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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.
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
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."
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: