All-Access - how big, how successful?

Anyone with a pipeline into the athletic deparment know how many All-Access (Cornell) subscribers there are? I bet it's in the hundreds or low thousands, which is not a big pot of money to be split among Cornell, CSTV, and the crew producing the game.

Here's a guess: eLynah for a really big game has, what, 150 people logged on? (The record for simultaneous registered users is 50-something.) Suppose every eLynah zealot also had All-Access by the year or by the game, and ten times as many people who weren't on eLynah also paid for the game. That'd give you 1,000 to 2,000 viewers and maybe with luck $10,000 in revenue for the game. Maybe it's more but maybe it's a whole lot less. That's not a lot of money.

On the other hand, if you multiply All-Access by a couple hundred NCAA D1 schools, it adds up to something big, which may be why CBS bought the parent CSTV for $325 million. And it's a pipeline that lets CBS stream all the college hoops or football games that might get 10,000 fans paying, not 500 or 1,500. (Did anyone buy the NCAA D1 streaming media basketball package spring 2005 - how was the quality?)

Lousy as streaming media is today, eventually we'll have screaming fast broadband (anyone on Long Island have the Verizon FIOS (fiber optic to the door from your phome company) service yet?) that will be equal to standard-def and then high-def television. There'll probably be a 2012 post on eLynah Forum complaining that the All-Access feed doesn't make complete use of the poster's new 2,000-line resolution TV.

Note the Intel Viiv announcement this week. Intel hopes to move further into the living room with media center PCs. One facet would be the development of TVs that could directly stream Internet feeds to a TV with no PC involved. That's still a big if - so far Microsoft / Intel have made only marginal inroads into direct connection to TVs.

Eventually it gets better. Just not before the games in Estero.

While I think your economy of scale points are probably overestimates, I think the biggest thing I want to comment on is as is:

[Q]Lousy as streaming media is today, eventually we'll have screaming fast broadband...[/Q]

I don't think anyone's complaining about the video quality, which is pretty darn good at the small size and acceptable on full screen. We're complaining about the reliability. And yeah, stuff happens on your end, but what we mean is when, oops, the feed doesn't start until 15 minutes into the game, or not at all, or dies part way through.

And then, when you call up, they say "sorry, not our problem, the school provides the feed." Or the gem I got two weeks ago, when the feed died midway through the second, and they told me "yeah, that game isn't being carried tonight." "Um, excuse me? You carried i through the first period and a half, and you just all of a sudden decided not to carry it?" "Oh, hold on then."

All Access seems to have a decentralized model, where the school/radio station logs in and provides content and the viewer can hook into it, with CSTV just providing the servers and streaming ability. But the problem is it provides absolutely no sense of responsibility. When we get no pre-game, All Access doesn't care. When the feed goes down, not their problem - they just make up numbers about when it'll be fixed to get you off the phone. If it doesn't happen at all, too bad, better luck next time. The buck stops nowhere.

All Access won't make it to 2012 unless someone there starts caring.

[Q]DeltaOne81 Wrote:
All Access won't make it to 2012 unless someone there starts caring.[/q]
All-Access isn't going to care until the schools' athletics departments start to care. Right now no one in Cornell Athletics seems to care one whit about the lousy service to date, and there is literally no communication from Athletics to subscriber fans.

This seems to be the M.O. of a lot of companies providing similar service -- practically every time my company webcasts a presentation, I'm on the phone with our account representative, threatening to fire our webcast provider because they keep blaming an "XML feed issue on [our] end" for their inability to have our presentation up and ready to go, with pleasant hold music streaming for remote viewers. Eventually they rig something up right before we're ready to go so we don't violate some SEC regulation. Reg FD?

I've never actually pulled the trigger on them, because both parties know that they provide many other services to us besides webcasting, and if we yank our business, they lose thousands of dollars, but we have to go through the hassle of finding another provider and setting up new feeds -- all without the guarantee that the service will actually be superior. But seriously, every time something actually goes smoothly with our provider, it's an office joke. The only thing I get for my thousands of dollars vs. whatever the going rate for All-Access is is more ass-kissing.

