46 Comments Add your own

• 1. Joe  |  September 25th, 2008 at 3:26 pm

  Several Raycom stations have been collaborating with PlayON on a project like this for past last year - streaming live and archiving.

  They use Windows Media Player (ugh), but have a pretty elaborate setup, including multiple camera angles.

  Unfortunately, I belive the company that hosts these is about to go out of business.

  Click on my name for an example…

• 2. tdc  |  September 25th, 2008 at 4:01 pm

  steve balmer lamented not long ago that he could not watch his high school ball team (detroit country day) while he was on the left coast (or anywhere else in the world i guess). this concept should address his concern.

• 3. Contrarian  |  September 25th, 2008 at 4:57 pm

  Too much technology chasing too few real uses.

• 4. Anonymous  |  September 25th, 2008 at 7:01 pm

  There goes ever getting the local AM to at least stream the LOCAL team’s AUDIO while they run some other town’s game on their signal!

• 5. Rod Overton  |  September 25th, 2008 at 7:18 pm

  How do I know what is going on in the games?

  Is someone going to zoom the camera in on the plays and change the angles when the team is heading the other way?

  One of our bright (seriously, he is/was) folks in Montana at our TV stations there shot full video of a wrestling tournament about 18 months ago.

  But, the video was a stationary camera and you had no idea what was happening in each of the the three wrestling “rings” that were on the small video screen. It was too much action — and too little information. And there was no audio — or overlapping audio…

  I suspect someone smart in Gannett has already figured this all out, though. My questions are probably moot. Right? I can’t be the only person thinking this..

• 6. Anonymous  |  September 25th, 2008 at 7:30 pm

  Wouldn’t resize? Big Deal. Not running the Demo either.

• 7. Anonymous  |  September 25th, 2008 at 7:31 pm

  No audio, no video, no way. Go see what HS Gametime uses.

• 8. Steve Baron  |  September 25th, 2008 at 8:07 pm

  I love it - good stuff.

  Along the lines of the questions above - how to provide context to a single camera, natural sound game…to an audience that may not be familiar with the teams…

  I think you could almost apply the moderator concept from LiveNewsCameras to this - and have one person monitoring all the games, and be able to switch to, or highlight any single game where an important play was taking place, or something cool was happening.

  Or you could let your viewers do it for you with chat or something along those lines.

  Maybe we’ll put your widget on LiveNewsCameras

• 9. Tannerman  |  September 25th, 2008 at 9:43 pm

  It’s too bad that LNC is no longer really relevant without the live moderator aspect. Without it, it’s nothing more than a page of feeds.

• 10. mako  |  September 26th, 2008 at 3:44 am

  photographers for the gannett experiment get as high in the stands or press box as possible and follow game action. during lulls, there are slow pans to the scoreboard. one game is combining its live pics with a radio station’s live audio. one game is a four camera shoot (the HS AV dept. is doing that one). as for quality discussions, when you’re the only live + VOD option available for a high school game, that is the highest quality available… the experience is quite watchable–and if you are steve balmer–you’re happy to get your Detroit high school game finally.. think about it though…no high end cams…no satellite or eng trucks…no production studio… it scales, even in a touch economy…

• 11. ma  |  September 26th, 2008 at 3:58 am

  Here is the Steve Balmer quote: “I dream of the day when I can watch the high school basketball games from Detroit Country Day School that I attended in Detroit, on my big screen TV. Detroit Country Day School will be a publisher in the digital future, if I have anything to say about it. So, the opportunity, the places in which people will think about wanting to include marketing messages will continue to increase.”

• 12. tdc  |  September 26th, 2008 at 8:05 am

  thanks #10 & 11 for picking up on the steve balmer quote.

• 13. Safran  |  September 26th, 2008 at 8:32 am

  Outstanding. Looking forward to seeing the final result. It doesn’t have to (nor should it) have the look of finished TV. As long as one can reasonably follow the score and the teams, and it’s not a static, locked-down widescreen shot that doesn’t provide information, it’s a major breakthrough.

  I’ll be interested to hear what the LR Faithful say tomorrow, as we Saturday Morning Quarterback - hopefully with good feedback and suggestions for next week!

• 14. Tom Planchet  |  September 26th, 2008 at 8:37 am

  Ambitious idea, but is there really a market for a amateur, single-camera, distant shot, coach’s film type of production?

  The cost of attending a high school football game is really cheap…only the most hardcore fans would probably want something like this…

  Am I wrong? I always hold out the possibility that I am…

• 15. tdc  |  September 26th, 2008 at 8:54 am

  in case you’re concerned that steve balmer attended a lowly “detroit” school, i’ve coded tdc to link to their web property.

