Today, Mountain View-based Ooyala, the fast-growing online video services provider, is announcing that it has landed a big content partner: The so-called “worldwide leader in sports”, ESPN. Those avid sports fans among us may have noticed some changes in the look and speed of videos on ESPN.com. Over the last few weeks, Ooyala has begun integrating its video technology into ESPN’s website, and is now officially powering all of the sports media behemoth’s streaming video content.

It’s a serious feather in the cap and vote of confidence for the four-year-old video startup, as ESPN is one of the biggest producers of online video content, with 400 unique visitors hitting play on ESPN videos every second (and serving over 1 billion streams per month), according to Ooyala Co-Founder and President of Product Bismarck Lepe.

For Ooyala, Lepe said, this partnership with ESPN is evidence that it has achieved scale, and in the big picture, shows that the online video industry is at a point where the fundamental building blocks are in place and can support viable, healthy businesses. Another sign that Ooyala has achieved scale? TechCrunchTV uses the service to power its on-demand videos.

ESPN VP of Technology and Product Development Jason Guenther told TechCrunch that the company had been using its own video system, based on Disney technology (ESPN is owned by Disney), and had been experimenting with a number of different video platforms and technologies. Yet, the company is at a point, Guenther said, in which it really wants to begin focusing on content and the overall user experience of its digital platform, rather than have to worry over the technology necessary to serve billions of video streams or refining its own video player.

The VP of tech said that after vetting a number of third party platforms, Ooyala “landed a bit higher” than its competitors, because it enables the sports giant to shorten video load times and to take advantage of a multi-bit rate that can deliver HD at up to 2.8 Mbps. ESPN’s new player is Flash-based, though users can tap into an HTML5 version on their iPads, and offers dynamic video quality that adjusts to the individual user’s network connection, bandwidth, etc. in order to serve the best quality video according to each viewer’s capacity.

For ESPN, not only does Ooyala step up load times and increase playback quality, but the video startup also enables the sports broadcaster to better utilize internal resources by streamlining the management of their videos and related data, according to the announcement made today on Ooyala’s blog. Ooyala also offers its customers a realtime analytics engine, with detailed per-video and per-user reporting for both on-demand and live video streaming, as well as integrations with payment systems so that customers have the ability to launch both paid and ad-supported video business models.

ESPN has generally lagged behind its big media competitors in terms of its utilization of social media, so the fact that Ooyala enables visitors to easily share videos via Facebook and Twitter from within the player, is a huge social boost for ESPN.

Guenther told me that scaling has been a big issue for ESPN.com, and the tech team has been looking for ways to take advantage of new mobile channels, as well as keep content quality consistently high on the Web. Ooyala allows ESPN to serve video of consistent quality across platforms and scale effectively. Going forward, he said, ESPN will look to innovate on top of its new video platform, as well as explore ways to beef up and publicize its API.

All in all, it’s great to see ESPN finally offering a quality player with fast load times and a more linear on demand experience in which video queues and layouts feel more akin to a television viewing experience — and can compete in ease of video use with YouTube. And for Ooyala, who recently inked a deal with Yahoo! Japan and will soon account for more than 50 percent of all Japanese online video viewership, according to Lepe, this is yet another sign that it is reaching that elusive tipping point.

But don’t worry, Ooyala has no plans to change. You’ll see what I mean below:

In many ways, tablet-focused readers like Pulse, Flipboard, and now Editions, are the next phase of RSS readers. But they’re RSS readers that the masses will actually use because they’re actually user-friendly and oriented around experience and visuals. But because they’re so tailored for user experience, they often need partnerships beyond a simple RSS feed to bring in the necessary information to populate the apps. Today, Pulse has landed a massive fish in that regard: ESPN.

The sports category has always been a bit under-represented in the tablet reading space because ESPN content has been largely absent. ESPN is by far the biggest name in sports news, and Pulse notes their deal is the first time the sports network has agreed to syndicate their content to a mobile app that is not one of their own.

With the deal, the Pulse Sports category is being revamped to highlight this ESPN content as well as the other sports content from SB Nation, Bleacher Report, Yahoo Sports, and others. The ESPN deal will place major headlines in Pulse as well as tailored news for MLB, NFL, NBA, WNBA, college football, and college basketball. Within Pulse, you’ll also now be able to break down the area by individual sports to get just news about that sport (this includes sports beyond the major ones as well, such as MMA, tennis, boxing, etc).

