As sports TV costs soar, leagues find new ways to slice up video dollars

There are now more ways than ever to get money for the valuable video sports teams create.

Increasingly, the sports leagues are finding new platforms not only for live games, but for their secondary content as well. The leagues, for instance, are granting licensing rights to companies like Sporting News and NDN to distribute highlights and post-game interviews to the websites of news sites like the New York Times and USA Today. As it becomes easier and cheaper to make web video, such clips appear set to become once more valuable tranche of media revenue for the leagues (there’s also radio, video games and so on). The deals are valuable to the licensors because they can sell video ads against the highlights, splitting the revenue with the publishers.