ESPN's Mining Gold in South Africa

World class athletes, the newest and best facitilities, global viewership, multinational sponsors, and now another innovation to keep our eyes on: broadcasting. While it sounds hum-drum, the way these World Cup games are broadcast is setting the stage for the future of sport broadcasts, at least the broadcasting of major international events like FIFA World Cup or the Olympics.
In the past, broadcasters, companies like CBS, NBC, ABC, or Fox, bid for the rights to show some event. For instance, NBC has the broadcast rights for the Olympics in America. They regularly paid big bucks for it. The broadcasters then turned around and sold spots within the events to organizations like Budweiser, Army, or Honda. The commercial spots (or commercials) were purchased by the major brands to get in front of all the viewers of the events. As long as the Olympics draw in millions of viewers, the brands are interested in getting their name in front of them and will pay NBC for the chance to shoehorn their commercial spot into the broadcast.
This is how network broadcast has worked from its inception. However (1) soccer doesn't fit the model well because there are no regular stops in the game where ad space can be sold, except for halftime. Also, this year the World Cup broadcast rights were sold, in part, to ESPN, a broadcaster that makes money not only from selling commercial advertising sports, but also from cable companies who charge us monthly subscriptions. ESPN doesn't rely solely on advertising revenue.
If successful, this could be the real game changer.