It?s sad but true, a sports fanatic without cable is not really a sports fanatic. You can?t get your accurate-to-the-second stats at ESPN News while having the FIFA World Cup on your picture-in-picture. There is no DIRECT TV NFL package to be watched on Sunday. Heck, there isn?t even your daily dose of the most basic of all American sports fanatics? diets, SportsCenter.

The Internet has allowed the cable-less sports fanatic to keep up on homerun chases from the mid-summer classic, listen to live radio play-by-play on an autumn Sunday afternoon, and even watch a live play-by-play update of their favorite basketball team through a Java applet; however this leaves most of us yearning for more.

Picture the following conversation:

Friend: ?Hey man, did you check out the Orange Bowl? Miami was so robbed!?
Me: ?Yeah, I couldn?t believe the tension in that thing with TWO overtimes!?
Friend: ?Yeah it was great! How about that hit Willis McGahee took tearing up three tendons in his knee??
Me: ?Oh yeah, I read on ESPN.com that it was a pretty nasty injury.?
Friend: ?Oh, you didn?t see it??
Me: ?No, I?m sports fanatically-challenged.?
Friend: ?Riiiiiiiight. I?ll see you around.?

I?m sure that?s happened to all of us at some point, or for editorial purposes, let?s say it has. How can you be a sports fanatic if you can?t even carry out a conversation with a fellow fanatic?

I?ll come right out and say it, I?m a sports fanatic and I don?t have a TV, let alone cable. I spend most of my free time following sports by listening to AM radio, usually ESPN Radio. It?s great to get all the stats, scores and latest interviews, but there is something to be said about actually viewing Orange Bowl highlights, seeing Luis Gonzalez knock in the winning run against the hated-Yankees in game seven, or watching Landon Donovan carry the US soccer team on his back in the World Cup. Hell, I live in the Bay Area and wasn?t even able to watch a single game of the World Series that was being played eight blocks from my office. Simply put, I need to see what?s going on!

Here?s where ESPN Motion comes in and I become a happy, TV-less camper.

ESPN Motion is capitalizing on the 24 million Americans who were using a broadband connection in 2002, with upwards of 30 million expected by 2004. When you connect to ESPN.com for the first time, it checks on your system to make sure that you meet the requirements of a broadband connection (128 kbps or greater), a Windows OS (support for OS X on the way), Internet Explorer 5 and Windows Media Player 7, leaving out too large groups, Linux users and non-IE users. Well, ESPN.com is a part of the MSN Network, allowing Microsoft to have their way with them. But is it totally unwarranted? Not to play off of any stereotypes, but how many Linux or Opera users out there are sports fanatics? I?m willing to bet not enough to warrant investing the money in developing technology to make it cross -browser and -OS compatible.

So you?ve downloaded the player, and are now watching crystal clear audio and video right on the ESPN.com homepage. You?re seeing Sunday Conversation with Barry Bonds, SportsCenter Top 10 plays from this evenings show, and even Internet only content for tonight?s NBA games. I was blown away the first time I saw this, and could not figure out how this was streamed to my computer at such high-quality in the same time that it took me to open the homepage. Turns out I was looking in the wrong direction with this ?streaming? video. ESPN might be on to something with the Motion player.

You need to install the Motion player - much like you installed Flash, Windows Media Player, or Real Player. When there is new video available from ESPN.com, the Motion player icon very discretely appears in your system tray. Clicking on the icon takes you to the ESPN.com homepage allowing you view the new video. But something occurred to me after a while. How does this thing know there is new video? It?s obviously communicating with the ESPN servers from my computer, but how much is it communicating? A brief stop at the ESPN Motion FAQ page showed me the answers I was looking for.

Motion will download the video to you computer before you even visit ESPN.com, allowing for nothing but high-quality, pre-downloaded video. When the newest video is completely downloaded, the ESPN Motion icon appears in the system tray, and as they say on SportsCenter, ?Yahtzee!? You?ve got video. No prompts, no annoying spyware, just a quality service that allows sports fanatics to once again be fanatics.

What does this mean for the future of high-quality video on the Internet? As far as I could tell, ESPN was streaming this stuff to me at mind-boggling quality. Is this something that more large-scale media websites will adapt in the future (think CNN, BBC, etc.)? I, for one, sure hope so.

Where do you see the streaming video heading? Will we even have streaming video? Why is it necessary to have Microsoft to be able to a TV-less sports fanatic? Check into our forums and sound off with your thoughts.

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