  (it’s actually in “beverly hills, mi. “.)

• 16. Safran  |  September 26th, 2008 at 8:58 am

  Tom - it’s the theory of aggregation at work. Will thousands watch a given high school game online? No. But many will. And for each community that adds up. For the aggregator - Gannett in this case - that builds a national audience. It’s not the price that’s the barrier to going to the game. Maybe it’s the out-of-state relatives that want to watch, or the long-gone alumns that would get a kick out of this. Just as with YouTube, there are two ways to get 100,000 views: have one thing that 100,000 people watch, or 100,000 things that one person watches apiece. You and R.O. are correct - there is some threshold for which we will need to understand what we’re seeing. This will be “person-driven” - you’ll want to be able to make out your nephew - or at least his jersey number. Cable access usually passes that threshold. Let’s watch this interesting experiment together.

• 17. tdc  |  September 26th, 2008 at 9:46 am

  true story-

  i shot a bunch of games back in the mid-70’s for our high school football team. the coaches wanted scouting films and i just happened to need extra credit.

  the case i lugged to the top of the press box weighed about the same as my ‘71 beetle.

  this thing took on a life of its own in the following years with the av dept working with the athletic dept.

• 18. ma  |  September 26th, 2008 at 10:03 am

  Expect 40% of tonight’s experiment to go well, 40% to require improvements. 20% to fail. Then, expect improvement on those ratios. Safron nailed it though…you can bet the house on “one channel = 100,000″ customers or you can have1000 channels and program and market for 100 customers per channel. The technology supports either option, as they are all one-to-one online connections anyway. “One channel = mass audiences” (TV model) or “mass audience across a larger number of channels” (network model). The trick is to make production costs scale and Mogulus helps with that part.

• 19. Jeff V  |  September 26th, 2008 at 11:10 am

  I think this will be a good first effort, and it’s the right time for this sort of product, as most of those in the biz will tell you. The moderator (or two, or three) would work well, but each of them would have to be extemely well-informed about the teams being shown. Is this how ESPN started?

  The rules have changed here in Michigan regarding live web streaming of high school games. You can’t show them live at all (there are a few exceptions) over broadcast; they have to be tape delayed. On the web, starting this fall sports season, you can stream video of the game live to theweb but it has to be in a closed (password or pay per view) environment. After 11:30 you can put it up for anybody to see. And, the crews have to be mostly students.

• 20. Rocker  |  September 26th, 2008 at 12:22 pm

  I’m not sure what the point is of doing an aggregated presentation of super-niche content, the vast majority of items (local h.s. teams) of no interest to anyone but the participants (and their friends/family).

  Not sure how a moderator would be informed going in and keep up with all these games…but pretty sure very few would care. Not arguing that finding a cheap, effective way to cover these games is a bad idea…just not getting the LNC-like implementation angle.

• 21. W  |  September 26th, 2008 at 12:24 pm

  My experience is that Gannett will stream anything - they’re not quite sure why, they just do it. Our local outlet will be streaming paint drying later today… and they’ll send you a text message so you don’t forget to check it out.

  That aside, a sporting event is particularly difficult for the reasons mentioned above - hell, without the Fox box these days I feel totally lost. Without the voice & context, it’s hard to follow.

• 22. ma  |  September 26th, 2008 at 1:28 pm

  The live presentations are both aggregated and single video player experiences. Markets have the option to publish whatever makes most sense (one, both, whatever). As for aggregated games in a grid, check out home page of http://www.highschoolsports.net tonight or http://www.preps.USAToday.com. In the future, think USA Today “Super 25″ Games. Think “Top Recruits” games. Think highest “Massey Rated” Games. Think http://www.highschoolsports.net Games of the Week. Gannett has the honor of serving both local and national audiences & advertisers with its brands, of course. The GRID is a way to showcase a handful of special games and those who might want to reach the kind of audiences who watch them. Under the grid is a widget/interactive map of all the live games.

• 23. Safran  |  September 26th, 2008 at 2:01 pm

  ma: If 40% of a first-time experiment goes well, I’d consider that an astonishing success.

• 24. Rod Overton  |  September 26th, 2008 at 2:45 pm

  The way online media experiments like this go:

  If this fails miserably — with a complete screw up — we’ll hear about it as a “gaffe” story from someone. It will limp along and finally die with not so much as a wimper of coverage when it does. Or maybe a bit of a coverage recalling the inital screw up followed by a “it-finally-died” story.

