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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?"
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
Dude, the game was broadcast on ABC.
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.
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: