mostly having to be written in a slow and slightly weird language, JavaScript,” Seaborn said. Google’s new technology, though, “can narrow the gap between Web apps and native applications.”

Security limits
When installing software through conventional means–from a CD-ROM or installation file you specifically choose to download, for example–you have control over what’s running natively on your computer. You’re the security gatekeeper. But security is harder when you visit a Web page that runs software automatically.

Native Client piqued the interest of Avi Muchnick, chief executive of start-up Aviary, which today uses Flash to run its online photo editing and illustration tools.

(Credit:
Google)

“We think the possibility of combining CPU and GPU computing would be great,” Bridge said. “At present they don’t actually work together, but we’re looking at getting them to work together in the future.”

Native Client software modules must be created through a specially modified version of the open-source compiler GCC, which converts the programs that humans write in understandable languages into the computer-comprehensible binary modules.

But both fundamentally challenge the idea that Web apps necessarily are stripped-down, feeble counterparts to the software that runs natively on a personal computer, and they come from a company that has engineering skill, a yen for moving activity to the Internet, and search-ad profits that can fund projects that don’t immediately or directly make money.

Google Native Client is shown here running a fractal landscape explorer.

Where the greater tension lies is in the best way to bring 3D to Web applications. Mozilla, the organization behind the
Firefox browser, shares Google’s ambition to have 3D Web applications and is working on a lower-level 3D interface in conjunction with the Khronos Group that oversees the widely used OpenGL 3D technology.

However, once created, the same software module can be run through Native Client on Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X on an x86-based computer.

“It’s easy to run native code on computers. The hard part is being able to do so securely,” Upson said. And Google is being cautious about Native Client in light of the risks of giving software low-level access to a computer.

Google Native Client has a performance advantage over Alchemy, Barclay acknowledges, but Alchemy has a big advantage of its own: it’s not limited to x86 processors. While x86 dominates on desktops and laptops, it’s relatively rare for smaller computing devices.

It’s this attribute that appeals to programmer Mark Seaborn, a non-Google programmer who has successfully contributed to the project. He’s been working on a Native Client version of a major supporting library used by GNU and Linux. “That could bring open-source software from GNU/Linux to a wider audience, because it could then run on Windows under NaCl without needing to be ported to Windows,” Seaborn said.

Even at the cutting edge of cloud computing, Web-based applications can be frustrating to write and to use.

“The basic approach is sound and can be made to work in principle,” said Internet security researcher Edward Felten, a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton. “They’re trying to hit a sweet spot where they provide the performance of native code with strong security guarantees. Native Client is really interesting approach to trying to do that.”

(Credit:
Google)

Native Client tackles security
The promise of Native Client is giving Web applications all the power of x86 processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, including low-level features to accelerate multimedia chores and to juggle multiple threads of instructions at the same time. But the challenge is unlocking that power without giving the keys away to computer attackers.

Google showed off its Native Client software with this version of the Quake video game.

Native Client has constraints of its own. It’s geared to give the browser a secure programming foundation that runs software at native speeds directly on the computer’s hardware, but it imposes to two levels of security to modules of code downloaded from the Web.

(Credit:
Google)

Good open-source companies will be primary beneficiaries of a downturn, as Stephen Elliot of IDC points out with regard to open-source system management vendors like GroundWork:

I single out GroundWork because I had the opportunity to talk with Dave Lilly, CEO of GroundWork, in advance of next week’s Open Source Business Conference 2008 (March 25-26, San Francisco), and got the inside scoop on how the company is doing. GroundWork exemplifies the “unfair advantage” that open-source vendors have when IT buyers actually need the software to work at a reasonable price.

Open source companies have an advantage in the market right now as the sales models are based on adoption first, counter to traditional proprietary sales which require you to pay first.

I bet.

GroundWork isn’t alone in this. I asked my friend (and MuleSource CEO), Dave Rosenberg, whether a recession is a landmine or an opportunity for open source. Shy person that Dave R. is (not), he didn’t mince words:

The price and performance of open source solutions are discontinuous with that of commercial software solutions. Thus we have always found that savvy IT executives are willing to go out of their way to ensure that open source is considered as an alternative in most major acquisition decisions.