  If it does badly, but not enough to kill the idea, it will — again — limp along. The major backers of it will never listen to those of us who probed early about the major issues: being able to actually FOLLOW the game via the video and getting an audience larger than 40 total per game.

  If it goes well at first, but badly later: We’ll hear it is the cat’s meow and everyone will pile on to the concept, never realizing until they fully implement it that it is hopelessly too complicated, too bare bones for a user to appreciate and (a nod to Tom) has too much involved to get too few users to watch. Eventually, it will fade away and — again — no one will know what really doomed it.

  If it goes really well: It will be hyped, but not too much because no one who pioneered it will want everyone to rip it off. Some really smart markets will pick up on the concept and it will slowly build.

  Basically, these things get pushed down our throats for about 8 months as “the thing” to do when they are really NOT “the thing” to do. It’s not that they are awful ideas, but they are MARGINAL ideas with a payoff that is too low compared to the front-end (and weekly) investment of resouces.

  I think what no one has taken into account is WHO will watch this? Safran says “many” but — what does that mean? Many?

  I have seen enough of these things in 12 years and know a “trend” idea when I see it. So far, this has all the makings of an idea that sounds good, but the devil is in the details when it comes to making it worthwhile for USERS. And, as usual, no one will want to invest in those “details” that makes it worthwhile for users (and, thus, advertisers.)

  I predict… drumroll… a small success to start with but few follow-up or repeat usage or advertising renewals. Some will jump on board because of the concept, but 2 hours of bad video is not something we can expect users to watch. Really. Sorry everyone. I hope the experience is better than I have seen so far — and that my prediction is wrong. I love to see new, good ideas work. But, making this WORK is tougher than most realize.

  Please, someone do an ROI on this…

• 25. Rob  |  September 26th, 2008 at 3:57 pm

  I like the concept because it has the potential to resonate in small-town America, where the Friday night football game is the place where the entire community gathers together.

  But here’s the thing: The people that want to watch it live will be watching it live in the stands, not in front of their computer screen.

  So the live stream – even if you have the Mogulus chat room feature running for interactivity (Of course you’ll need to run heavy on the moderation) – is probably not where you capture an audience and make your money.

  Personal opinion: Where you grab the audience and make the money is through recording and archiving each of these games of the week, making them available for people to watch and pay-to-download. As for the advertisers, wrapping the video player with static advertising or using the Mogulus ticker or lower-third features it would be relatively easy to “sponsor” the broadcasts.

  Building up an archive of shows each season and making them accessible to the community is where you can win over the audience and make some money in the process.

• 26. ma  |  September 26th, 2008 at 4:08 pm

  each game is recorded and automatically transcoded and made available VOD immediately after the game. this is a standard mogulus option. the VODs can be watched on the same channel or can be embedded on any web page or blog.

• 27. Safran  |  September 26th, 2008 at 5:34 pm

  By many, I think a few hundred people may watch in and out of a given game on any given Friday night. I said I didn’t think it would be thousands. Low hundreds, max, seems reasonable.

  Looking at it at 8:15 ET seems to bear that out. The most popular game has 300ish concurrent streams. The least-watched have single-digit views. People come in and out during streaming, even more so than during TV. The quality is downright impressive - I’m listening to two very excited announcers (whose voices are cracking, charmingly) and there’s no problem following the action.

  A game plan? Who knows? But it seems like a decent play on first and ten.

• 28. GoUpstate  |  September 26th, 2008 at 5:41 pm

  The booster club for the Byrnes Rebels, ranked No. 1 in USA Today’s poll, are also streaming games live via Mogulus.

  http://www.mogulus.com/byrnesfootball

• 29. Grimmy  |  September 26th, 2008 at 6:38 pm

  This sort of application looks like a winner for radio to me, particulary local sports radio.

  Many HS games are covered live by radio right now. Why not add a camera attached to a laptop right in the press box to capture audio from the radio broadcast and put the whole thing online?

• 30. ma  |  September 26th, 2008 at 7:52 pm

  Grimmy makes a great observationt. The audio really makes the game, as does on screen labeling and “color” commentary and fan interviews during lulls. Those games tonight with great on screen labeling, play by play audio (even from the cameraman) and crazy fan interviews were the best experiences. A point about measurement–we need to measure these games as “live + infinity,” as it will be interesting to gauge what happens in the “VOD long tail.”

• 31. Anonymous  |  September 26th, 2008 at 8:38 pm

  It was useless trying to enjoy that.

