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Where is the Webcasting?
epiphani asks: "This weekend the Womens World Cup soccer finals took place between Germany and Sweden, and a German exchange student, whom is staying with us, was very interested in seeing this game. We don't have cable television at home, however we do have broadband. Now, thinking an event such as this should obviously have a webcast stream somewhere, I went on a search so my German friend could watch the game. After looking for close to an hour, the closest thing I could find to live coverage was a text-based ticker that followed the game. Where is webcasting? Almost all radio stations now have live feeds to the internet, and yet a major sports event such as this doesn't have a video webcast? What is holding this back? The technology exists, and I suspect there would be demand. Are the cable and satellite television distributers preventing it to maintain their business model, or is there some technical aspect that hasn't been addressed?"
don't have to double pay fee's for the same broadcast it may happen. Probably just in time for you to see your broadband capped by your ISP for "over-usage".
They advertise watching movies via DSL/Cable (modem) access, but the reality is the media companies want the status quo because they fear the unknown.
This is the major weakness of our market economy in my opinion.
Well a situation like that happened to me. I have cable TV but no UPN channel. Call me a Trekkie nerd but I really like Star Trek Enterprise and I wanted to see the episodes. So Kazaa has supplied me with them. Maybe you can hook yourself up with the soccer finals via some form of P2P?
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Lack of control over the medium is what's holding it back. You know those warnings at the end of baseball games? The "This has been a production of Major league Baseball. Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited without the express written consent of the commissioner of baseball" slogan?
They can't control what happens when you get it, there's any number of copies that they can make, and they don't get the revenue stream of commercials.
Big media is all about control, because that's where the money is.
Zapman
and another beautiful woman like Brandi Chastain takes off her shirt in the game then I would expect you'll find plenty of clips available... However, I doubt that you will find a live feed. As far as I know the broadcasters prevent that from happening, or at least I've never seen it.
Band Width.
I should set up a server farm to deal with a nuclear-powered Slashdotting so that people can watch my TV channel elsewhere? People that will never buy products from my advertisers because they're in different countries?
Right...
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Really? I thought only the NPR/Volvo set in the US cared about women's soccer. Not that they watch or follow it either, but they're very insistent that the rest of us should.
Anyway, the major sports leagues in the US generally do offer Internet coverage, at least for audio and frequently video too. (Live coverage usually is for a fee.) The World Cup was hurriedly rescheduled for the US after SARS chased it from China -- maybe they just didn't have time to get it in place.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Part of the problem, is that desipte what you say, the technology still isn't terrible good. It's surely not as good as it obviously could be. If it was as good as it could be, you'd request subscription from your gateway to multi-cast address X port Y. It would keep asking up the router stream until it got to the source. I've never seen a video feed that looked good live. I really don't want to know what it would be like if there might be 50,000 people who are interested in it. I know the Victoria's Secret special is always a fiasco (never seen it, but the guys I know who tuned in said it was a fiasco).
There are plenty of problems, but most people don't do multicast terribly well.
Each packet could then be broadcast as needed down each internet link. Currently most streaming video is a UDP feed that is pretty inefficient. The resolution is crappy, the frame rate is horrible, on most of the video feeds I've ever seen. I might pay $5, however, I'd be more interesting in paying $10, and having you ship me the DVD of the live coverage in the next week. Don't bother editing, just take the recorded live broadcast, break it into 5 minute sections, and ship me the game.
Kirby
The site willow.tv does online Cricket broadcast. They are partnered through Akamai for devlivering the required content. They just recently did the Cricket World Cup 2003 live from South Africa. I was able to catch the Semis and the Finals and it was pretty darn good for webcasting (however, far from perfect).
They also do many other cricket games for netizens worldwide. There charges are reasonable (comparable to Dish Network's coverage of international cricket).
I wonder why other sports are lagging behind?
now supporting:
cmdrTaco for president '04
michael for oval office intern summer '05
I bet the German girls have hairy legs though..
It takes a lot of resources to support media streaming, with video requiring a lot more than audio.
.com delusion that giving things away is the key to profits having faded, I'm afraid it's going to take a long time to evolve this new media world.
