2 Billionaires Smell Big Profit in Ducks, Angels : Analysis: The teams would be part of an interactive Internet empire embracing commerce, tourism, ticket sales and more.

Why would two high-tech billionaires imagine that buying two money-losing sports teams might improve their business prospects?

By buying the Angels and Ducks, Henry Nicholas III and Henry Samueli, co-founders of Broadcom Corp., could move rapidly from vendors of high technology to interactive pioneers, with enormous potential for revenue.

Along with selling computer chips that allow quality video transmission via the Internet, cable TV, phones or satellites, they could sell game tickets, event souvenirs and travel packages to games.

That potential, insiders say, helps explain why Nicholas and Samueli have bid some $450 million for the Angels and Mighty Ducks and are talking about investing in “content providers.”

With sale negotiations with the Walt Disney Co. ongoing--but far from complete--Nicholas and Samueli declined to talk about their plans Friday.

But Samueli said in an interview with The Times in April: “What you’re seeing now is people starting to get the feeling of using interactive computers--for example, using the Internet to go online and search the Web for something interesting.

“You can take that to the next level where you merge that with your TV set. You get the ability to have interactive programming content where you choose what you want to view--just like you now choose what you want to look up on the Internet.”

It might work like this: A teenage girl, wowed by images of towering Tahitian waves, clicks an icon on her bedroom television and calls up interviews with champion ocean surfers from the Internet. She loves the winner’s cool swimsuit, clicks again and buys it.

In the next room, her dad groans at a game-ending strikeout, then clicks to a “catcher cam” replay, torturing himself with a slow-motion shot from right behind the plate.

With one click, he could buy tickets to the next game. Or, with a few more fierce clicks, he could fire off an e-mail to the manager, telling him to use a better batter next time.

“We’re betting on convergence, but we’re not looking at it as a bet,” Nicholas said in a recent magazine article. “We’re going to make it happen.”

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Nicholas, Samueli and Marvin Winkler, who is a third member of the proposed ownership group and the chief executive of Irvine-based Gotcha International surfwear company, already are partners in other sports ventures.

With backing from Nicholas and Samueli, Winkler is promoting the construction of the Gotcha Glacier, a huge indoor park for snowboarding and other extreme sports on a parking lot between the Angels’ stadium and the Ducks’ arena.

Samueli and Nicholas also are directors of Broadband Interactive Group, or Big, a corporation Winkler founded in January as Interactive- ContentProvider.com. Big already has sponsored pro surfing events under the Gotcha name in Huntington Beach and Tahiti and also has sponsored extreme sports athletes.

Big recently signed an agreement with Fox Sports Net, under which Gotcha will sponsor a daily hour of extreme sports programming starting in January. Big will provide content starting in July.

The Fox extreme-sports show “Rush Hour” now features half-hour blocks of programming furnished by a variety of providers, including a Big-produced show called “Surf the Planet.” Big will replace all the individual producers.

At the Gotcha.com Web site, another Big project, there’s video on demand from extreme sports events and articles and photos from surfing, bodyboarding and wake-boarding magazines that Big purchased this year.

“The line between television and Internet is going to start blurring a little bit,” said Tracy Mikulec, vice president of operations at e-X Inc., Big’s magazine-publishing subsidiary.

As Internet boxes provided by cable companies become more common on top of TV sets, “we’re trying to ramp up for that kind of interactivity,” Mikulec said.

And as high-quality Internet broadcasts--also made possible by Broadcom chips--become possible, sports on the Web could wind up competing against cable broadcasts on Fox Sports Net.

Although Disney signed agreements last year that bind the Angels and Ducks to Fox for 10 years, Fox Sports spokesman Steve Webster said those pacts cover cable rights only.

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Broadcom is not the only company trying to develop a demand for high technology by tying it to the broad-based appeal of sports.

Quokka Sports of San Francisco, for example, displayed its interactive technology with coverage of the 1997-98 Whitbread Round the World Race, providing e-mail reports from sailors, race updates from journalists, video footage from boats, weather reports furnished to race teams, medical conditions of competitors and even virtual races for online sailors.

“It’s a way of seeing the event from the inside looking out, as opposed to the outside looking in,” Quokka chief executive Alan Ramadan said. “It’s like being in the mind of an athlete while he’s competing instead of being in the stands.”

The Whitbread site generated an estimated $7 million in revenue. But that race is a niche event compared to major league baseball and hockey, which attract millions of fans annually and generate interest through daily coverage in newspapers and on radio and television.

While Nicholas and Samueli could assure Broadcom of popular content by buying the Angels and Ducks, Quokka would be unlikely to follow that lead. If a technology company buys a team, Ramadan said, the company risks losing its focus, either by broadening beyond its core business goals or by hiring outsiders to run the team.

“I think media companies will always be able to tell better stories than traditional technology companies--they [the media companies] are out of business otherwise,” Ramadan said.

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Experts who study how home networks will tie together TV, the Internet, phone lines and even air-conditioner and hot-tub controls have mixed opinions about whether investments in traditional and extreme sports will help Nicholas and Samueli sell more Broadcom chips.

Broadcom chips hold a dominant position in the technology that will provide such interlinks, but that position could quickly erode if they falter in the fast-changing market, said analyst Arun Veerapan at BancBoston Robertson Stephens. And he said he’s unclear on how sports investments would play a part in the company’s success.

“I’m not quite sure that any of this would help or hurt Broadcom,” Veerapan said, adding that he felt it was trying to buy teams “on a personal basis.”

Karuna Uppal, a senior analyst at Yankee Group, was more positive:

“It’s a long chain of interim events between sports and what Broadcom does,” she said. “But its technology is for set-top boxes, networks inside the home--and for all of those, the driving factor is content.”

Times staff writer James Bates contributed to this report.