More online sports events

For various reasons, some of which I alluded to in a comment on a Louis Gray post, I prefer to consume my sports online. Actually, "consume" is not the correct word, because if I'm online, I can also comment about the event. If I comment while listening to a car radio, I am the only person who hears what I say. (Maybe that's a good thing.)

However, online sports are only available for the big games, such as the upcoming Super Bowl. If you want to listen to the Los Angeles Lakers, you often can't do it online, since the radio station website doesn't broadcast the game. This means that if the game isn't on a TV channel that I get (and I currently don't get a lot of the sports TV channels), and if it's after sundown (meaning that the radio station is hard to receive in the Inland Empire), I'm not listening to that game.

Of course, there are online re-creations of the games, in which a textual account shows the action as it happens - basically the 21st century equivalent of the textual service that Ronald Reagan used to broadcast Cubs games early in his career. However, I'm not sure what ESPN would do if the line went dead in the ninth inning.

Since you can obviously show advertisements online just as easily as you can over the airwaves, perhaps sports teams will allow more online broadcasts of their games as time progresses.