On top of that, you have a well-developed international system of broadcast rights management that has evolved over decades that governs who gets to deliver what media coverage to whom and who pays. This isn't something simplistic like copyright laws. It's an evolved ecology of contractual and implicit agreements among all of the major players internationally regarding who does what, how it's managed, and how it's accounted for (meaning financial obligations). The teams have contracts, the players have contracts, venues have contracts, broadcasters have contracts, advertisers, media distributors, the unions...and most of these are multiyear contracts regarding what you are allowed to sell to whom and under what circumstances, based on how things have been in the past.
Suddenly, we have a technical way to deliver streaming video to anyone over the Net. It costs money to manage, but suppose some organization decided to pay. They're still going to run right into the brick wall of all the interlocking agreements among all parties. Cutting this gordian knot will take a lot of time and a lot of financial incentives, because it will be resisted by many parties who can retaliate financially.
I'd love to be able to tune in to every radio and TV broadcast in the world as well as a huge variety of small, niche operations that can't afford any medium other than the Net, and to do so as simply as I view a Web page.
We're going to have to evolve into it, though, starting with media with minimal commercial entanglements, such as NPR or BBC, for example, and new media that is wholly owned by some guy streaming it from his garage. Then we'll grow out from there.
I hope it won't take too long, but with Net users demanding their "right" to have expensive things for free, and with the
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
The only 'radio' stations I know of that are streaming on the Internet are the ones that only do net streams, and not actual radio broadcasts.
This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
Dude, the game was broadcast on ABC.
here on /. recently there was an article about a device that would stream tv via broadband between a person's home and a different location.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
In our case, we'd have to pay royalities for not only the songs played (we already pay royalities to play them on the air in the first place), but would then also have to pay royalities to the artists who provide music for advertisements.
Note, this last one affects almost all radio stations, even sporting events.
When the music artists union pushed this through a couple of years via a strike, most stations just rolled over and gave up. The cost of bandwidth and low number of users already made streaming difficult a best. Tracking ads and writing those checks were too much.
We have explored some niffy technologies that basically block out the ads, but then you can't charge for the additional audience, unless you had locally produced ads.
I have the same problem when I want to watch Formula 1 Races. They're only on the Speed channel in the US. Which is ok when I'm at home. But at college I don't get that channel, I would need to pay for super digital cable. The only thing you get on the official formula 1 wesite is a text sportscaster and a graphical representation of the field, kinda. It works well, but a video webcast would be the best. I think they just don't want to pay for the bandwith and they make more money from the tv channels than from the advertising they would have on a webcast. If tv ratings go down after a webcast goes up, then tv stations be pissed and they will lose money.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
A general rule: "whom" is used to replace "him". When in doubt, use who, and you won't sound like an idiot who's trying to convince other people that he's smart.
I've been playing around with PeerCast lately and it's really great although it has some major shortcomings. For example if you have dynamic IP the channel ID will change every time you get a new IP, you can't have multiple sources feeding the same channel (mirrored Shoutcast/Peercast stations or simply a redundant feeder), and you can't get the stream from multiple sources if one of them don't have the bandwidth to send the complete stream.
What is needed is a PeerCast-like service with support for multicast and stream-rebuilding from multiple sources and something that identifies the channels by a public key instead of building the ID by making a hash from a number of variables on your system (including your own IP and the IP of the feed).
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
I've seen people mention bandwidth issues (on the senders end), and it's a perfectly valid issue, which brings up this point, as it would save the sender a tremendous ammount of bandwidth.
Why isnt the multicast feture of TCP/UDP taken advantage of more?
Any kind of webcasting, be it video or music, or even game servers would require much much less bandwidth and processing power if they send multicast packets out and have the routers along the way replicate and forward packets to thier next hops as needed. I assume there has got to be a good reason since its not taken advantage of, anyone care to comment?
For many years FashionTV used to webcast their channel live round the clock. It was a pretty decent quality ASX stream @300 kbps. Great for looking at supermodels strutting their stuff ;-) For some unknown reason they've recently taken it off their website.