In addition to this deal, co-founder Akshay Kothari tells us that Pulse should today cross 5 millon users across all the platforms that Pulse is available on (iPad, iPhone, Android). It was only a month and a half ago that the service hit 4 million users, just in time to announce their big $9 million Series A round of funding.

You can find Pulse in the App Store here. And in the Android Market here.

Time Warner Cable received rare praise these past few weeks with the launch of its iPad app. Not familiar with it? It lets Time Warner Cable subscribers view 32 different TV networks on their iPad provided they’re connected to their home (read: Time Warner-provided) Wi-Fi network. (You can’t watch these channels while at the park and connected to 3G, in other words.) As you might expect, several networks have reacted by freaking out, arguing that Time Warner Cable doesn’t have the right to develop such an app and stream their content. It’s madness that we still have to deal with this in 2011, but I’m confident that in the future we’ll look back on these controversies and laugh heartily. “Ha, what simpletons, thinking you should only be allowed to watch video content on a TV. I’m watching the game on my Internet-connected contacts lenses* right now!”

One network not available on the app is ESPN. The sports network, which is regularly the top rated network in the country (as if I need to remind you of Monday Night Football’s gigantic ratings this past season), said yesterday that its current contracts won’t allow the network to be on the app.

ESPN needs to be subject to regional blackouts in order to fulfill various contractual obligations. If the network is showing a big Yankees game, viewers in the New York City area won’t be able to view it there. (They’ll have to watch on the YES Network.) Along those lines, at least; I haven’t seen a Yankees game since Wade Boggs was riding on a horse. Substitute your own local team to make the idea work.

ESPN wouldn’t elaborate, wouldn’t say when it expects to work out these contracts, or if it ever will.

*See Michio Kaku’s new book, Physics of the Future.

ESPN 3D will show this year’s NBA Finals in, yes, 3D. This is the first time the NBA Finals will be in 3D.

The Finals, which will take place in June, will probably be between the San Antonio Spurs and the New York Knicks. (That’s a safe bet, right?) And that’s just as well: the very first NBA game broadcast in 3D, which took place last December, was between the Knicks and the Lakers.

This is the same ESPN, mind you, that admitted to having problems trying to figure out this whole 3D thing, though basketball, being played on a smaller surface, probably lends itself to easier 3D production than, say, football or soccer.

ESPN has just released a study that sheds some light on people’s cord cutting habits—or lack thereof. Using Nielsen data, ESPN has determined that a paltry 0.11 percent of U.S. households have dropped cable and/or satellite TV over the past three months. That rounds down to essentially nobody in my estimation. Even more interesting is exactly who these cord cutters are, and they’re not who you’d most likely suspect.

It turns out that, of the 0.11 percent of people who cut the cord, they’re “mainly middle-aged, middle-income households and persons who are light or non-streamers. In short, cord cutters are more likely to be recession-challenged householders making hard choices about their expenses.”

In other words, everything you thought you knew about cord cutting is probably wrong.

ESPN commissioned the study to figure out exactly where it, the top rated sports network in the country, fits in this new world of Google TVs, Boxee Boxes, and streaming Netflix. It turns out the network has nothing to worry about, given the low number of cord cutters in general, and particularly among medium to heavy sports viewers. Medium to heavy sports viewers, which make up 90 percent of ESPN’s audience, have shown “zero cord cutting.”

Remember: this is the same ESPN that’s trying to figure out how best to use 3D, too. (At least the network is pro-active about integrating new technologies!)

The results make all sorts of sense on a few fronts.

One, as I’ve suspected for some time now, this cord cutting business is for the birds. As Matt reiterated the other day, the single best way to watch television right now is to put up with a cable or satellite provider. If you think you’re going to successfully cut the cord and scratch your TV itch solely based on what’s available to you on Hulu, or available to you on your Google TV box, ha! It’s easier said than done, particularly if you’re a sports fan.

That, and there’s a certain elegance to coming home from work, plopping down on the couch in front of the TV, then watching Some Show that can’t quite be matched with any combination of streaming boxes and services.

Watching TV is a passive activity. The minute you have to start praying to the gods of technology in hopes that everything works without a hitch, you may as well be reading. And nobody reads anymore.

