By Ridge Mahoney MLS commissioner Don Garber stated a couple of years ago that the American market was "nearly insatiable" for international soccer, but in a recent interview he expressed concerns with how saturated the market will be this summer.

Major League Soccer attendance continues to lag behind its record-high final average of 18,807 in 2012 with an average of 17,480 through 150 games in 2013.

The Confederations Cup's 12 first-round matches were seen by an average audience of 485,000 viewers on ESPN and ESPN2, an increase of 26 percent compared to the 384,000 viewers who watched the group stage matches during the 2009 Confederations Cup.

As mentioned before, lead-ins are hugely important for MLS national broadcasts. MLS's two biggest television audiences of 2013 happen to have both been on ESPN -- the largest network for sports programming -- but they both also aired directly after Confederations Cup broadcasts.

NBC Sports has a new voice for its MLS coverage. Like his predecessor, Arlo White, John Strong was plucked out of the soccer-crazed Pacific Northwest, where he made a name for himself covering the Portland Timbers.

By Paul Kennedy MLS Commissioner Don Garber met with Soccer America editors Paul Kennedy, Ridge Mahoney and Mike Woitalla Thursday in San Jose, where he was speaking at the Silicon Valley Business Journal's Sports Summit.

It wasn't the 20 million viewers who watched Game 6 of the Heat-Spurs NBA final series on ABC -- a record for a non-clinching championship game -- but the average of 1,127,000 viewers who tuned in for Tuesday's USA-Honduras World Cup 2014 qualifier on ESPN was a respectable audience.

Veteran sports media and marketing executive Gary Stevenson has been named president and managing director of MLS Business Ventures, MLS's new business unit.

Major League Soccer has its own soccer news web site (MLSSoccer.com), it has its own YouTube channel (KickTV) and it is now launching its own content and distribution group, MLS+, to create soccer programming for its own platforms and those of its partners.

The fifth annual Kicking + Screening Soccer Film Festival kicks off Tuesday at Tribeca Cinemas in Manhattan with Les Rebelles du Foot, a film by Frenchmen Gilles Perez and Gilles Rof starring Eric Cantona and chronicling the stories of five soccer rebels: Rachid Mekhloufi, Socrates, Predrag Pasic, Carlos Caszely and Didier Drogba.

Ian Darke and Stewart Robson will lead ESPN's coverage of the 2013 Confederations Cup that kicks off Saturday in Brazil with the host country playing Japan.

The USA-Panama game on ESPN was the network's second most-watched and second highest-rated World Cup qualifying or international friendly match ever, behind only the Mexico-USA match in March.

Tuesday's USA-Panama game is not a sellout -- the upper deck at CenturyLink Field will be closed off, putting the capacity at 42,000 -- and as of early Monday afternoon Dan Flynn, secretary general of U.S. Soccer, said ticket sales were at "about the 38-39,000 range."

World Cup 2014 qualifying returns to ESPN on Tuesday when the USA hosts Panama in Game 5 of the Hexagonal in Seattle (coverage starts at 9:30 p.m. ET).

Crowds totaling nearly 100,000 are quite possible at CenturyLink Field in Seattle for a Sounders-Whitecaps MLS match Saturday and the USA-Panama Hexagonal qualifier on Tuesday.