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Media The Internet Wireless Networking Hardware

Where is the Webcasting? 55

Posted by Cliff from the catching-up-to-the-technology dept.
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?"
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Where is the Webcasting? More

Where is the Webcasting?

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  • When the broadcasters (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BoomerSooner ( 308737 ) on Thursday October 23, 2003 @04:09PM (#7294360) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • P2P (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Kethinov ( 636034 ) on Thursday October 23, 2003 @04:09PM (#7294364) Homepage Journal
    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?

  • Control. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Zapman ( 2662 ) on Thursday October 23, 2003 @04:11PM (#7294389)
    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.
    • Just out of curiosity- did I miss the horrible series of tragic rebroadcastings which caused those fucking annoying blurbs? I can't ever recall going to watch an underground baseball retransmission. Or do they just put them in for the hell of it?
  • 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.
    • I just noticed that this really might [azcentral.com] happen. Guess it's time to watch soccer. :-)

    • another beautiful woman like Brandi Chastain takes off her shirt

      Why do I watch hockey...

      Seriously I think that media giants prevent webcasts from carrying things like pro sports in any quantity.

      Things over the internet are too hard for them to control. If they send it through a cable channel or (worse) pay-per-view they have control over who watches it and (to an extent) can prevent free-loaders from seeing it. No such controls exist on the internet.

      Since the big company won't get as much money th

      • Things over the internet are too hard for them to control. If they send it through a cable channel or (worse) pay-per-view they have control over who watches it and (to an extent) can prevent free-loaders from seeing it. No such controls exist on the internet.

        I'll remember that the next time I have friends over to watch a World Cup soccer game on pay-per-view using my "test" satellite card...
  • 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...
    • Multicast. Someday?

      • I spent ten years as a service research guy at broadband companies banging my head against this wall. I could show all kinds of interesting services based on multicast in the lab, but it wasn't practical to deploy multicast in the local distribution systems. Early DSL suffered from the problem that DSLAMs didn't understand about IP, and you had to replicate packets at the last IP router that did understand. DOCSIS 1.0 cable modems could pass multicast, but it was "all or nothing" and there was the possibil

  • 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.

    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 fo

  • Money probably (Score:3, Informative)

    by ComputerSlicer23 ( 516509 ) on Thursday October 23, 2003 @04:18PM (#7294479)
    Well, it's quite simple. Where is the money? Who has the broadcasting rights to where? How do you control that? Generally the business model of broadcasting television isn't well thought out. How do they advertise. See Television people really like advertising revenue. It's consistant. It's not a spur of the moment deal. It's known well in advance, and collections isn't an issue, as you are dealing with maybe 10 major corporations that are sending $100K's of money around, not rather then 100K people sending in 10 bucks.

    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 [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 behi
    • Perhaps cricket is more suitable for webcasting because a 5fps refresh rate is faster than the pace of the live game (says the American with the baseball reference in his .sig ;-) .
      • I think you underestimate. Cricket requires at least 6 fps. And, that my friend is one more fps than baseball (I like baseball too. However, the Yanks blow).

        Seriously, they keep a sustained 350kbps feed. Not bad.

  • Where's the money? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GCP ( 122438 ) on Thursday October 23, 2003 @04:32PM (#7294636)
    It takes a lot of resources to support media streaming, with video requiring a lot more than audio.

    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 .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.


    • It takes a lot of resources to support media streaming, with video requiring a lot more than audio.

      If anyone needs convincing, take a look at prices for professional video streaming cards (MPEG in hardware, etc.).
  • Almost all radio stations now have live feeds to the internet
    In what universe? Most radio stations I know that used to offer live 'net feeds don't anymore, because of the royalty rules that say they have to pay again for Internet rebroadcasts of the same stuff being broadcast over the air.
    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.

  • Ummmm... (Score:3, Informative)

    by JAYOYAYOYAYO ( 700885 ) on Thursday October 23, 2003 @04:38PM (#7294703)
    "We don't have cable television at home, however we do have broadband."

    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.

  • Royalities... (Score:4, Informative)

    by pease1 ( 134187 ) <bbunge@NOSPAM.ladyandtramp.com> on Thursday October 23, 2003 @05:12PM (#7295074)
    My parents own a small AM station. Aside from the bandwidth issues (a lot of bandwidth for just a few users), the artists, unions and others in a money grab killed streaming for most radio stations.

    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
    • Same thing with rally racing, although the channel situation is the opposite. I had it in college, but don't now that I moved. Again, here you have to upgrade to the super digital cable to get it... I might do that eventually, but for now I miss the rally action.
    • Speak to Bernie.

      He decides how F1 is distributed. He's also one of the sports riches men. A coincidence, I think not.

      He experimented with mutiple camera angles for home viewers. You could watch the race from the cameras on each car, from over head cameras. switching them when it suited you :-)

      He also experimented with real time insertion of advertising hoardings. At the track they're just blue panels on TV they feature advertising, different for each target audience. Not bad being paid by two adver

  • Grammar Nazi (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    whom is staying with us

    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 [peercast.org] 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 multica
  • 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.
    • Why don't we use multicast? Simple. There are probably a total of about 12 home users on the MBone, and they probably aren't even aware they have access. Remember that multicast, according to spec, has its own address range (Class D) that "normal" internet routers will just drop as bad. This means that in order for multicasting to work as designed, every router, from source to where the multicast is "split" to clients, must grok multicasting. The MBone just doesn't have much penetration, and people are
      • hmm, interesting, any reasons why it was never included in the other classes? I dont see why the IP would actually matter other then because its not included in the others. Seems a wee bit short sighted.

        I could look it up but I'll ask for the sake of asking, is it a 'feature' of ipv6 (not sure if this is even a relivent question, as i havnt bothered to learn a thing about ipv6, yet) ? It seems like this would be a great 'feature' to include to help move people over and save bandwidth.

  • FTV (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For many years FashionTV [www.ftv.fr] 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.

  • BBC World Service on internet: w/o sports (Score:3, Informative)

    by jdunlevy ( 187745 ) on Thursday October 23, 2003 @07:13PM (#7295981) Homepage

    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:

    "Due to restrictions imposed by the rights holders, BBC World Service is unable to offer the current program on the Internet."
  • When the ad agencies finally come to terms with 2 things

    1. Network-centric "brand" advertising provides the WORST ROI [adage.com] 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

  • FIFA (Score:1)

    by i8msft ( 158890 )
    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.

    For US viewers information on actual TV coverage can always be found on www.soccertv.com. An excellent reference. But note
  • 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 [learner.org]

    simulcast link: http://learner.org/channel/broadband/video.html [learner.org]

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