What has surprised me is exactly who is cutting the cord. As it turns out, no, it’s not the hip cat on Grand Avenue with blue blockers, Back to the Future shoes, and a Nexus S. Nope: it’s people who’ve been hit hard by the recession and the resulting unemployment. This goes against what’s been seen in past recessions, that people may cut down on other expenses and activities (going out to dinner and the like), but they sure as heck will keep their TV service up and running.

Apparently not anymore.

Microsoft certainly used a lot of words at some Credit Suisse technology conference yesterday, but only a few of them are worth relaying here. The main thing that its Interactive Entertainment Division CEO, Dennis Durkin, said that a whopping 50 percent of Xbox Live users actually pay the $60 per year for Xbox Live. There’s 25 million Xbox Live subscribers, so you’re looking at something like 12.5 million Xbox Live Gold subscribers. How many of these 12.5 million people aren’t jerks? That’s all I want to know.

You’ll recall that Microsoft jacked up the price of an Xbox Live Gold subscription by $10, from $50 per year to $60 per year. Microsoft says that’s to help cover the cost of all the fancy new features Xbox Live Gold subscribers get, such as… online multi-player! And access to ESPN and Netflix streaming video!

Eh, I suppose if you’re a big Netflix user that would be worth $60 per year (works out to $5 per month, in addition to whatever you pay to Netflix).

Additionally, Durkin doesn’t seem too bothered that much of the Kinect launch software really isn’t all that good, perhaps with the exception of Dance Central. That seems dandy.

Is 3D already in trouble? Quite possibly, and there’s a few data points to back up that claim. As you know, Christopher Nolan has announced a few things pertaining to the next Batman movie, namely its name (the Dark Knight Rises), that The Riddler won’t be in it (much to fans’ chagrin), and that it won’t be filmed in 3D. I’m pretty sure the previous Batman movie, the Dark Knight, was a gigantic success, so to not film it in 3D is quite the snub. Sorry, 3D, but the prettiest girl at the dance wants nothing to do with you. (Stupid metaphors are stupid.)

Now there’s word that ESPN 3D isn’t doing too well, either.

The channel, which launched in time for the 2010 World Cup (which, incidentally, comes out on 3D Blu-ray in two weeks), will come under review in early 2011 to see if carrying it makes business sense. No use having to produce and/or license content for a channel that nobody watches, or that nobody can watch.

The primary problem, as ESPN’s Senior Director of Technology, Johnathan Pannaman, told a European business conference, is that ESPN is “still not sure what makes sense for 3DTV, and we don’t yet see a proven ROI [return on investment].”

So, ESPN doesn’t know what works when it comes to 3D sports broadcasts, and there’s no money in it. It’s not too dissimilar to what ESPN said at IFA in September: filming sports in 3D is tricky.

Pannaman then said ESPN is looking forward to this holiday season, because then, hopefully, people will buy 3DTVs en masse, and the channel will at least have the potential viewership to be viable.

Then again, you look at something like the unemployment rate for the U.S., and you wonder how many people are even in the position to upgrade to a 3DTV, perhaps only a few years after they upgraded to an HDTV.

Recent sales data suggested as much, that not too many people were upgrading to 3DTV. You know the reasons: 3DTVs are expensive, wearing 3D glasses is cumbersome, and there’s no 3D content.

That last point is cyclical: if consumers see there’s no 3D content out there why should they buy a 3DTV? And if consumers don’t buy 3DTVs why should companies like ESPN invest in producing 3D content?

We’re looking at a situation where 3D technology is still very new—you’ll recall the torrid time Sony had filming the 2010 World Cup in 3D—and consumers, for a variety of reasons, aren’t all that interested just yet.

Hopefully this doesn’t come as a shock to you, because we’ve been saying it pretty much all year long.

Without Sony’s support ESPN “probably would not have launched” ESPN 3D. So said Bryan Burns, Vice-President of ESPN, at IFA earlier today. Burns, talking before a reasonably crowded auditorium, reiterated ESPN’s commitment to 3D sports broadcasting while fully recognizing what we’ve all been going on about for months now: nobody’s going to buy an expensive 3D TV—have you seen the unemployment numbers of late?—when there’s nearly zero 3D content to be found.

