“We think that’s a fantastic start for only being at this a year and a half,” said Matt Murphy, ESPN’s senior vice president of digital video distribution.

WatchESPN offers live feeds of four pay TV networks: ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN3 and ESPNU. It also offers on-the-go access to feeds of ESPN Goal Line when college football is underway or ESPN Buzzer Beater during college basketball season.

Its predecessor, ESPN Broadband, later renamed ESPN 360 and then ESPN3, was a separate channel started up in 2001. ESPN3 was only available online and offered streams of games that were a bit off the beaten path. WatchESPN gives users access to the regular ESPN channel, including shows like Monday Night Football, and its spinoffs.

Customers of Time Warner Cable Inc., Bright House Networks, and Verizon FiOS also have access to WatchESPN. Its app, available on iPads and iPhones, has been downloaded about 8 million times.

For now, the online and mobile versions come with few or no ads as the Disney subsidiary experiments with interactive advertising. During TV commercials, the online version often puts up a message that says “Commercial break. We’ll be right back.”

“It’s not a television platform, it’s an (Internet protocol) based platform,” said Murphy. “There are different and engaging things and we wanted to take advantage of that.”

Users must prove they are subscribers to use the website or the mobile apps.

WatchESPN also can be viewed on Comcast’s XfinityTV service, a website and app that gives its subscribers access to some, but not all, of the programming they pay for on their regular televisions.

Matthew Strauss, Comcast’s senior vice president of digital and emerging platforms, said at least a quarter of Comcast’s customers have tried its digital offerings. About 5 million Comcast subscribers per month check out its XfinityTV.com website. The app, available on iPads, iPhones and Android devices, has been downloaded 5 million times.

He declined to say whether the online features have helped keep subscribers from leaving. Comcast lost about 37,000 video subscribers from a year ago to finish the quarter to March at 22.3 million.

Adding WatchESPN adds a substantial live sports presence to the XfinityTV platform. Previously, the service had live games during the March Madness college basketball tournament but hasn’t offered NBA games online despite its relationship with Time Warner Inc.’s TNT network.

“We’re still just scratching the surface of what this can become,” he said.

“It could drown in amongst all of those big titles,” says Blake Howard, director of Australian review site Castleco-op.com.

He says the movie’s “popcorn escapism” was good enough to succeed in a regular year. This summer, it has unusually tough competition.

The hit-or-miss fate of a given Hollywood big-budget movie doesn’t normally matter that much. Media company analysts discount the studios as too volatile to be given much credit inside large conglomerates.

But “Battleship” is the first board game movie since “Clue” tanked in 1985. It’s a barometer for the appetite of audiences for a handful of other Hasbro board game movies, including Universal’s own “Ouija,” due out next year, as well as “Risk” and “Candy Land,” which are in the works at Sony Corp.’s movie studio.

Universal Pictures took the unusual step of releasing “Battleship” in international markets five weeks before its U.S. debut. Part of that was to avoid competing with “The Avengers,” the Disney/Marvel movie that brings together “Iron Man,” ”The Incredible Hulk” and other superheroes from previous films. It also wanted to give a wide berth to European Cup soccer starting June 8.

The overseas haul for “Battleship” goes part way to justifying its reported $209 million price tag. But after subtracting splits with theater owners and marketing costs, it is estimated to need about half a billion dollars at box offices to turn a profit.

That’s tough given the competition. In a little more than one week, “The Avengers” snagged $280 million abroad, far more than “Battleship” did in three weeks. “The Avengers,” fuelled by gushing reviews and a fan base that has been building since “Iron Man” in 2008, could break the domestic opening weekend record of $169 million.

Both movies squarely target the young males that make or break Hollywood movies in the all-important summer movie season.

“Battleship” has mixed momentum coming to the U.S. Just 48 percent of critics on review site Rotten Tomatoes gave it a positive review, compared with 93 percent for “The Avengers.” The most generous critics have still heaped cynicism on the board-game tie-ins, such as a scene in which American soldiers use a grid to fire blindly at alien ships in a strained nod to the board game.

“The only thing to do is raise the white flag and surrender to the film’s awesome silliness,” writes British reviewer Jason Best with the What’s On TV website.

American patriotic militarism is accepted overseas, but not relished, and international audiences appear to have overlooked a heavy dose of it in “Battleship” to get their action movie fix. It probably helped that a Japanese co-star, pop icon Rihanna and a disabled veteran helped the American hero save Earth from outer-space invaders.

“I think it literally just comes down to: People like explosions and action movies abroad,” says Oliver Lyttleton, a U.K.-based writer for The Playlist blog.

He believes that won’t prevent the movie from losing money. “I don’t think we’ll see a Battleship 2.”

Executives from Hasbro Inc. and Universal, a division of Comcast Corp., declined to comment ahead of the domestic release.

The movie represents the hopes of both companies for a big franchise, a series that sells billions of dollars in toys and tickets, the way “Transformers” did for Hasbro and Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures.

Given the results so far, a more realistic benchmark for “Battleship” is “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.” The Hasbro toy-inspired movie from 2009 generated $300 million in ticket sales worldwide, about half of it overseas. That was good enough to spawn a sequel, “G.I. Joe: Retaliation,” which hits theaters in June.

“Battleship” also doesn’t have to be as big as Warner Bros.’ “Harry Potter” to become a bankable franchise. If it makes some money, it could add to Universal’s relatively successful series, such as the “Bourne” and “Fast Five” movies.

“If they have three really strong franchises and a bunch of other movies in their slate that are going to perform well, that’s absolutely fine,” says Paul Dergarabedian, the box office president of Hollywood.com.

