In working with classic sports producers Margate Entertainment, we here at Totalvid have been getting to know the sports collecting community a little bit better. And we’ve been wondering: are they online? And if they are, how are they collecting?

So we reached out to some collectors associations and other groups dedicated to finding and cataloguing sports memorabilia. We asked them what collectors were doing as the whole world (it seems like) shifts to the digital marketplace.

According to a spokesperson at the National Sports Collectors Convention office, “it is our experience that people like to touch and feel the items that they collect.”

Now that’s a completely different tune than what we’ve heard Tom Ficara, founder and owner of Margate Entertainment singing.  “The ease of which [collectors] can come to the trough, sort through stuff, and take a look at it, it will definitely change the way fans are looking for their information. They don’t care if its DVD or download as long as they can access it, get it at a good price and have it on demand. “

We did a little of our own poking around and found that, yes, there is a considerable amount of classic sports footage available for purchase online. If you go to Ebay and type in “home run derby”, you get dozens of results. A little less for Amazon.com.

But that’s all pretty parochial stuff. If you’re a sports collector, a serious sports collector, then you’re probably going to be looking for the gold in the sand, the needle in the haystack. So we dug a little bit deeper into the rare sports videos market and came up with two different sites that are pretty well established in the market. RareSportsFilms.com and VintageSportsFootage.com both seem to have a stranglehold on classic commercial sports distribution online. In fact, we contacted Rare Sports Films about the nature of digital distribution and they neglected to respond by the time of publication of this article.

If the existence of the previous two websites is of any indication, there is a market out there for vintage classic sports.

Margate Entertainment however, is a unique case.

The shift is towards streaming media. If you look at all of the big Internet video suppliers out there (i.e. Netflix, Hulu, YouTube), none of it is for download – it’s all streaming media. So, Margate, and us folks here at TotalVid, are changing the game a little bit. We’re offering all of those classic sports movies in a streaming format. This is significant and although there’s no scientific study to back up my claims, I think it’s best explained through this scenario:

Why do people collect?

A: To own something rare from a particular sport or hobby that you are interested in. To mine the past.

Why collect vintage footage?

A: Although it’s not the most precious of collectable footage – for instance, it’s no signed Mickey Mantle baseball – it is a great deal important as the visual representation of what sports fans and historians understand to be the legacy of their sport.

Why are collectables collected in the first place?

A: Because they’re unique, difficult to acquire, and precious to the collectors.

So judging just by those points, hosting memorabilia online for streaming would seem to defeat the purpose of collecting in its entirety, right? Once something is streaming online, that means millions of online users can access it instantly. This would negate the aspect of the “rarity” that drives so many folks to collect.

But, as Ficara said before, (“The ease of which they can come to the trough…“) the shift towards accessibility seems to eventually eclipse the traditions of collecting sports memorabilia.

Peculiar, yes. But if you look at another media scenario currently developing over the Internet, Tom may have a pretty good point. Ever since the arrival of music pirating websites, distributors and record dealers have had a hard time acclimating themselves to the new music industrial climate. Online downloads eventually prevailed, perhaps to the dismay of the record labels, but to the music collectors’ benefit.

Again Tom Ficara: “I don’t think that it’s going to be any different for video,” referring to the audio portion of his company. “It’s running about 5 years behind the curve.”

So while the video streaming market in the world of sports collectibles is still burgeoning, there are considerable speculations that it will soon eclipse that of physical distribution. And as collectors make the awkward shift from holding that bit of memorabilia in their hand to streaming it all from the convenience of their computers, TotalVid’s Classic Sports tv channel will be right there.