CNN CNNdotCOM
Man Uses the Web to Enter NASCAR Events; Online Game EverQuest Draws Almost 100,000 People a Night; Movies Lose Audiences to the Web
Aired August 19, 2001 - 16:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JAMES HATTORI, HOST: Today on CNNdotCOM. Ever wish you could be in the pit as a NASCAR team owner? Now you can, virtually,
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I like to see fans get involved in things, instead of the big corporations.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HATTORI: NASCAR is gaining sponsorship muscle at a pace that rivals its cars, but one man is using the web to show that anyone can get in on the action.
Missed out on tickets to the PGA championship tournament this weekend? Well, we've got your online scorecard.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There are only going to be 30,000 people on site, so that leaves millions of golf fans out there watching the PGA championships.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HATTORI: Hit the links up close and personal over the net.
Enter an online world of dragon slaying and spell casting. EverQuest draws nearly 100,000 players a night, who log on from around the globe.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: To slay a dragon or to be able to fly is a pretty amazing thing. You don't really get the chance to do that often in real life.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HATTORI: Take a behind-the-scenes look at this mystical cyberworld.
This is CNNdotCOM with James Hattori, Hi everybody and welcome to CNNdotCOM, I'm James Hattori.
The Internet, as we've all seen, has become a high-tech field of dreams where just about anything is possible. We begin this week with the story of a railroad worker who rode the information superhighway all the way to NASCAR on a fast track to realizing his dream, owning a race car. David George takes us to the starting line in Indianapolis. Let's go to the races.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
DAVID GEORGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): NASCAR racing is one of the highest-rated sports on television, second only to the NFL. Just two of NASCAR's many series, Winston Cup and Busch Grand National, drew about 9 million fans last year to tracks across the country. Now, thanks to the Internet and an upstart bunch called BigFanRacing, NASCAR enthusiasts have a new way to get involved in their favorite sport.
The NASCAR experience includes big time sponsors, speed, excitement and power. And now, BigFanRacing has brought the most important element to pit row: The fans. Barely a year ago, Mark Watkins, a railroad worker was one of those fans. His son Josh dreamed of one day becoming a driver. And the two shared a bigger dream: A team of their own. Mark decided the only thing stopping them was money.
MARK WATKINS, BIGFANRACING FOUNDER: I knew that financially there was no way that I could put together a team.
GEORGE: A car costs $40,000, an engine $40,000 more. Sponsors pay millions for a piece of the action. But Mark Watkins didn't have any sponsors. Until he got an idea.
WATKINS: One day it popped in my head that maybe there would be enough people on the Internet who were NASCAR fans that would like to donate or put in just a small amount of money. And if we could create enough volume, we could actually buy a car and maybe go out and run a few races.
GEORGE: Watkins set up a home page and advertised on e-Bay. And pretty soon, people like "Grumpy" Wadding were buying shares at $50 and $100 each.
"GRUMPY" WADDING, BIGFANRACING MEMBER: Bought one for myself. Then I bought one for my wife. And then my stepdaughter got involved.
GEORGE: The money literally poured in, a total of $100,000 and counting. In return, each owner got a share in the car and a rubber duck, the team mascot.
MARDY UNDLEY, NASCAR DRIVER: He didn't know how well it would take off. And man, it just come in so fast and it was -- it enabled us to come to our first Busch race here in less than 6 months of work.
GEORGE: Here is Indianapolis Raceway Park. The Busch circuit is NASCAR's minor league, but it is NASCAR nonetheless. Today's race: the Kroger 200. On a bright day in early August, the BigFan team is ready for the big time. Dozens of owners show up. The name of every owner is on the car. There's also a special message from one fan, Terry Boyd, to his girlfriend Lori. She said "yes."
The rest of the day didn't go as smoothly for fans of BigFanRacing. Number 89 didn't even make it through the pre-race practice.
WATKINS: We were running real well, you know, before the practice. We were close to the top ten in practice. And it's just one of those racing things. We had a valve break on it.
GEORGE: BigFanRacing didn't have an extra motor, standard equipment for teams with big bucks sponsors. BigFan's backers chalked this one up to experience, and vowed to stick with their fan-financed approach to racing.
WADDING: I like to see fans get involved in things, instead of the big corporations.
GEORGE: The Watkins father and son are disappointed, but still determined.
WATKINS: It happened so quickly. Right now I don't know what the future holds. But that's our dream for the Busch series, and then of course we want to get a Winston Cup car one day with BigFanRacing on it and get out there and see what happens.
