It was only a matter of time...

... but you now get to pay seven buck a month to listen to Cornell Sports on the internet.

[cornellbigred.ocsn.com]

I'm going to wait to collect my thoughts before letting loose, but anyone who wants to tear into the athletic department over this decision may want to do it via [cornellbigred.ocsn.com]

I'd suggest that a personal letter to the athletic department would be better than using the feedback form on the web site. Even better, direct a letter to the hockey team. Helps if you've actually given money in the past.

So how does this affect the groundbreaking effort and existance of the LynahCam feed that was started last year?

On the other hand: with payment comes rights. Now, when quality is poor or we miss the first five minutes because somebody has forgotten to turn a server on, or god help them if they ever, ever screw up and we miss a whole game, every one of us has the right to demand improvements in service. Back when it was free it was "take what you can get." By charging, they are promising to provide something and we can make sure they provide it.

[q]We believe that most colleges and universities will be using some form of subscription product for their multimedia content by the start of next season. We decided to shift into this model now rather than later. By making the transition now, we can begin offering our fans this improved experience immediately.[/q]

To: Cornell Athletic Department
Re: Poor quality, lack of dependability of Big Red Pass

I am writing to voice concern about the lack of quality and dependability of the services promised by Big Red Pass. There are bandwidth limitations, content quality issues, service delays, interruptions, and poor to non-existent support.

I will notify you personally of each repetition of these problems as it occurs. I know you will be as surprised and dismayed as I that I am not receiving "the best-of-class multi-media content available on the internet today."

Although the season has not yet begun, I have decided to shift into this model now rather than later. By making the transition now, I can begin offering you this improved experience immediately.

You are speaking as though we are actually going to lie down and put up with this crap. Their frequently asked questions list says, in answer to the obvious question of "How are you greedy bastards doing us a service by charging us for what we used to get for free?" They include some nonsense about how this service will have improved features and use advanced technology (i.e., less compatible with non-Micro$oft operating systems than before), to which the answer is of course "I don't want new services; I just want to listen to the same feed I always have." They also point out that it costs them money to stream the broadcast and this is a way of supporting it. I think we all enjoy services like this enough that we would gladly respond to calls for donations to help them raise the money they actually need to provide the service (I have with Age, and slack.net), but demanding $84 a year from each and every listener naturally pisses us off, and I think we should all tell them we'll not only not shell out for their service but also pull all the donations we can if they don't put back the old system.

I don't think the article actually says they will discontinue free broadcasts. If the pay service is so much better than what we had before, they shouldn't mind letting people keep getting just the old broadcasts for free, so perhaps that's the line of attack we should take. (After all, there have been parallel services available before; bare-bones .ram feeds as well as Yahoo presentation winidows.)

At the very least, the video part of it will continue. The audio issue remains to be resolved.

JTW -
I don't think anything is going to be free. To quote the FAQ:

Why should I pay $6.95 when I only want to listen to one game? Isn't $6.95 fairly expensive?
Presently there is an option to purchase the College Sports Pass for a three-month period at a reduced price of $18.95. Also, RealNetworks plans to listen to examine user data and fan feedback over the course of this school year, and they will be looking at different programming options in near future. Also, we encourage you to take advantage of the 14-day free trial offer, which will allow you to experience the new product at no cost.

I am pretty upset about this, but I am not the type to demand that people give me free stuff. (I confess that, unlike many of you, I haven't donated anything to alma mater in some time.) However, with apologies to Adam Wodon, I've never heard him, so I won't miss hearing his calls. (Now brace yourselves, as this is tantamount to blasphemy.) I will just listen to the opposition's feed.

On the good news tip, the Ivy League has a deal with the YES network, and the Cornell - Harvard game will be shown live on October 12.

[cornellbigred.ocsn.com]

The video and audio were in sync as long as you were picking both up from the hockeycam feed, which is what I chose to do. Otherwise, there was a significant (read: really, really annoying) lag between the hockeycam video and the Yahoo (or whatever it was last year) audio. If we can't get video and audio from the same source, it will be nearly impossible to sync them up.

yeah - but it is football.

big red apple wrote:

Why should I pay $6.95 when I only want to listen to one game? Isn't $6.95 fairly expensive?
Presently there is an option to purchase the College Sports Pass for a three-month period at a reduced price of $18.95.

[sarcasm] Ooh! If I pay up front, I can pay $6.32 per month instead of $6.95 a month! Wow! [/sarcasm]

That particular question and answer pair is especially stupid. If someone only wants to listen to one game and thinks $6.95 is too much, why would they want to pay $18.95?

Also, it sounds like $6.95 is for all the college sports broadcasts, including "brand-name football games". If someone wants to set up a pay service for the semi-pro division of NCAA football, they can go ahead. Sucking all of Cornell sports into this is like if DirecTV combined all college sports programs into a single pay-per-view package, so that if you wanted to watch the college hockey on the RSNs, you would have to buy the same package as the people who use it to see big-time squeakball. "Brand-name" college sports can get along just fine without making fans of smaller sports subsidize them.

