This was to go on my own blog, but as I just spent the last three hours working on the layout and Photoshop just crashed, I'm going to post the content here.

Have you ever said to yourself. "Self, was Kordell Stewart really in-bounds on that last second Hail Mary pass from Jim Harbaugh in the '95 AFC Championship, or is it just fuzzy memory from your younger-hood?"  And upon saying some similar thing, wonder why the NFL doesn't have these games available to the general public for viewing or purchase?  I do often.

Nowadays, people have DVRs, DVD recorders, Limewire, BitTorrent and a variety of other tools that allow them to save and share video of their favorite games, and archive them for posterity.  This was not so much the case pre-2001, before TiVo hit the streets with a fury, and people found a way to export the video to their computer for long-term storage.  I watch maybe one season of Captain Comeback(the Indy Version), and wish I could have seen the rest.  And maybe Eric Dickerson in a Colts uniform, or Marshall Faulk coming out in the ridiculous White-Shirt, Blue-Pant uniform, or Edgerrin James' first game, Peyton's first snap from center, of the first D Pass from "18 to 88".  The entire '95 playoffs were incredible fun, and I loathe that the most I can hope for is some highlight on some Colts history video.

I don't think I'm the only one, nor do I think Colts fans are alone here.  Other teams have great moments from the past(some back from the days where the goalpost was in front of the end zone).  Are these moments truly lost?  NFL Films says no, but they'd rather hoard them to only be released on their dramatically scored and narrated "Classics".  What about me, and those like me, who want to watch the original broadcast, sans outdated commercials, and see all the action?  Who want to decide what games are classic to them?

I'm sure the NFL would counter by saying that the costs of digitzation of these games would be too high.  Give me a break, if I can digitize a VCR tapes for an inital investment of less than $100 on my $500 computer in under an hour, I think NFL Films, with all their technology and talent, could pull this together in about a year's team, maybe releasing another season every few days or week.  And guess what NFL, no need to worry about putting together some new-fangled way of getting these games to the fans, most of them already use one of the best, most proven ways to get digital media consumed on an ala carte basis, iTunes.

Sign on the dotted line, Roger Goodell, and watch the revenues come pouring in.  This is a market that is so untapped that I think it is insane.  Other sports would probably follow suit, though they might not offer every nearly-irrelevant game in their excessive schedules.  But the NFL schedule lends itself so well to this, 265 games a year, plus 11 games.  There are over 200 million fans of NFL Football out there, you don't think you couldn't get an average of one game sold to every one of them?  At the going price for feature-length video out there, that might fetch a decent $500 million dollar revenue plus.  Pay iTunes their $1 or whatnot and you have a respectable entry into the new media world.  Do the same with the NFL Films Classics like "America's Game".

If people will fork over money to watch low-rating crap that they can see re-runs of all year long, and 5 years and 10 years later on the higher-number channels, and constantly hand over wads of it to buy more commercialized, droningly similar music, why would they not spend it to watch their favorite sports moments?

The absence of this from the NFL's agenda tells me that they have people who are afraid to look beyond the status quo to find new revenues for their member teams.  Treat the net revenue as broadcast revenue, and give it to the teams and adjust the cap accordingly.  Or, count it as a "local revenue" and split the revenue between the two teams in each download.  An average of $12 million might sound like a drop in the bucket to teams in large markets like the Redskins and Patriots, but it would help small market teams a lot.