GEORGE: And if it happens, just think -- it all began on the Internet.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HATTORI: We'll have our fingers crossed for BigFanRacing. Now, from four wheels to two feet. If speed and time are on your mind when you hit the track or jog around the neighborhood, then Marsha Walton has the gadget for you in this week's "Technofile."
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MARSHA WALTON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Whether you're a hard-core runner or just trying to lose a few pounds, the speedometer by FitSense could be your best personal trainer. As you run or walk, the ergonomic watch will display your speed and distance, and how many calories you are burning.
YONAS ABRAHA, RUNNER: I could look and say, "oh, I'm hitting 400 calories, let me go a little bit more."
WALTON: It will record your heart rate using a special strap. Oh, and yes, it also tells time. A foot pod that clips to your shoelace tracks how far and how fast you go, and sends the information wirelessly to your watch. You can log up to 28 separate workouts and then transfer them to your PC by a net link connection. And you can track your progress by charting the results on the web. The manufacturer says the speedometer is 98% accurate, so forget the pencil and calculator. With all the bells and whistles, the FitSense speedometer sells for $300. I'm Marsha Walton, and that's "TechnoFile."
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HATTORI: Coming up on THE DOT, we'll show you why nearly half a million people are paying $10 per month to play a video game. But first, pro golfers gather for one of the PGA's premier events. You can track Tiger Woods as he chases the Cup in real time, on the web. That and more, when "CNNdotCOM" continues.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HATTORI: Golf is a huge sport on TV, the PGA championship tournament held this weekend draws millions of viewers each year. But for the first time, perhaps the most comprehensive coverage is on the web. Allison Tom has more in this week's "Nothing But Net."
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ALLISON TOM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Wish you could have attended the 83rd PGA championship this weekend, but just couldn't find the time, or the tickets, or the bucks? If seeing Tiger tee off in person is just not an option this year, how about a little cyber-Tiger? Log on to PGA.com. You can still see how your favorite players are doing on the course, in real time. Thanks to a mark-up language called xml, a more flexible evolution of html.
TRAVIS SMITH, PGA PROJECT MANAGER: Xml stands for extensible markup language, which is a bit confusing, but xml is a good way to handle large files of data.
TOM: Xml helps web sites transmit huge amounts of data faster than ever. The PGA is hoping to keep the millions of fans that can't attend events tuned in on-line as the action unfolds.
SMITH: It's just speed and ease of transfer. You're looking at live scores coming in from the course and you know it is real time data coming in from IBM on the course, and then you're looking at, I would say, nine to ten seconds later it's on the web. So it's very quick.
TOM: Live TV broadcasts are often only able to cover the top few players throughout the day, but PGA.com has all the scoring and profile information on the tour pros available any time.
SMITH: We have an IBM scoring unit on each green. A walking scorer walks with each group, so you have a Woods, Duval and Goosen group on Thursday. And as soon as they hit enter and send those scores, it goes back to our scoring server on site and is immediately transmitted out to the Internet.
TOM: And you can hit these linked. Click on the champion's charge tab to see a full feature section devoted to Tiger Woods' attempt at winning a 3rd straight PGA championship. Audio, video and other multimedia features are scattered throughout the site as well. The next best thing to being here might just be logging on. By mixing the celebrity power of golf's rising stars with the latest Internet technology, PGA.com is bringing the tournament experience home. Still, the old timers say, nothing compares to watching a PGA major event in person.
REES JONES, PGA CHAMPIONSHIP COURSE DESIGNER: When you get out on the field like we did here at the Atlanta Athletic Club and make the changes really based on how the game is played -- the computer really doesn't know how the game is played, the people out on the course do. So -- and the bulldozer operators are really artists, so if we gave them a computer drawing it might become too engineered instead of artistic and have a flow to it.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HATTORI: Xml, or extensible markup language, is gaining popularity as a tool to bring more compelling content to the web. But its potential isn't limited to online applications. For more, we asked Mark Johnson, president of Elucify Technical Communications, "Just One Question": is xml the future of programming languages?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MARK JOHNSON, PRESIDENT OF ELUCIFY TECHNICAL COMMUNICATIONS: Most of the web right now is described in terms of html, hypertext mark-up language. And html is a vocabulary for expressing how to show a web page in a web browser, which is great if what you want to do is look at your information in a web browser. But if you want to use the information in some other way, it's not so great. Html describes how to show the information. Xml describes what the information actually is.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HATTORI: After more than 25 years, Dungeons and Dragons could be the granddaddy of subculture games, where players use their imaginations to inhabit a world of goblins and griffins. Today, the Internet has created a completely different playing field. And EverQuest, an on-line game, has attracted a new generation of players to its virtual world of wizards and bards. Marc Saltzman pays a visit.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MARC SALTZMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: EverQuest is best described as a massively-multiplayer fantasy role-playing game. Literally thousands of computer gamers from around the world can log on and roam vast electronic landscapes.
