Where is the Webcasting? 55
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?"
When the broadcasters (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:When the broadcasters (Score:2)
P2P (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:P2P (Score:2, Funny)
Daniel
Re:P2P (Score:2)
Re:P2P (Score:1)
Re:P2P (Score:2)
In other words, no. See the Betamax decision- Sony vs Universal, 1984. Time shifting for personal use is legal.
Re:P2P (Score:2)
Re:P2P (Score:1)
So if you share video casettes of a program with someone, and they could have legally recorded the program themselves (because they rent cable access), it would be fine.
But if you share video casettes with someone who doesn't h
Control. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Control. (Score:2)
if history repeats.... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:if history repeats.... (Score:1)
Re:if history repeats.... (Score:1)
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
Re:if history repeats.... (Score:1)
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...
Two Words (Score:2)
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...
One word (Score:2)
Re:One word (Score:2)
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
Probably (Score:2)
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)
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
Willow.Tv (Score:1)
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
Re:Willow.Tv (Score:2)
Re:Willow.Tv (Score:1)
Seriously, they keep a sustained 350kbps feed. Not bad.
Where's the money? (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:Where's the money? (Score:1)
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.).
Online radio streams? (Score:1)
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.
Re:Online radio streams? (Score:2)
is Twelve channels [bbc.co.uk] with no adverts enough?
Ummmm... (Score:3, Informative)
Dude, the game was broadcast on ABC.
Re:Ummmm... (Score:1)
Device to do it small scale.. (Score:2)
Royalities... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Formula 1 (Score:2)
Re:Formula 1 (Score:2)
Re:Formula 1 (Score:2)
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)
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.
P2P webcasting (Score:2)
What is needed is a PeerCast-like service with support for multica
Why do we have multicasting? (Score:1)
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.
Re:Why do we have multicasting? (Score:2)
Re:Why do we have multicasting? (Score:1)
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)
BBC World Service on internet: w/o sports (Score:3, Informative)
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:
When the advertising agencies get it. So will you. (Score:1)
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)
For US viewers information on actual TV coverage can always be found on www.soccertv.com. An excellent reference. But note
Annenberg/CPB Satellite Channel Online (Score:1)
channel info: http://learner.org/channel/channel.html [learner.org]
simulcast link: http://learner.org/channel/broadband/video.html [learner.org]