• 32. Jeff V  |  September 27th, 2008 at 10:11 am

  Boy, there were a few cranky comments left here last night. In spite of the choppy video -which could have been my connection- I enjoyed looking through all the games and seeing the diverse approaches. The experiement has actually inspired me to push up our own experiment with live web streaming a HS football game. We were going to do it for the first time at a game in late October, but instead we’re going to go for next week. Wish I could send it to Mogulus live, but thanks to MHSAA rules, I’ll have to send it to ustream.tv instead - since you can password it, I believe.

  I do want to see more of this…keep it up Gannett; the more streaming, the better!

• 33. Rod Overton  |  September 27th, 2008 at 12:51 pm

  Uh, what is each TV station site NOT doing that users are expecting — each night they do THIS content?

  I bet I could go to each site and find at least 10 things completely wrong with their sites that they SHOULD be focused on and working on…..

  Instead, it’s the shiny penny that distracts…. it keeps everyone from doing the hard, annoying work (the blocking and tackling) that gets everyone really ahead.

  Sure.. do this fun project where results don’t really matter. That is so much more interesting than making sure the news is updated….

  I’ve seen it all and can HONESTLY say, this is just another distraction away from making sites WORK right… instead of just piling on ridiculous “cool” things that appeal to a very, very narrow audience and take everyone’s (internal) attention away from the core product.

  When in doubt: just look at what the CONSULTANTS say. I don’t think I’ve ever heard ONE talk about doing the basics right. Why? Because they don’t make money if you do the basics right. They have to add on the “shiny pennies” that confuse and distract station management and get everyone thinking that THEY have the panecea…. when, in fact, it is RIGHT in front of your face: your site. Do it RIGHT. But, alas, No.. that’s no fun. That doesn’t make the consultant $200,000 over 2 years. No.

  Geez…

• 34. Brink  |  September 27th, 2008 at 12:55 pm

  Exactly, Rod!

• 35. Rod Overton  |  September 27th, 2008 at 2:05 pm

  And, to prove my point.. not that I need to.

  I went to the Greenville Daily News site today (more than 15 hours after the game took place) and NO WHERE can I find the video from the game involving the #1 team in the nation that is in their circulation area — that they seem to have a text staff-writer story from.

  Within the story itself: one photo. No video from this much talked-about, hyped video “initiative”

  Does it take 16 hours to put up video from the game the night before?

  Again, I just don’t understand.

  Let’s see: Let’s hype our livestream for 50 people to watch, ignore the basics and then never (apparently) put up archived video of the game…

  Can someone explain this “strategy” to me? (And, please, consultants.. I don’t mean you… I’d love a “bigwig” from Gannett to really explain this… why can’t I find the video?)

• 36. Rob  |  September 27th, 2008 at 4:30 pm

  On second glance after looking at Mogulus and some of the live feeds yesterday (There were a handful of debate-related feeds as well as HS football last night) … it’s a nice, free streaming service but they cut you out of the revenue opportunities. As it stands the only way to make money is to embed it into a page and surround it with static advertising.

  I hate to say it but I’d like to see Google set up something similar through YouTube or have them buy Mogulus and integrate the live streaming into YouTube.

  “Shiny Penny” = Spot-on description Rod.

• 37. azrob  |  September 27th, 2008 at 6:35 pm

  The high school mentioned is Mesquite HS (Gilbert, AZ)! Great instructors and sudents!

• 38. ma  |  September 28th, 2008 at 5:25 am

  Mogulus PRO comes out in mid November. PRO users will have ability to insert pre/mid roll and overaly advertising, as well has some other very interesting sponsorship tools.

• 39. KO  |  September 28th, 2008 at 9:24 am

  Rod, contact Kerry Oslund at koslund@gannett.com. I am pleased to talk to you and our other friends at Belo about strategy, innovation, monetization and collaboration with you. Your team at KHOU did a terrific job with live/VOD video during the hurricane, as a side note.

• 40. Kelly  |  September 29th, 2008 at 6:10 pm

  Why do we all work so hard.
  Go to the website.
  Its time to earn cash fast, another way. don’t hurt to check it out. open your life to freedom.. I still work, but I work with freedom, traveling around the world. So what you want to do? Enjoy, if not pass it on to someone you know.
  Kelly:^) They will Thank You.

• 41. Anonymous  |  September 29th, 2008 at 6:59 pm

  Gannett - continuing to promote mediocrity.

• 42. Dave  |  September 30th, 2008 at 7:09 pm

  Technical question:

  What kind of camera(s) are you using to do this?

  My hyperlocal site does live high school games but we’re doing them audio only because we couldn’t get acceptable video quality through a laptop and broadband cell modem.

  We’re not blessed with cameas to choose from, so it’s possible it was the camera that made everything look like a game shot in strobe lights.