RICH WHITMIRE: You go in, you can do quests, you fight creatures, you can get items, cash, experience. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: To slay a dragon or to be able to fly is a pretty amazing thing, when you don't really get the chance to do that often in real life.
SALTZMAN: EverQuest encourages cooperative play, where many missions cannot be achieved by working alone.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm playing it because it's a chance to socialize with people all over the world. I love the moment when you break through to the real person.
SALTZMAN: So do these testimonies from addicted gamers translate into sales? You bet your bitmaps, baby. EverQuest currently enjoys over 400,000 active players, each paying ten bucks per month, not to mention the initial investment for the software. You do the math. When asked how much he plays EverQuest, Rich Whitmire admits:
WHITMIRE: Close to about 30 hours per week.
SALTZMAN: And Bridget Goldstein says over the past year and a half, she's invested,
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I think it's something staggering, like 30 days or something. Those are 24-hour days.
WHITMIRE: EverQuest, the name says it all. The game never ends.
SALTZMAN: So how does Sony handle all this traffic?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our customer support staff is upwards of 100- plus people, and at peak time we'll have 90,000-plus players in our virtual world. So it's not a game that ever sleeps. Right now we're supporting 40 worlds within EverQuest, and that capacity is around 10,000 players per world.
SALTZMAN: Why are people paying $10 a month to play this game?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The analogy we use is HBO, where it's a pay- for channel. And the reason people are willing to pay for it is because they have very compelling and entertaining content.
SALTZMAN: Players began selling their EverQuest characters and items over on-line auction sites such as e-Bay for real cash. You see, the sellers wanted to profit from the hundreds of hours that it took to build up their character, and buyers didn't want to invest the time. However, earlier this year, in the issue of fairness, Sony asked e-Bay to ban these transactions. The game has become so popular that players began meeting at EverQuest-related fan fairs.
WHITMIRE: I saw them first as nothing more than just pixels on the screen, and then to actually meet them and go out and hang out at the beach was a blast.
SALTZMAN: And as Bridget explains, there are often benefits of friendship in a virtual space. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There are two people that I play with on- line that are actually in real life seriously ill. They are bedridden. But in this game, we together can run across hills, we can go find treasure, and I find that really, really special.
SALTZMAN: To keep gamers glued to the monitor, new EverQuest expansion CDs are often released, adding new locations and characters. And don't think the EverQuest bug can't bite you. The first month of game play is free.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That's how I started playing. I was hooked like that.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HATTORI: Up next, human rights activists, including rock star Peter Gabriel, embrace the power of the net. When CNNdotCOM continues.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HATTORI: One picture may be worth 1,000 words, but when it comes to documenting human rights abuses, a picture or a video clip could be worth human lives. Allison Tom tells us about an activist group using inexpensive cameras and the Internet as weapons against social injustice.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
TOM (voice-over): Seeing is believing. Eric Rosenthal is a human rights activist, documenting alleged abuses of patients in psychiatric facilities. Words could not describe what he saw in this institution in Mexico. But these visual images did.
ERIC ROSENTHAL, HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST: We saw children and adults totally neglected, living in completely inhumane conditions, often without clothing, tied down, tied to beds, tied to wheel chairs.
TOM: Rosenthal is part of Witness, an organization that works with human rights activists worldwide.
GILLIAN CALDWELL, WITNESS: The main goal is really to shift the balance of power to put low-cost communications technology in the hands of locally-based activists and to give them the capacity to tell their own stories in their own voices.
TOM: Witness has trained and equipped 150 groups in 50 countries with video technology. The footage is then available online for anyone to view.
CALDWELL: The videos are original productions developed in consultation with our partner groups, and they are between eight and 15 minutes in length.
TOM: Like this one, titled "Bought and Sold," about the trafficking of Russian women for prostitution. Musician Peter Gabriel recently performed in New York with the band Afro-Celt Sound System. He co-founded the non-profit organization back in 1992. He says technology and the Internet are powerful tools in the human rights movement.
