I was going to title this post, “In which I give away $1 billion,” but that’s just  a recipe for huge snark. Nevertheless, I do think the following idea is a potentially Youtube-esque payday for whoever has the time, perseverence, and risk tolerance to quit their job and form the startup. If I were 23 and unmarried with no kids, it is unquestionably what I would do. But I’m not so I won’t. And now the fabulous idea (which I must co-credit to my brother-in-laws) is yours for the taking. Just thank me when you are the next Internet gazillionaire. Or cut me into the profits.  Here’s the idea:

Build a website with real-time streaming-audio capabilities. And then broadcast real-time commentary/rants during the commercials of NFL games.

That’s the whole idea. It’s trivial to get it off the ground if you have five grand laying around: build the website, buy a quality microphone setup, pay for some streaming-audio hosting (or piggyback on a free site), and go to town. You could start with just yourself as the only  “ranter.” People who come to the site would hit the play button as soon as the game started, but all they would hear is dead air. Until the game went to commercial, that is, at which point you would begin a commentary/rant on the most recent action.  I’ll even give you the catch phrase: “When the NFL goes to commercial, we go live.”

You could start small with just one ranter talking about one game (“When the Giants go to commercial, we go live”), but the scalability is endless. Multiple ranting channels for each game, with people coming from different angles (stats geek, calm analyst, emotional loudmouth, even a guy who focused on offensive line play). Even better, the site could grow into a justin.tv type platform, in which people who sign up for the site could themselves become ranters, and a yelp-like ranking system could develop to rate them. Expand across teams, then across sports.  It’s endless.

I don’t know about you, but this is something I would listen to. God knows there are enough commercials during NFL games. Hell, I’d probably even pay $20 for a season subscription. So there’s money to be made. But I don’t think it would even need to be profitable as a startup. If it was proven viable and popular, it would be acquired literally overnight by one of the big players.  That’s how almost all start-ups operate now anyway; give away your content, bleed money, and hope Google buys you before your investors run out of capital.

I think it’s less than three years of work from startup to acquisition, and I think it’s plausibly a nine-figure acquisition. Think about it: you might not know how to monetize it without charging a subscription, but it’s built around NFL commercials, which themselves are already monetized to the tune of billions of dollars. If you can steal the NFL audience for 10 minutes every hour, someone will figure out how to make it profitable. And they will pay you a fortune before they ever do.

Yes, there are legal questions. You probably couldn’t use the team names, definitely not the logos. And the NFL would hate you and try everything they could to shut you down. But I don’t think they would win. We can sit in a bar and tell everyone what we think about what we are seeing in real-time. Why can’t we do it on the internet? As long as there was no subscription fee, I can’t imagine there’d be a problem. Even with a subscription fee, it’s debatable.

So yeah, someone go get some angel money from Ycombinator and give it a shot. And cut me in for 1% when you do.