NFL.com will be streaming the draft live from Radio City Music Hall on Saturday. While the most comprehensive coverage including live streaming of all rounds on April 26 and 27th is on the NFL’s website, there is a variety of coverage on multiple platforms elsewhere, here’s where to look.

Above: NFL.com Live Coverage

ESPN, which is televising the draft offers a number of ways to follow along online, most notably DraftCast, allowing users to chat, see Scout Inc’s player profiles, and Mel Kiper’s analysis of each pick.

Above: ESPN DraftCast 2008

Sprint wireless users have access to NFL Mobile, offering live streaming of the draft on both days. Exclusive content and expert analysis by Trev Alberts and others is available on mobile phones as well as the SprintSports YouTube channel. Coverage is produced by Intersport.

Above: Let Chad Go

The Sprint coverage includes an almost desperate plea from Chad Johnson’s agent Drew Rosenhaus to the Bengals: “please trade Chad.” The YouTube trade plea, that has to be an online video first.

Thanks to OVW friend (and Red Sox Fan!) Bill Stanton for sending this our way. Hysterical!

The folks from Fox Sports’s Best Damn Sports Show Period have created a music (well, sorta) video ahead of this weekend’s football draft.

I hope they can analyze draft picks better than they can rap. Pretty funny, though. Lucky for us, the title of the post works because there isn’t a whole lot of pre-draft viral video floating around. Or is there?

Display advertising on mobile devices, Google launched it this week, MSN and Yahoo! have been doing it for longer, but really, is a mini banner ad a useful marketing device?

The answer for Google, I guess, is “it can’t hurt,” if other companies offer mobile display ads, Google might as well compete, but when will the innovation come? It seems to me that mobile advertising more than any other form of advertising should be about targeting, hyperlocal.

Above: Google Mobile Display Ad Formats

A banner on my cell phone is just another obnoxious distraction, which like traditional banners will become noise on a page my eyes adapt to naturally avoid. Not something that I will click on. This at least, is a step in the right direction.

Still set to launch “this spring,” TidalTV announced that they’ve added NBC News and TV Guide content to their lineup. Previously announced partnerships include National Geographic and the Scripps Network.

“Our mission is to provide consumers with a unique viewing experience rich with brand-name video programming,” said Mollie Spilman, chief executive officer of TidalTV, in the annonucement. “The addition of these industry-leading media companies is essential to delivering on this mission – as they represent some of the most-watched, most-trusted brands in the business.”

A new Nielsen Online report shows that Senator Barack Obama is dominating the other candidates in campaign video views (press release PDF).

The report shows Obama with 518,000 unique video viewers consuming more than 820,000 streams of content, and averaging 16 minutes per user. Hillary and McCain lag behind with 351,000 and 38,000 unique viewers, consuming 551,000 and 66,000 streams respectively. Obama simply trounces his competitors in time spent, with nearly 4x Hillary’s 4.8 minutes per viewer, and McCain’s 1.5 minutes per viewer.

Head over to MarketingCharts for the graphs.

At long last Seinfeld addicts can get their fix 24 hours a day, though on a limited basis. TBS.com will make available four DRM-protected episodes at a time on a rotating basis.

OK, this is a short case study. But an interesting one as Seinfeld has been about as valuable a TV property as there is. Sony Pictures Television has earned well over a billion dollars in revenue since the show entered syndication around the beginning of the internet boom, and the studio intentionally delayed release on a number of platforms beginning with DVD to prevent cannibalization.

Now several years after DVD they are being equally cautious with online, doing everything in their power to ensure online viewership is incremental and won’t hurt syndication. Alley Insider wonders why, but it makes a lot of sense. Mac penetration is under ten percent, and very few of those people are rabid enough to go hunting on Bittorrent for episodes they could get any night of the week on TBS.

Eventually, Sony Pictures and their syndication partners will surely offer greater access to Seinfeld online. But for now, for the 90% of users who can view content on the TBS website, rotating only four episodes at a time ensures that fans will have a new way to view content, will drive additional digital revenue for TBS.com and DVD sales for Sony Pictures TV.

Lots of news worthy of discussion this past weekend which I mostly caught via Google Reader on my Blackberry while traveling back and forth between Boston and New York. Some thoughts:

- Sony will again attempt to deliver video to the PS3. The new Playstation store will offer among a digital media download service with original content. Despite past failures with Movielink and Sony Connect, the move is a no-brainer.

