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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?"
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!
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."
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.