Burns—and perhaps this is indicative of ESPN as a whole—seemingly forgot he was talking before a primarily European audience, with the 3D sports chosen to highlight including American college football and the Harlem Globetrotters. Pretty sure no one in Europe gives a toss about either of those, so why not take advantage of the fact that you’re in Europe, and show footage of the World Cup? Maybe one or two of the German goals, you know? No, let’s keep showing clips of Some College against Some Other College, that’ll keep the Europeans interested. Perhaps Sky should host a press conference in Iowa and shows scenes of a Liverpool darts competition.

ESPN, Burns noted, launched HDTV service back in 2002, and it wasn’t until enough HD content was available that its viewers began to buy HDTVs. That matters quite a bit because, on the whole, sports fans tend to be, if not the early adopters, then the trend-setters when it comes to home entertainment. Show a person a nature documentary in HD (or 3D) and you might get a polite shrug. Show that same person an NFL game or a World Cup game and they’ll say, “Now that’s awesome~!”

An interesting stat: still only 63 percent of households in the U.S. have an HDTV (and of those, 83 percent watch sports in HD). That leaves 37 percent of the households out there haven’t upgraded from their SDTV to an HDTV—perhaps they’ll skip HDTV and go straight to 3DTV? (Not at these prices, they won’t, the average price of a 3DTV currently projected to be in the $800s by 2015.)

ESPN 3D currently broadcasts to 60 million homes, including the addition of 15 or so million that will now have the channel on Time Warner. “People who have seen 3D can’t get enough of it,” said Burns, no doubt looking forward to next week’s mass in-store demo.

That’s right: next week, more than 1,000 retail stores in the U.S. will show ESPN 3D.

And since ESPN “simply cannot avoid 3D,” they’d better hope people see those 3D images and lose their minds in a giant OMG I NEED THIS flurry of excitement.

Everyone is busy talking about Microsoft Kinect (the project formerly known as Natal), but to me, some much bigger news just dropped at E3 from Microsoft: ESPN live sports access. Simply put: this was the only thing holding me back from completely canceling my cable subscription. As soon as this goes live, I’m done with cable forever.

No, this live sporting access won’t be entirely free, but it’s one hell of a deal. You simply have be an Xbox Live Gold member (about $50 a year), and you’ll get access to over 3,500 live events a year. In HD. Did I mention it was $50 a year? My cable bill is currently double that — a month.

According to BusinessofVideo.com:

Content includes college basketball, college football, soccer, MLB and NBA amongst others.

It’s hard to overstate just how big this news is for people fed up for cable. A little over a year ago I tried to cancel my cable after being fed up with Comcast’s sub-par (a nice way of saying it) service and absurd prices. I was fine using only my Xbox 360, Apple TV, and computer for all my content for several months. One thing I severely missed though was live sports. As crazy as it sounds, there’s only so many times you can drag yourself to a bar on a weeknight to watch every game you want to see.

So when I moved a few months ago, I signed up for cable again (this time without Comcast, thankfully). Once again, I find the only thing I regularly watch on cable is live sports — so I’m effectively paying $100 a month for that privilege since the cable companies still refuse to do a-la-carte packages where you can choose only the channels you want. With this new Xbox Live ESPN service, I can officially cancel cable — and never look back.

One thing not mentioned in the announcement was the biggest sports league in the U.S.: the NFL. Still, if I only have to drag myself to bars to watch those games, I’ll be a happy camper.

Back in December, when it looked like Apple was on the verge of talking some of the television networks into doing subscription-based TV packages through iTunes, I wrote that Apple may be on the verge of kneecapping the cable industry. Those deals have yet to come to fruition. And so their rival Microsoft beat them to the knee bashing. As long as I can throw that crappy cable box and its piece of garbage remote out the window, I don’t care who destroys big cable’s monopoly, I just care that it’s done.

Here’s a slight update to my World Cup “all you need to know” post from yesterday. I completely forgot to mention that ESPN3.com is streaming all the games live and totally for free. No need to mess around with shady P2P streams.

But of course there’s a catch: you either need to be on a college campus or need to have an ISP that’s has a deal with ESPN. The nation’s largest ISP, Comcast, does have a deal, so for once it’s good to have Comcast!

The full list of ISPs are here.

Another note: the stream works just fine on Linux, as seen in the supplied screenshot.

Oh, also: Uivision has the Spanish-language rights, and it’s in HD this time.

Have DirecTV? You can watch the games with different language commentaries, including Arabic (it’s like I’m watching YouTube clips!), German, Portuguese, Japanese, and Korean.