PETER GABRIEL, MUSICIAN AND CO-FOUNDER OF WITNESS: Those in power have to respond quicker than they had to in the past, where it was maybe much slower to get anything happening. So I think technology can definitely accelerate campaigning and activism.
TOM: Activists like Eric Rosenthal say visual images did indeed create change for one psychiatric facility in Mexico.
ROSENTHAL: Within six months the institution was closed down. And we worked with the government of Mexico, brought in some experts who were able to create some very humane community alternatives to that facility.
TOM: As technology advances, activists say they hope the voices of people who are suffering will be more easily heard.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HATTORI: Next, sneaking into the theater without leaving home. Think of Napster hitting the big screen. Hollywood's battle with on- line piracy, when The Dot returns.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HATTORI: These days, two movie tickets, popcorn and drinks could easily set you back 30 bucks or more. So it's no surprise those who are technically skilled, but perhaps morally challenged, are finding the newest theatrical films on the Internet for free. Casey Wian on the growing Hollywood dilemma, "Gone with the Web."
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CASEY WIAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Chris likes to watch movies. But the college student doesn't like to pay for them. Thanks to the Internet, he doesn't have to.
CHRIS: If one guy has it, then someone else gets it from him and then it goes on and on and so everyone has it. It's really easy.
WIAN: From copied DVDs to digital cameras snuck into theaters, one web site makes stealing Hollywood movies easier than ever. With minimal computer expertise, a download of free Napster-like file- sharing software, we accessed several movies now in theaters. "Shrek" took a couple of hours to download, and the quality was marginal -- but it didn't cost a dime.
Even more embarrassing to studios, recent instances of daily footage and rough cuts of movies not even in theaters yet appearing on the Internet. Point 360 provides digital distribution and storage services to studios. MATT GRACYK, POINT 360: Digital dailies is particularly vulnerable because everything happens so quickly. You film something in the morning and you want to make it available to whomever you want to authorize to have access to it two hours later. So how can you really do that in a secure environment?
WIAN: Graczyk says security is possible with the right procedures. Still, some studios are not adopting new technology because they're afraid of security breaches. Vigilinx provides digital security services to studios, and says the biggest threat is from within.
DAVID REMNITZ, VIGILINX: They are more vulnerable in most cases to internal hacks, that is, disgruntled employees, industrial espionage-type activities, folks who have access to internal systems that may be holding digital films, may be holding copies of digital audio, may be holding copies of scripts and contract deals. These are all areas that need to be better secured in most Hollywood studios.
WIAN: But with escalating production budgets and pressure to cut costs elsewhere, Vigilinx says studios often view information security as a discretionary expense.
While hackers may be a thorn in the side of studios, it's pirates who steal finished movies who remain the industry's biggest problem. Hollywood studios lose an estimated $2.5 billion a year to film piracy.
JEFFREY LOGSDON, GERARD KLAUER MATTISON: They need to be assured that there's a security system that at least minimizes the ability of someone to break in and take it without paying for it. But that's been somewhat elusive because whatever you can create, you can uncreate.
WIAN: As technical and economic barriers to digital film distribution gradually disappear, behind the scenes the industry's trade group is trying to find a way to protect those future profit opportunities. But studios won't discuss the efforts for fear of tipping off or challenging hackers and pirates. As for Chris, he says he'll be watching.
CHRIS: Yeah, unless someone stops it.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HATTORI: Time for us to pull the plug, but before we go, here's a look at what's coming up next week,
Remember Atari, Coleco Vision? How about Intellivision? No? Well, just ask these guys,
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The games today certainly have better graphics and sound, I'm sure everyone pushes that. Back then, though, it was all about gameplay. (END VIDEO CLIP)
HATTORI: A blast from the techno past as we take you to the classic gaming expo.
I can feel my controller button fingers twitching already. If your hands are wound up, how about banging out an e-mail to us. Our address is thedot@cnn.com. That's it for this week. Thanks for watching. For all of us at THE DOT, I'm James Hattori. Hope to see you again next time.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
|
|
![[CNN.com]](http://i.cnn.net/cnn/images/newsnet/cnnlogo.gray.gif){kind=small}
TOP STORIES![[SI.com]](http://i.cnn.net/cnn/images/main/si.logo.gif){kind=logo}
SPORTS
All Scoreboards
![[CNN Money]](http://i.cnn.net/cnn/images/main/fn.logo.newsnet.gif){kind=logo}
(