But he added, “in order to warrant the investment of a franchise built around it, it’s going to have to do quite well here in North America.”

___

Online:

Blake Howard’s review: http://bit.ly/IKPVl0

Jason Best’s review: http://bit.ly/J1yhpC

Oliver Lyttleton’s review: http://bit.ly/J0T2Aa

In February 2010, Yahoo Sports had 32 million unique visitors and 254 million page views for the Vancouver Games, it says. Second-place NBC, which paid for exclusive U.S. broadcast rights to cover, had 19 million visitors and 251 million page views.

NBC, a unit of Comcast Corp. that has agreed to pay $4.4 billion for the U.S. rights to carry the Games through 2020, lost $200 million on the Winter Olympics. By contrast, Yahoo’s Olympics coverage is profitable, says Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo’s head of global media.

“These games will be the biggest revenue driver we’ve ever had for an event by a long shot,” he says.

The Summer Games will represent a test of Levinsohn’s broadened role of overseeing Yahoo’s global media efforts. Previously, he was over media for the Americas.

The event also represents Yahoo’s bigger push into video. Levinsohn said the site will have five times the video coverage of the previous games. Proctor & Gamble Co. is a key sponsor for various projects, including one that features the mothers of Olympians.

“Work was his hobby,” said Fran La Maina, the longtime president of Dick Clark Productions Inc.

La Maina started as the production company’s financial controller in 1966. He estimates Clark amassed a fortune that reached into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

“He had this never-give-up attitude. He was a great salesperson and a task master,” La Maina said.

Clark was one of the early pioneers of the idea that a public company can be formed around an entertainer’s personal appeal. By the time La Maina went to work for him, Clark already had three shows on air: “Swingin’ Country,” ”Where the Action Is,” and, of course, “American Bandstand.”

He promoted more than 100 concerts a year back when promoters, not bands, called the shots. His roster included The Rolling Stones and Engelbert Humperdinck. In the 1970s, he launched shows like the “American Music Awards” and “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” — shows that are highly valued by advertisers because fans still want to watch them live in an age of digital video recorders.

At one point, he hosted shows on all three major TV networks, including “The $20,000 Pyramid” on ABC, “Live Wednesday” on CBS and “TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes” on NBC. All the while, he was hosting shows “Dick Clark’s Countdown” and “Rock, Roll & Remember” on the radio and running a business.

“He had boundless energy and a remarkable ability to do innumerable things at any given time,” La Maina said.

By the time it went public in 1987, Dick Clark Productions had several thousand employees, had launched a restaurant chain with Clark’s name on it, and ran a communications-promotion business. Revenue exceeded $100 million a year and the company was profitable.

His daily schedule was daunting, even when Clark was in his late 50s and 60s, according to longtime board member Enrique Senior, a managing director at Allen & Co. who helped Dick Clark Productions go public.

Senior remembers taking a peek at Clark’s schedule after meetings.

“It frankly was the schedule of a 20-year-old,” Senior said. “This guy was a dynamo. I’ve never seen anybody who would be so personally involved in everything he did.”

Despite its profitability, the business didn’t always keep pace with Wall Street’s quarter-by-quarter demands. Clark decided the company should be taken private by a third party, even though, according to Senior, “he could have taken the company over by himself.”

“He said, ‘I want a third party to do it so there’s no question that I’m taking advantage of the shareholders.’”

In 2002, the company was taken private for $140 million by a consortium led by Mosaic Media Group Inc.

Instead of cashing out, Clark sold a portion of his 70 percent stake, while reinvesting the rest with the new ownership group and staying on as CEO. He voluntarily accepted $12.50 per share when other shareholders got $14.50. Usually, company founders seek the highest premium in a buy-out.

“He wanted to reward the people that were loyal to him and who entrusted him with the stewardship of their capital,” said LeRoy Kim, another Allen & Co. managing director who guided the transaction. “He was a different type of entrepreneur. He was an incredible man.”

Clark suffered a stroke in 2004 that affected his ability to speak and walk and led to a reduced role at the company.

In 2007, the company was sold again, this time to Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder and his private equity firm RedZone Capital, for $175 million. Clark sold the remainder of his stake. He remained connected to the company only through his annual appearances on the New Year’s Eve show.

Over the years, Clark invested in other assets outside the production company, including multiple properties in Malibu, according to Senior, Dick Clark Productions lawyer Marty Katz and others.

He paid nearly $15 million for a 12-acre oceanfront estate in Malibu known as Gull’s Way in 2002, according to the Los Angeles Times. He had offices and his home in Malibu.

In his later years, Clark was trying to sell shows “just like any other independent producer,” said his publicist, Paul Shefrin.

Senior said Clark would still be coming up with new show ideas today if he could.

“I never ever saw a side of him that would make me think he was a narcissist or egoist or that he needed to be in front of a camera in order to feel accomplished,” Senior said. “It was all one thing for him. I don’t think he really cared as long as he was involved.”

Despite recent legal tussles involving Dick Clark Productions — including a running dispute over who has the rights to the Golden Globe Awards — Clark’s personal integrity has been “untarnished” over the years, Katz said.

Seacrest said in a statement that Clark “has truly been one of the greatest influences in my life.”

“I idolized him from the start, and I was graced early on in my career with his generous advice and counsel,” Seacrest said. “When I joined his show in 2006, it was a dream come true to work with him every New Year’s Eve for the last six years. He was smart, charming, funny and always a true gentleman. I learned a great deal from him, and I’ll always be indebted to him for his faith and support of me. He was a remarkable host and businessman and left a rich legacy to television audiences around the world. We will all miss him.”