  How did you attack that issue — pushing full motion video through a relatively thin broadband pipe?

• 43. rod overton  |  October 1st, 2008 at 8:02 pm

  Thanks KO.

  I have been out of town and not able to check the site for a couple of days.

  I would love to take full credit for the KHOU performance on the web, but can only say that I helped promote and hire some of the key folks who did the heavy lifting and great work….

  I left there in the 1st quarter of 2007…

  I’ll get in touch with the person you mention — I am interested in learning the point behind this…

• 44. Ryan  |  October 8th, 2008 at 9:21 pm

  I’m a student at Mesquite, and I am the Technical director for our live games. Here’s our setup:
  3 Canon GL2’s
  All hard wired
  And a Tricaster Studio Switcher
  2 camera’s up on the roof of the box, and 1 in the middle of the stands somewhere. We’re getting a wireless transmitter and we’ll soon use a field cam every game.
  I stay in contact with all the cameras using radios, and I tell them what short of shot I want them to get, then once they have it I switch to it. So for the beginning of the play, we’ll start off with a wide shot, then switch to a closer shot so you can see details. Then back to a wide shot. Because we have the switcher, we can throw up different graphics, and we keep the score up, and put that up every few minutes, so you know what is going on.
  As for sound, we have a shotgun XLR microphone mounted on one of the camera’s up in the box, and we have an XLR splitter that splits the microphone for the stadium announcer. One end goes to the sound system, and one comes into our small audio board, then to the switcher.
  And we’ve had quite a few problems using cell tower internet, because the upload bandwidth isn’t the too good, causing lag, and we also don’t have that good of a laptop at the moment, but that is hopefully changing soon.
  We’ve had a few problems with mogulus, but it is still in beta mode. Once they get all the bugs out, and maybe some more powerful servers, it’ll be great.
  So if the schools have a setup similar to ours this will work out great. However I agree that a one camera setup just doesn’t cut it. I stayed home from a game one night, and watched a few other High Schools. And the quality wasn’t too good, and you often times here audio from the camera man, and anyone else around. I can say I’ve heard some “interesting” conversations.

• 45. Neal  |  October 16th, 2008 at 2:07 pm

  I head up one of those “small town” webcasting ventures here in Western Kansas. We initially started with just audio play-by-play coverage of the local high school a couple years ago for our own enjoyment. For this year’s football season, we’ve branched into the video side of things and it has taken off like wildfire.

  Coming from a town of 1,200 people with less than 150 HS students, we’ve been happy to reach 125 concurrent viewers during one of our key road games already this year. We initially started with Stickam, experimented with an actual Windows Media streaming host (whew, that was expensive for 10GB of transfer data that was used up in one broadcast!), and are currently using Mogulus (encoding w/ the standalone Flash Media Encoder). Quality so far w/ Mogulus and the Flash Media Encoder has been tops for us, but I’m constantly trying out the other services to see if there are justifications to moving our workflow over.

  We have a dual-core 1.6 WinXP laptop w/ 2GB RAM, a Diamond Multimedia USB capture device, the Canon FS100 SD-Card based camcorder and a 9v battery capable Behringer Field Mixer. Our best investment has been a portable backup power solution for about $150 bucks. Capable to power up to 1400 watts, and we’re not even tasking it yet (unless we hook up our local FM transmitter to it!). We have talked about designing and building an enclosed broadcast solution into a portable tabletop to ease our mobility and hide the plethora of cables!

  Hiccups encountered have been some viewers unable to view the streaming video (ensured they had latest version of Flash, other than that not much we’ve been able to support them with) and our own laptop chugging along trying to encode/stream, administer the overlays via browser and playback audio ads via Winamp. We guaranteed our sponsors audio coverage but the video is just turning into an add-on bonus for them at this point while we continue to tweak it.

  For the most part, unless you get into a tradition-rich school w/ large numbers and a devout following, there is money to be made but I would consider it supplemental and just a bonus for getting to travel and enjoy watching high school sports (which all of us in my venture do). We look at the advertising dollars solely as a vehicle to pay for our expenses incurred and to improve our hardware from season to season. I could see a large-scale high school sports site (like MaxPreps) maybe partnering with a streaming provider like Mogulus or even rolling out a venture like this on their own.

  If anyone has any questions about any of this, feel free to drop me a line via my site (linked to my name). I love being an early adopter of this stuff in my area and I think there is such an awesome future for these technologies, especially in rural areas with lack of media coverage.

• 46. Jay Hope  |  November 14th, 2008 at 7:56 am

  Anyone out there using Tricaster equipment to stream high school games? If so please share your experience. Thank you.

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