Carry on, sports fans!

Comcast, America’s worst company, just announced that it will have indeed have ESPN 3D in time for this year’s World Cup. Comcast is the first cable provider to commit to carrying the network (while DirecTV announced the same thing several weeks ago).

As you know, ESPN 3D is to be the first big 3D network here in the U.S. ESPN went HD just in time for last year’s World Cup—I bought my very first HDTV, some 26-inch Samsung that’s probably now worth 75 cents, for the tournament—so I guess it makes sense to launch 3D with this next World Cup, which Spain will win. (Have you seen the squads? Poor Messi is surrounded by players not even sports reporters in Argentina have ever heard of! If Spain doesn’t win this year it never will.)

ESPN 3D will carry other, non-soccer programming in 3D as the year marches forward. The X-Games will get the 3D treatment (July 28-August 1), as will the BCS National Championship game in January, 2011. I honestly can’t believe the BCS is still around. You’d think they would have developed a better system by now…

So yeah, those of you with Comcast can get in on the ESPN 3D fun. You just need one of those TVs and enough glasses to hand out to your friends. Not cumbersome at all!

DirecTV will be among the first television providers to offer ESPN 3D. The channel launches this June, and DirecTV will place it alongside two other 3D channels, a 24/7 pay-per-view channel and a movies on-demand channel.

This is a markedly different approach from, say, Verizon’s FIOS, which said that it will only add 3D channels when it feels like it. If I can find an extra $2,000+ (spoiler: I can’t) then it’s good news for me, being a DirecTV subscriber. (I only get Internet service via Cablevision, which already broadcast the country’s first 3D sports event last week in the Islanders v. Rangers at the Garden.)

And as much as it sounds like a broken record, the defining 3D TV moment will be this year’s World Cup. I fully expect people who have zero interest in the sport to at least be curious to check out what it looks like. Hopefully Best Buy and so forth will have the 3D matches on display.

As an aside, I will say how hilarious it is that DirecTV has announced 3D channels before it decides to carry Fox Soccer Channel in HD. Sorta lame.

ESPN has long been the leader in live HDTV and the network is about to stay ahead of the curve yet again by launching its own 3D network early this summer. But this network is just a test and ESPN is only committing to it through June 2011. So if you really want your kids growing up watching live 3D events, you better support ESPN’s effort.

The initial broadcast will be a World Cup soccer match, followed later on by the Summer X Games, NBA games, and collegic football and basketball. It seems like ESPN really doesn’t know how this is going to pan out. There are apparently a lot of questions about how subscribers will get the stations, if they will have to pay a premium, and if anyone besides sport’s nerds will really watch it.

But props to ESPN and Disney for at least trying something new instead of taking a backseat while some other network potentially loses a crapton of money in 3D.

Good news, sports fans in the U.S.! It looks like ESPN will broadcast today’s Champions League final in HD on ESPNHD. Well, at least according to the schedule on its Web site. Why the network didn’t bother showing the whole tournament in HD when UEFA provides an HD feed, I don’t know.

The game sees the champions of England, Manchester United, against the champions of Spain, Barcelona. I’d say Manchester United are the favorites, if only because there’s no way Henry and Iniesta will be match fit (and who knows how long they’ll play) and because dumb Dani Alves had to collect his zillionth yellow card of the season, resulting in a one-match man. Good one, Mr. Alves!

Here’s a fine article summing up the situation, without the usual “Ronaldo v. Messi” cliché.

I’m excited (even if the tournament itself needs some sort of shakeup).

On Friday, word got out that come November 1 Verizon Wireless plans to tack on an extra 3-cent charge for every SMS message sent by Web information services to any of its mobile subscribers. That hike will be on top of the 20 cents per message that Verizon subscribers already pay (even those with “unlimited” plans). Thus, in one fell swoop, Verizon is attempting to boost its SMS revenues by about 15 percent.

While it may be good for Verizon, the additional charge is not good for any service that sends out millions of SMS messages each month. The move caught a lot of Internet companies, SMS aggregators, and media companies by surprise. For instance, I asked Twitter co-founder Biz Stone what impact it would have on the micro-blogging service, which lets users keep up with every Tweet they follow via SMS, and he didn’t know:

We’re still investigating with Verizon so I don’t have a definite answer for you right now.

