In a brief segment from a show on the YES Network, Forbes national editor Michael Ozanian speaks about the growing fantasy sports market and how favorable the consumers are who make it up.

Honestly, if you follow the fantasy sports market research as we do here at FSB.com, this video probably won’t tell you anything new. When the folks near the top of the American financial food chain realize and report on the strength of our industry, though, it’s worth passing along.

The “Fantasy Sports Hit Mainstream” video below the featured clip features Rotoworld’s Gregg Rosenthal and Rick Cordella — along with Eric Fisher of the Sports Business Journal — talking about just what the title says. Rosenthal, for one, thinks that we’ve only seen the very beginning of fantasy’s integration into the mainstream and that plenty more awaits.

We reported back in September on the partnership between The Sports Network and Contec Innovations to grow international service to mobile phone users. Now, we’re seeing the largest outgrowth of that relationship.

TSN and Contec are nearing the launch of a worldwide sports information service that will cover a wide variety of sports, drawing from TSN’s already global reach, and be available on any network and any handset. The service will be available for branding by mobile service providers seeking to enhance their offerings to customers and will reportedly be mostly supported by advertising.

Greater access to sports information and statistics can only help enhance the capabilities of foreign markets to access American fantasy games and for interested American fantasy players to take part in contests overseas, such as those centered on English Premier League soccer.

“Fantasy has not really played a role in what we see as an obvious and palpably apparent direction to pursue: the world of sports brought to users on the one communicative vehicle that almost never leaves their side — the mobile phone,” TSN founder, president and CEO Mickey Charles tells FSB.com. “Fantasy is the natural outgrowth of the effort, as will be other games that we have planned but that remain unannounced currently for clearly recognizable reasons, the same that keep us in the forefront of the industry.”

Charles says the venture arrives with the “clear-cut intention of opening the marketplace to a vast audience that will be attracted to participation that they believed necessitated access to the Internet until now.”

TSN and Contec have already built a strong mobile presence in the Far East, offering content in Chinese, Thai and Bahasa Indonesian, but Charles says his company is also focusing on Europe. He points to TSN’s exclusive deal with the NHL as a valuable resource there, as the league is popular in Scandinavian countries. Eventually, the partners plan to offer content in more than 100 languages.

Fantasy players tend to spend more money, particularly on the products commonly marketed to sports fans, according to a recent study by Ipsos Public Affairs.

The study, commissioned by the Fantasy Sports Association, determined that 73 percent of fantasy sports participants had bought beer within a month of the survey. Compare that number to 47 percent of the general population and even just 52 percent of all sports fans, and you get a good example of the buying power that the average fantasy consumer brings.

“We need to tell Madison Avenue that we’re not just this small, nichey geek audience,” Greg Ambrosius, FSA president and editor of Fantasy Sports Magazine, told Sports Business Journal. “This gives us the next step into really seeing who the fantasy consumer is. In the ’90s, we were often positioned simply as fantasy geeks. But looking at this, we’re really big-time consumers.”

This study supports previous findings in similar studies, including those conducted by Ipsos for the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. Especially at a time when consumers are increasingly nervous about their spending habits and companies are more cautious with their ad dollars, it helps to realize the kind of bang that can reside in a fantasy buck.

Twice a year, the Center for Digital Transformation at Penn State University holds a research forum and invites speakers to address a gathering of member companies on “emerging trends in technology and business.” This fall, the emerging trend was fantasy sports, and the speaker was Jeff Thomas, CEO of SportsBuff.com (which owns this site) and president of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.

Thomas’ speech, titled “Fantasy Sports: Web Marketing’s Holy Grail,” provided corporate decision makers with an overview of the engaged fantasy sports consumer and the value of fantasy sports as a promotional tool. Thomas believes that all fantasy sports business leaders need to help spread the word to educate brand managers, business leaders, and sports marketers.

“Guests reported to me that the fantasy sports market was far bigger than they had thought, and Jeff’s statistics on user engagement definitely got people’s attention,” said Dr. John Jordan, executive director of the CDT.

Past speakers at the forum have included representatives of Google, Ernst & Young, IBM, Wachovia, Booz Allen Hamilton, Gartner, and Xerox.

Thomas has shared fantasy sports industry insight at Conferences in Montreal and Vancouver, and recently spoke to sports marketing students at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School.