Born Ready

Warner Music Group (WMG) and a TV sports show called "Born Ready"? That just doesn't make sense.

That's what I thought, too. But stick with me on this one.

On October 25, 2007 Warner Music Inc. filed a trademark application to protect Born Ready for "entertainment services in the nature of an ongoing web-based show and an ongoing television program in the field of sports." Odd. But the app is pretty specific about "Born Ready" being a web/TV sports program.

Wait. The plot thickens.

One month earlier on September 14, 2007, Den of Thieves registered the domain name, bornready.tv. As usual when I tell you about such things, the domain is just parked.

Are you confused yet? Let me clear things up for you. According to this NY Post article (May 8, 2007), Den of Thieves is a video unit of Warner Music Group Corp. and was formed to "drive New York-based Warner Music's digital sales of music as demand for compact discs declines."

Perfect. I e-mailed Evan Prager, one of the heads of the LA-based Den of Thieves, about the new project, but I received no reply. What else is new?

My guess? (And it's only a guess.) Den of Thieves will produce a short-form series that highlights extreme sports action set to new WMG music. Think about a web/TV-version of Ultimate X or any of Warren Miller's ski films. Or maybe think about it as a package of music videos with extreme sports as the common theme. It would also be a perfect product to market exclusively on AOL Video — it could be presented as an entire program or as individual music videos. It might also be one of many items required to raise the national profile of Time Warner Sports so AOL Time Warner can better compete with News Corp (Fox Sports, Fuel), Disney (ESPN), Comcast (Versus), etc.