In August, Twitter suspended the SMS feature in the UK and other foreign countries because it would have cost the company as much as $1,000/year/user. In the U.S., apparently it has more of a flat-rate pricing.

But that might change now with Verizon—and other U.S. mobile carriers as well, if Verizon’s competitors match the price hike. How long are they going to stand by and watch Verizon capture a 15 percent margin advantage in the booming SMS business? If the new 3-cent charge becomes the norm, it would cost companies $30,000 for every million SMS messages they send out.

I use Twitter here as an example, but it is by no means alone. Thousands of Web services use SMS as a communication channel. For example, Google lets you search by SMS and also lets people set up automatic SMS alerts from Google calender and other services. Nearly every sports, stock, and weather Website (not to mention the political campaigns) lets you get SMS alerts as well. Those are the heavy volume users. But this new charge could end up hurting SMS startups such as 3Jam, 4Info, or TextMarks the most.

Now, of course, the price hike could backfire on Verizon. Google, ESPN, Twitter, and others could just suspend their SMS features for Verizon customers, and its competitors could use that disparity to their marketing advantage. But if AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile decide that they too can squeeze out an extra three cents per SMS message, they might simply pile on board.

Forget for a moment that the mobile carriers are already making a huge profit margin on the 20 cents they charge users for each message. They know they cannot charge consumers any more, but Verizon at least thinks it can turn around and charge the Web services where the SMS information is originating. If the charge spreads to other carriers, those services might die or stop using SMS as a communications channel.

(For Twitter, at least, this may not be so dire. Although Stone would not confirm, my understanding form another source is that SMS accounts for less than 10 percent of Twitter’s overall message volume. That makes sense to me. I only use Twitter’s SMS functionality to send in Tweets from my phone, not to receive the barrage of Tweets that I follow).

The other way this could backfire for Verizon is that it could raise some serious Net neutrality issues. If it does not apply this charge evenly across the board, or starts carving out exceptions to do biz dev deals (and Verizon made some indications to Silicon Valley startups it was moving in this direction prior to the rate hike announcement), then it will be giving preferential treatment to one source of information over the other.

What if Verizon were charging the Obama campaign 3 cents per SMS message right now, but cut a deal with the McCain campaign to charge one cent per SMS? That is just a stark example, but you see where this can go. What if it charges the New York Times one rate, and the Wall Street Journal another? It becomes a freedom of speech issue. That is why it is better for the mobile carriers to charge consumers directly (and consistently), rather than try to sneak around and get an extra three cents per message from the Web content companies.

(Photo by Ti.mo).

The Active Network, a network of sites focused on getting people involved in sports and other activities, has raised an additional $80 million in a Series F round led by ESPN and joined by Canaan Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Performance Equity Partners.

The round brings San Diego-based company’s total to over $275 million since its founding in 1998 as a registration site for endurance races (we’re still tracking down all the rounds for CrunchBase).

While its main property, Active.com, delivers the bulk of its traffic with 17 million registered users and almost 1.3 million uniques per month (according to internal stats), network properties also include Eteamz, LaxPower, and CoolRunning.

We’re told that The Active Network’s total revenue in 2007 exceeded $102 million. Since the beginning of 2007, the company has made 11 acquisitions intended to help it branch out into new markets such as camping and education.

This is not the first time ESPN has invested in The Active Network, which focuses on the participatory side of sports rather than the spectator side. In 2006, ESPN invested more than $20 million in an attempt to diversify its business away from news and editorial. As part of its relationship with The Active Network, ESPN runs advertising campaigns and places its logo on the network’s sites.

The Active Network makes most of its money through transaction fees for event registrations. The network facilitated over 10 million transactions in 2007 alone.

via B&C

We’ll have a review unit in soon, so we’ll see if PC Mag is just smoking the rock.

Who here’s been watching Euro 2008? All you English lads, I’m sure, and right from your living room.

Anyway, I only mention the Euros because of this neat camera technology ESPN has this year, Axis. It’s a 360-degree camera the network uses to show instant replays. It makes plain ol’ telestrators look genuinely pedestrian in comparison.

Moving on, I bet those of you who had money on Holland prior to the tournament’s start are happily holding onto your betting receipts right about now. Speaking of which, just how illegal is online betting here in the U.S.? Anyone with any experience in the matter, please don’t hesitate to contact me.