Coach Bill Walsh, a three-time Super Bowl winner and, in 1992, head of Stanford's football staff, bought the idea. He signed on as an investor and chairman of HTA's advisory board. Stanford's athletic department agreed to team up with HTA as a beta site for the product DeKraker envisioned. Coaches for the football, tennis, volleyball, and basketball teams consented to work with the software programmers DeKraker would hire.
Soon, DeKraker's original idea of selling digitizing equipment to schools expanded into another dimension: why not sell the digitized content? The people who had become involved with HTA began to imagine all kinds of commercial applications. Schools could install interactive screens at stadiums to show digital sports clips, and they could sell advertising around the miniprograms. Pregame shows incorporating video clips from schools across the country could be beamed to coin-operated kiosks in sports bars where fans would pay to see exactly what they wanted. As Walsh puts it, "Fans are more and more sophisticated in the world of sports and athletics, and are expecting and demanding more and more information and analyses. This is just going to be an ever-growing and ever-prospering opportunity." And at the center of that web of connected opportunities lay the possibility of selling the material over the information superhighway, or I-way -- whatever that turns out to be.
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Launched with $250,000 of DeKraker's money in 1993, HTA raised $1.1 million from investors in 1994. For a time the company operated in offices on the Stanford campus and on a quiet Palo Alto street a short drive away. A couple of months ago it relocated to DeKraker's expansive home, in nearby Los Altos Hills. The potential product lineup has expanded and contracted through trial and error since 1994, and today HTA is focusing on two ways to pull in customers. The first is to sell the coaching systems -- Touch 'n Go and At the Game -- to college and professional sports teams. The second is to show schools how they can use their existing film and tape archives to create a digitized program of sports highlights that athletic directors can show to alumni and potential contributors on a dedicated portable computer that HTA will lease them. In other words, DeKraker is trying to show schools how they can make money from the sports video material they've already got.
As tangible as those products and services are, DeKraker sees them as Trojan horses. What he really wants is to get the company into schools and establish HTA as an adviser and partner on all things video. Then he hopes the company can secure commitments from the schools to cede comanagement rights of the video to HTA and to share the proceeds from future digital sales. "We will explain to schools what our objective is and that we want them to have a year to understand the significance of managing their video," says DeKraker. "And then in that year we'll work to close a deal to manage their content."
So far, Stanford's athletic director, for one, is still intrigued. Ted Leland, who oversees a $26-million budget, says he thinks HTA's coaching stations will allow his staff to do more, more easily. And he likes the company's long-term goal of sending sports video over cable and telephone lines to fans across the country. "Right now," says Leland, "our fan in New York City may have to wait until Monday morning to find out who won a Saturday game. I think HTA may let that guy see not only the game later that evening but a 20-minute highlight show as well." Developing that commercial market is something he's happy to leave to a third party. "It would be very, very hard to do this on our own," Leland says. "For me to take the precious dollars we have away from our, say, softball team, to generate enough cash to somehow get this thing going would have just been impossible."
The reaction outside Stanford, where HTA doesn't have built-in relationships with decision makers, has been more tentative. In early 1994 HTA showed a prototype of the Touch 'n Go system at a coaching convention, and it seemed to be a hit. High on that feedback, three HTA staffers hit the road. They visited some 25 schools in 1994, pitching the advantages of digitizing. But they were, they concede, too cocky for HTA's good. When schools hesitated over the proposed system's $45,000 base cost -- or over the need to make the digital conversion at all -- the salespeople wasted no time; they moved right on to the next prospect. As a result of grossly underestimating the financial pressures on athletic directors and the length of its selling cycle, HTA ended 1994 with practically no sales.
The challenge looks formidable. HTA estimates that 60% of its target college customers already own $100,000 worth of analog video equipment produced by one competitor, Sports-Tech. That means HTA may have to wait years before many schools will be in a position to invest in a Touch 'n Go system.
Furthermore, the time and financial pressures on coaches, many of whom are technology shy to begin with, are huge. "I get brochures I can't understand or don't want to take the time to understand every week," says Mike Montgomery, head coach of Stanford's men's basketball team, who used an early prototype of the HTA system last year. "A lot of them probably have value, but in the long run, does it really have value versus what its cost is?"