I really don't feel like there's any incentive, in any niche of streaming media (or at least, in investor relations and NCAA sports), to provide A+ service -- no one has stepped up to be head and shoulders better than the competition, so every company just camps out happily at the B or C level, with apathetic 24-year-olds manning the customer service phones. Unacceptable? Not really, because there's no clearly better provider to whom we can turn.

Maybe the smarties on this board could found a company to solve this problem (beyond LynahCam -- I remember it, and know the saga from both sides). I'll do the marketing. And if you ever want to expand into IR, I'll be your first client.

The solution is STILL LynahCam. A free service provided by fans that was more reliable and better than any of the solutions Athletics has come up with. If they don't take this option, then what hope do we have of CU picking any other suggestion we come up with?

After all the recurrent problems I sent a detailed, highly polite account to CSTV/All Access, including a timestamped log of the interruptions. After a week I got back a computer-generated "thank you for your interest!" idiotgram. Nothing, since.

Operational hypothesis: they don't give a flying fuck.

The CSTV folks do get some kind of Junior Achievement award for creating yet another satellite channel, then cutting deals with dozens - hundreds? - of colleges to create the colleges' websites and take over their webcasting if and when the college wants to do that. And then cashing out handsomely in the span of just a couple years. Weren't we only a year or so back musing about whether there was a market for CSTV (the TV channel)?

CSTV may wind up like the nice family business that thrives on service (um, maybe not such a good analogy), sells out to a franchise for a good profit, and then service goes to hell once the big company takes over. But the guys who got it going have their money. CSTV seems to have accelerated the pace by introducing the lousy-service part early in the business plan. Actually, their website designs are a bit formulaic, too: Browse a bit and you'll find a dead ringer for cornellbigred.com somewhere else but tarted up in yellow and gold.

You're right that there is room for a Webcasting service with quality service and maybe CBS can fund some of the underpinnings, even things as simple as having enough people to handle complaints, and having them offer the same scripting of reasons for why it's not working. When the CSTV contract expires, Cornell ought to shop around.

Al DeFlorio has a good point, too, that QOS (quality of service) doesn't seem high on Cornell's agenda.

BTW I posted this because I really wanted to post a "Is this Cornell slump ever going to end?" thread but decided to wait for the results of the Princeton/Q'pac weekend. Maybe Cornell is just off to a slowish start. Let's hope.

Actually, I am complaining about the quality of the originating video, if no one else is, and it's in part because there's not enough bandwidth. Agreed: It's secondary to the stoppages and outages and feed failures. But when you put the Webcast on a big screen TV, even on a big monitor, the image isn't that good and it gets blotchier and darker when there's lots of motion - which is most of the time in a hockey game.

Whatever. It still beats radio. Which beats gametracker. Which beats waiting for the score to maybe show up in the morning paper.

[Q]Trotsky Wrote:

After all the recurrent problems I sent a detailed, highly polite account to CSTV/All Access, including a timestamped log of the interruptions. After a week I got back a computer-generated "thank you for your interest!" idiotgram. Nothing, since.

Operational hypothesis: they don't give a flying fuck.[/q]
Send a copy to Andy Noel. See if you get a similar response.

[Q]billhoward Wrote:

Actually, I am complaining about the quality of the originating video, if no one else is, and it's in part because there's not enough bandwidth.[/q]
I would argue that this is all of it. The small percentage of users who have a pipe large enough watch a 1.5 mbit, NTSC-quality stream would not warrant the added startup or bandwidth cost. Yet. It will happen, just not now.
[q]Whatever. It still beats radio. Which beats gametracker. Which beats waiting for the score to maybe show up in the morning paper. [/q]
Thank you. This is all I'm saying.

Cheers,
Kyle