Streaming

[Rational Observer]

West Al's attempt at streaming today was horrible. It buffered or outright stopped for most of the first half. The audio was varied between being too low to hear or not being synced with the video. When the stream worked, the camera was constantly being refocused.

UWF's stream has some odd camera angles, but it has worked the entire time. The audio is booming. Plus, it has replays.

What I saw of the MC/Shorter game worked well.

[boyblue]

It's weird because FLO's quality has been good all year. Most likely the problems were at the source. Flo is going to have to "mandate" the equipment necessary to use their service.

[Uwfalum98]

West Al's attempt at streaming today was horrible. It buffered or outright stopped for most of the first half. The audio was varied between being too low to hear or not being synced with the video. When the stream worked, the camera was constantly being refocused.

UWF's stream has some odd camera angles, but it has worked the entire time. The audio is booming. Plus, it has replays.

What I saw of the MC/Shorter game worked well.

To be fair UWF home games are also on CST (for the Cox Communications subscribers) and something called Yurview. Yeah the sightlines are a little different, after all it is a minor league baseball stadium. I've noticed that several of the GSC streams have been pretty bad (which wasn't an issue when they were FREE) but when you ask people to pay $20 a month and then put out an inferior product people will understandably get upset. As much as I love watching the rest of the GSC play if the stream is bad I just go to the D2 Football.com scoreboard and find a FREE stream from another conference that is of good quality and watch it. Generally the radio feed for the GSC games is pretty good quality and doesn't use much bandwidth which can be beneficial when you stream multiple games. Sometimes I'll have a game on the Roku, 2 games on the desktop and at least one more D2 game on the laptop. I've had good luck finding quality SAC and PSAC streams and some others that I don't remember which conference they were from.

[Rational Observer]

Years ago, the GSC had a TV package agreement with CSS, and we had a weekly Thursday night game. One negative to that was that the channel wasn't widely available. When that deal ended due to the channel folding, the schools began streaming the games.

A downside to streaming is that people aren't going to stumble across the game when channel surfing.

The upside of the streaming is that we aren't limited to the one game selected for the TV package.

A paid streaming package is only going to get the affiliated fans such as parents, students, etc, but those are the only people D-II is going to get anyway. However, if it is going to be a for-fee product, it needs to be worth the fee.