Everyone's Brent Musburger

Did someone say "succeed"? What's the business plan here?

"First I should say: It's unclear," Epstein admits. "There's no revenue coming in, obviously, at this point. But my thinking going into this was that we'd charge broadcasters who want to do this on a vanity basis -- who just want to broadcast to their friends and family, less than 20 listeners -- we'd charge them a small fee, maybe five bucks a game or 50 bucks a month or whatever it turns out to be. [With] those who are getting over 20 listeners, or those who are drawing an audience -- we'll hopefully have some of those people -- obviously you get into targeted interactive audio ads."

Epstein says that as of the middle of last week he'd spent about $50,000 ("the burn rate's low -- I'm working out of my apartment"), and that he has some investors lined up if he hits certain benchmarks, which he says he's close to hitting. So far, FanCast has signed up about 150 broadcasters, about 40 of whom do shows regularly, for a total of about eight shows a day, with a growth rate of about 100 percent every two weeks.

"I think the people who will be the most successful, or who start drawing big audiences, will be those who are targeting certain niches," Epstein says, "whether it's statistics-focused analysis or talking about old-timers or a woman's perspective or people who are new to the sport or different ethnic minorities. Maybe it's just that a bunch of stoned college kids will be more interesting to stoned college kids than Bill Walton is, though I guess he was once a stoned college kid himself. The idea is that the narrowcasting that's going on in other media would happen in sportscasting as well."

It's hard to imagine the sports leagues and television networks not fighting FanCast if it looks like it's getting off the ground. After all, the networks and local stations are very invested in having you listen to their announcers, who between plays are talking about their sponsors. And besides, the entertainment industry has a long history of fighting anything that it sees as competition, even though one could argue that most of those things -- television, cassette tapes, videocassettes -- end up making it even richer. (The jury's still out on Napster.)

"Actually it's a three-step process," Epstein says. "First they ignore it. Napster was ignored for many months. They got to 25 million users because they were ignored for a long time. Then they scream bloody murder: 'This is the end of our industry!' Then they realize that it can really help them. And I think all three of those points are applicable to user-generated commentary on sports. I think they're going to ignore us for a while, and if we become successful I think they're going to scream bloody murder, and then I think they're going to realize that we're bringing people who never would have watched the sports before to watch the sports."

There's no doubt that Epstein wants to make money with FanCast -- he's looking forward to a formal relaunch in the fall, because he says football, with its huge audience, less frequent games and deep fan passions, is perfectly suited for what FanCast does -- but he seems to be most excited about the cultural implications of giving sports audiences a choice, which might lower television rights fees and advertising rates for the networks and leagues. "I mean, what if you took the money out of sports?" he says. "Not all of it, but a lot of it. Maybe this 20-year ride they've had of monopolization, based on their complete control of the distribution of their content, ends.

"I think it is easy to dismiss us and say, 'OK, this is never going to work. These guys are amateurish.' And yeah, I'm a guy in my apartment. I don't have venture capital. It's the easiest thing in the world to sort of write off at this point. And maybe FanCast won't make it. Maybe FanCast is not the iteration that's going to be successful, but something is going to shake up what's going on in the sports media. We're onto something here."

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