Open Source companies are insulated to the extent that they eschew the whopping license fees associated with proprietary software. And, to the extent that open source products tend to be designed to “just work” IT shops don’t have the added burden of professional services charges from vendors whose software needs extensive customization that only they can do.

We are or shortly will be in a recession. While perhaps not cause to celebrate, it’s also not cause for alarm as the best companies will emerge all the stronger for the experience.

It’s a great time to be in open source. When I see people straining to sell and buy homes, I can smell the recession. But when I go to work selling open-source solutions, I can taste prosperity. A downturn separates the wheat from the chaff. Here’s hoping for even more open-source “wheat.”

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It’s just more exacerbation of the hand-to-mouth existence most CIOs already face. In the nearly five years since the founding of GroundWork Open Source, it seems that enterprise IT executives have been tightening their belts continuously.

Because of the cost-value discontinuity I expect the demand for open source solutions to increase as functionality improves regardless of economic conditions, but we’d be happy to assist those IT executives who may be facing some sleepless nights due to recent conditions, as well.

Despite the slowdown, things are heating up for GroundWork. GroundWork has seen 58 percent of its subscription revenue coming from distributed deployments within larger enterprises like Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences, MobiTV, and Siemens. Why? Because GroundWork costs 20 percent of what the proprietary “Big Four” system management vendors cost. 80 percent cost savings in systems management? I’ll buy that.

As Lilly pointed out to me, however, this “belt tightening” isn’t novel:

With economic uncertainty building on IT organizations, we are seeing enterprise IT organizations tightening their belts when it comes to IT budgets and initiatives. As open source management solutions continue to mature and increase their functionality, they will see more opportunities on the enterprise scale.

Disclosure: I am an advisor to MuleSource.

But the league reckons that many of the 20 million hockey fans in North America don’t live near their favorite teams. The league is hoping that improvements to its subscription video service will appeal to the diaspora.

Among the new features that the NHL is adding to its video streaming service are added stats and a play-by-play "ice tracker."

“We’re working on that right now,” he said. “It’s a decision we are going to make soon.” Asked whether the league would work with all the major services or go exclusively with one, Cooper said that, too, is still being worked out. “There are advantages to both,” he said.

“We have high hopes,” he said.

New this year, though, the league has moved to Flash-based video that it says more
Mac and PC users will be able to use, Cooper said. The league will also pick one game each day to offer with multiple camera angles, and offer added stats as well as the ability to play back games on demand.

Major League Baseball offers a streaming video service, MLB.tv, while the National Basketball Association offers online streaming as an added service for those that pay for its League Pass service on digital cable or satellite.

I tried to pin Cooper to the boards until he gave me some hard numbers on subscription projections, but was unable to get specifics.

“A lot of fans are displaced and don’t have regular or immediate access to their favorite team,” Cooper said. Not to mention all those hockey-crazed Canadians.

“It’s a common misconception among the marketplace, the media, and sports fans that hockey fans are something less than affluent,” Cooper said. “It’s the complete opposite,” he added, saying that hockey fans are more likely than other enthusiasts to have things like digital video recorders and broadband connections.

The National Hockey League figures its teams do a pretty good job of connecting with the ice junkies in their own backyards.

(Credit:
National Hockey League)

And the idea that hockey fans maybe aren’t the most tech-savvy bunch? Also bunk, Cooper assured me. (I actually didn’t need all that much convincing, being both a hockey fan and well, reasonably tech savvy.)

The league has been streaming video for a while now, said Perry Cooper, the NHL’s senior vice president of direct and digital marketing. As it did last year, those that pay $159 a year ($169 after October 15) gain access to nearly all games, including the ability to watch up to four games at once.

Cooper rejected the idea that the new video service is destined to be a niche product. While hockey may not be as big as baseball or basketball in the U.S., hockey fans also lack the plentiful television options available to watch out-of-area games.

As for offering games for paid download, Cooper said to stay tuned.