By Staff
Athletic Management, 16.6, October/November 2004, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/am/am1606/wuliveontheweb.htm
Never before have there been as many outlets available for televised football games as there are today. Still, there are far more college football games played every Saturday in the fall than there are outlets to broadcast them.
This imbalance has prompted some schools to turn to a new option: Web broadcasts. Western Illinois University, for example, will broadcast three of its 2004 home football games live over the World Wide Web. "We are in a very small media market in west central Illinois, and this gives us an opportunity to expose our product, campus, and university to the world through Internet broadcasts," says Tim Van Alstine, Athletic Director at Western Illinois.
The games will be broadcast through Sportsview.tv, which is the sports network for the Digital Media Broadcasting Corporation. "It’s like a television broadcast live on the networks, only the delivery at the end is a little different," says Susan Bruder, spokesperson for DMBC. "The signal will go to a computer or a broadband television, which converts that computer signal into a big-screen TV picture."
According to Bruder, while the broadcast itself will look like a typical televised game, it will also take advantage of opportunities presented by being carried over the Web instead of the airwaves or cable networks. "There is complementary content that we can put on the left side of the screen," Bruder says. "This includes things like rosters, information highlighting a certain player, or something cool the alumni association might have going on, and these will all add to the user experience."
The cost to watch will be $20 for a three-game package or $8 for a single game. WIU will receive a percentage of the viewing fee as well as a portion of advertising revenues related to the broadcast.
"The benefits are two-fold—exposure and revenue," Van Alstine says. "We have to be a little bit more creative in trying to find unique revenue streams and this is one of those opportunities."
Logistically, there’s not a lot for WIU to do. Through its College of Fine Arts and Communications, the school has been televising home football games for several years, as well as home games in basketball, baseball, and softball. The games are shown on the local cable system, but are rarely seen outside the local community. For the three selected games, the school’s broadcast will be fed live to the Sportsview.tv Web site. "There’s not a lot more we need to do on this end," Van Alstine said. "We simply have to run a few extra wires and turn on the satellite."
The increased exposure is expected to benefit the communications department as much as it will the athletic department. "Western Illinois University has one of the few student broadcast curriculums in the state," Van Alstine says. "Not only does this provide exposure for the football program, it will also provide exposure for our students who are working their on craft and getting hands-on experience in broadcasting athletic events. It really helps us fulfill the institutional mission."
The University of Tennessee at Martin followed a similar script for its home opener against Tennessee State. A local PBS station had televised the Skyhawks’ home games on a tape-delayed basis in previous years. This season, the broadcast was also fed to Sportsview.tv allowing fans anywhere to watch the game live for $5. Seven other schools also have contracts with Sportsview.tv as of press time.
For those schools not fortunate enough to have a communications department or local station televising each game, Sportsview.tv can provide a full production crew in addition to the necessary technological infrastructure. "Some schools we’re working with want us to handle everything from soup to nuts," Bruder says. "So we send out the camera crew, we do the production—we do everything. If we go out and do the full shoot they have to pay for that, but they can make the money back through ad sales and viewing fees."
Van Alstine says the idea of live Internet broadcasts has been well received throughout the WIU community. "Our alumni association is in love with it," he says. "The coaches like it, our media services and marketing and promotions people like it, and the people in the College of Fine Arts like it as well. And I’m sure the parents of our student-athletes will love it."
For the first year of its three-year agreement, Western Illinois chose to televise its conference home games against Indiana State, Illinois State, and Youngstown State, whose fans will also have an opportunity to watch the games. "We wanted to do our most attractive home games, which have the highest level of interest for our alumni and friends," Van Alstine says. "Those are our conference games, which include our Homecoming and Family Weekend games."
Van Alstine sees the possibility of expanding the Internet broadcasts beyond football in the future. "The capability is there to carry live on the Internet every game we broadcast," he says. "There are opportunities down the road for basketball, softball, baseball, and volleyball. But for right now, we’re going to take it one step at a time and look at football only."