While Sony faces an uphill battle in trying to compete with the already strong force that is Microsoft’s xBox live marketplace, their media presence should give them a leg up in programming and it’s a market they should have a share of.

It will be particularly interesting to see how original content plays in. The playstation store is a natural outlet for content on Crackle and Sony Pictures Television has made a number of investments in original digital entertainment.

- A Vuze study shows prevalence of bandwidth throttling - The study involved more than 8,000 users who installed a plugin that tracked packet-loss. While Vuze admits that the sample size is not statistically significant, they state : “we are not aware of any normal conditions that would cause the disproportionately large variances in reset activity shown in the data of data sets of this size.”

- Revision3 Inks Deals with Hulu, Joost - While the list of syndication partners continues to grow their largest audience is still on YouTube. It begs the question at what point do new media studios like Revision3 begin using YouTube more as a promotional tool to drive viewers to sites like Hulu where they will receive better ad rates.

- Funny or Die Celebrated 4/20 in (anonymous) style a few days after their one year anniversary with Cocoa Rice Crispies, reruns of 90210 and FOD videos including PSI (Pot Scene Investigation.) The site currently reaches 3.2 million uniques a month and a redesign is coming this week.

Does television have the power to drive web video consumption? If last night’s episode of How I Met Your Mother is any indication, TV’s influence over the web might not be nearly what people would expect.

The CBS sitcom featured highlights from Robin’s past, when she was the Canadian pop one-hit-wonder, Robin Sparkles. We’d previously seen the video for her breakthrough hit, but at the end of the show, there was a teaser for the “Sandcastles in the Sand, ” her follow-up single, music video on MySpace.

The show airs at 8:30pm, and as of 10pm last night, there had been roughly 17,000 views of the video. However, this morning, after the show aired in all time zones, there have only been 35,500 views. According to an article in the LA Times a few weeks ago, the show draws an average audience of around 8 million viewers, and had 10.6 million viewers during a recent episode featuring Britney Spears. That’s a paltry .35% of the audience checking out the additional web content in the 12 hours immediately following the broadcast.

Yes, its a bad spoof of 80s videos from Tiffany or Madonna, but you’d have to watch it to find out.

Sandcastles in the Sand

Lets just cut right to the chase. I’m going to have to pony up the money for the Extra Innings package through my cable company.

I used both the Silverlight and NextDef plugins to try and get to the “TV Quality” that is advertised for the 1.2MB stream from MLB.TV’s Premium package. What TV? Well, on a 42″ 1080p plasma screen, the stream looks like your grandmother’s 20 year old RCA with the picture tube on its last legs.

The good news? MLB.TV’s premium package looks fantastic on a laptop or on a 22″ widescreen monitor plugged into the computer. Plain and simple, it looks great. If, hypothetically, you wanted to watch this afternoon’s Red Sox game while you were writing a press release, you wouldn’t be disappointed in the least with the offering. Stutter free, high quality audio and video without any sign of noise in the signal. If you were in a hotel room with basic cable in a city where you can’t even begin to fathom watching the local game, you’d also be spared the usual agony. And without a doubt, the stream beats the quality of watching your cable box over a Slingbox.

The bad news is that MLB.TV’s offering just isn’t up to what I’m going to call “livingroom quality.” There will be, for the foreseeable future, a balance between convenience and quality, and that value can’t be underestimated. I would rather have watched the Red Sox make a triumphant late inning comeback to beat the (Walker) Texas Rangers on Sunday than any other game, but it came at a price. Or rather, a choice of prices.

I could have sat at my desk with my 22″ monitor and been perfectly happy with the quality of the video stream. But alas, thats not what my experiment is all about. We’re talking convergence. We’re talking “lean back.” We’re talking sitting on your sofa with a few friends, a few beers and seeing if anyone notices that you aren’t watching cable, let alone HDTV. Unfortunately, it didn’t take more than 5 seconds for the first person to speak up, and they spoke up loud and clear. “What’s wrong with your TV? This sucks!”

Did it suck? No, not really. We wouldn’t have been able to watch the game at all, and that is a luxury in its own right. But is it on par with even regular TV? Not yet. So road warriors, sign up without any hesitation. But if you plan on watching full screen baseball without a pixelated, monochromatic outfield, you better call your cable company for the time being.

For anyone keeping track, the test PC uses an Intel Core2 CPU 6600 @ 2.4GHz, 4GB of RAM and an nVidia 7900 GS video card connected with a DVI-to-HDMI cable to a Panasonic 42″ TH-42PZ700U 1080p TV. Windows XP Pro SP2.