Just try tuning into any football (soccer) match on the BBC World Service. Fine, if you're able to tune in the old-fashioned way, using your shortwave radio (a lot harder to do now, though, for those of us in North America, since the BBC no longer specifically targets this part of the world via shortwave). Try listening to the webcast, and all you get (over and over) is:
When the ad agencies finally come to terms with 2 things
1. Network-centric "brand" advertising provides the WORST ROI for their cleint, and
2. Their client is too dumb to understand this until they realize the money sink of poor network delivered "brand" advertising needs to stop and they put guilty agency on notice.
Currently companies often think it's the creative that sucks and not a combination of poorly executed creative, poorly executed research/targeting, and a poorly executed technology framework (television)
What provides the BEST ROI?
1. Well targeted direct mail followed by
2. Internet advertising.
When the advertising agencies get it, The content will follow.
Heil Sig! -Rob
Multicast. Someday?
The TV rights to the Women's World Cup are owned by FIFA, the organizing body of world soccer. So you should always check www.fifa.org for any international soccer game. FIFA usually market the internet rights themselves and for the last Men's World Cup used Yahoo! as their broadcaster. $20 got you game highlights of all 60+ games. I don't know if they did the same with the Women's Cup.
/.ers seem to think they deserve their own circle of hell.
For US viewers information on actual TV coverage can always be found on www.soccertv.com. An excellent reference. But note that the majority of the big games are often pay per view (since I don't have digital cable for example I usually have to go to a bar to watch any Ireland game - and man what a depressing experience that suddenly turned out to be, but I digress:).
The FIFA games are usually an exception to pay per view and can usually be found on cable in the US (Disney/ESPN currently have a lock on the FIFA games in English, Telemundo in Spanish).
This all changes for other competitions - the organizers usually own the rights and they each go about selling those rights in different ways. Currently UEFA, the organizers of the top European clubs, 'Champions League', have done a deal with Real Networks for same day video coverage, video highlights and live audio, $5/month, $40/season. I'm ambivalent to Real but many
But be careful what you wish for, the Men's World Cup coverage was adequate, but fuzzy. It could be a little hard to see what was happening. I've only viewed the free preview of the UEFA Real Network stuff and the video is dramatically better, still not up there with a good TV, but not far short either - ASSUMING you have a high speed (100kb+) connection. Forget dial up for anything other than audio.
Oh, everything is streamed, no downloads, DRM and all that guff.
Go Chelski for The Champions League!
Richard
Keep It Simple
Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited without the express written consent of the commissioner of baseball"
Like I said, we used to rebroadcast illegally. We only had implied oral consent to rebroadcast.
While perhaps not the most exciting stuff out there, one of the few online simulcasts I know of is the Annenberg/CPB Satellite channel -- which largely broadcasts educational programs (eg: telecourses for distance learning initiatives and teacher professional development):
channel info: http://learner.org/channel/channel.html
simulcast link: http://learner.org/channel/broadband/video.html
i used to work for a movie studio in IT. one day one of the head honchos came in and asked how easy it would be to set up a streaming server. i said it was easy, and had a demo running in a few days. his idea was that all of our clients were spending tons of money having demo VHS tapes duplicated to send out to investor/clients/promos/whatnot, and that streaming the video online would be a lot cheaper, since it was edit once and go. we got approved for a kick ass streaming server system. there was talk of a major company springing up from this. the word IPO was everywhere. seed stock was the buzzword of the office. it was going to revolutionize the company. so we set up. and we waited. and waited. and waited. none of our clients were interested. they felt that it was too expensive. even the ones that we were giving it to were not really interested in having it. we got more notice from the big players in streaming video than we did customer contact. when i left the company streaming was all but a dead issue. i don't even think they have the web site any more, and probably the equipment got sent back after the lease or something. oh well, i had fun setting everything up myself and running it. in the end i even had a setup elsewhere that was streaming porn for an unnamed webcam girl. showed up her hosting company as they felt it was impossible to do.
bottom line? just like everything else on the internet, no one wanted to pay for it. our clients or theirs. we couldn't give it away after the tech bubble burst.