Now, this is just a thought, but I read the page and didn't see anything again this... how does the system have you log in? Name and pass? If so, would it be possible to share a subscription with some other cornell alums, or would the system reject that? Is it against the subscriber agreement? May be worth looking into . A few friends and I were planning on that if Napster ever moved to a subscription server, which, of course, never came to pass.

-fred

If you read a bit further into that paragraph, you'll see that they actually do address the question of "I only want to listen to one game." There's a 14-day free trial available. So if you really <B>do</B> want to listen to only one game, you should be able to take advantage of that opportunity.

Beeeej

This is the message I sent (via the webmaster - the comments form wasn't working):

$6.95 a month is much more than I am willing to pay to listen to Cornell sports. I was able to listen to all Major League baseball games this year for $14.95. One year of Cornell sports broadcasts will cost over four times as much.

I have no interest in the non-Cornell games that will be made available to me. I don't care about the geegaws that are included in addition to the actual broadcast. (For the record, past broadcasts have traditionally been choppy - every time the announcer raised his voice during lacrosse broadcasts, the feed cut out. In other words: every shot, every goal and every exciting play did not go out over the web.) What you are offering is a bundle of things I don't want and charging me too much for the only thing that I do want.

I assume that some time in mid-season, when the subscriber base is so low as to be an embarrassment, Cornell will rethink its policy and come up with a reasonable pricing scheme. I promise not to say I told you so.

Sincerely,
Charles D. Star ILR '92, MPA '94

I'm not about to sign letters to the AD "big red apple". I want them read, after all. I also should have read it once more before hitting send.

Beeeej - this site requires square brackets for tags. This is the first, and probably will be the last, time this techno-zero is in a position to give such advice.

Look at it in these terms $6.95 per month, if you figure 28 hockey games over some 5 months that is $1.24 on a per game basis or only $0.31 per period or $0.155 per minute of hockey action. Pretty cheap .

You can always listen to Clarkson Hockey for free at least for this year . But alas I figure that will stop in the next few years.

Or, since many other teams have free broadcasts, you can listen to their broadcasts. It's interesting to hear another point of view.

You might consider getting your local Cornell Club chapter to sponsor a group feed somewhere. Sort of like they do when the team is on satellite TV. Everyone could get together at some local place or other at gametime and listen to the feed together...Cornell Club dues should be good for something after all.

A group of people getting together to gather 'round an audio webcast. Fantastic. The internet has thrown us headlong into the 1940's.

Heh... I knew that, too. I think it's just something about the ridiculous workload in the first year of law school that makes you be less careful about everything except classwork. I'm lucky I've had two days in the last three weeks when I felt I could visit eLF.

I will be at the Hahvahd games, though. I do have my priorities.

Beeeej

Agreed. If the free ride is over, at least give me a cheaper price option to buy school specific access -- a couple of bucks a month but I only can hear feeds for games in which a Cornell team is playing is a more attractive scheme to me.

Well I wrote a letter to the athletic department, but I decided to wait until I find out if its actually true that no one will carry hockey broadcasts.

Basically I said I will sign up, but only at the expense of my yearly (bigger) donations to the school.

In all honesty, how many subscriptions do they expect? I bet less than 20. This is probably not worth the subsequent loss in school spirit.

Felix Rodriguez wrote:

In all honesty, how many subscriptions do they expect? I bet less than 20. This is probably not worth the subsequent loss in school spirit.

Especially because, if they really couldn't come up with a way to provide a free feed without spending money they don't have, at least 10 of those 20 people, plus people like me who won't sign up on principle, would have made donations to make it possible.

Coach Schafer came out against this today, stating in the Coach's chat "I don't agree with having to pay $7/mo", also saying this was the first he heard of it. Maybe we have an ally on the inside now.

I will be signing up...for one reason only: I have no choice. I will be living a continent away, and aside from the first game of the season at OSU, I'll have to catch every game online...which makes me bummed....

Jordan

Remember, about 80% of our opponents will have free webcasts, so if you can put up with listening to Jayson Moy, Bob Ahlfeld, etc instead of Adam (sorry Adam), you'll still be able to get most of the games.

Alternatively, you can shell out the $7/month, but inform the Athletic Department that you'll be reducing your annual donations to Cornell by the corresponding amount. (Yes, I know it's not the University's fault, but if enough people do this, it will send a message to Athletics about what a bad move they made switching to the pay service.)

How does one donate -$7 a month?

According to the pre-game article on CornellBigRed, you need to be a "CollegePass" subscriber to listen to the Internet broadcast of Saturday's Cornell-Yale football game.

Only a nitwit would put a program in place that requires you to pay money to listen to a radio broadcast of a Cornell football game.

This is true. But then again, I subscribed last week to listen to the first game. FWIW, it was a good quality 'cast. I kinda wanted an excuse to bitch to them.

But there's always this week.

Greg wrote:

This is true. But then again, I subscribed last week to listen to the first game. FWIW, it was a good quality 'cast. I kinda wanted an excuse to bitch to them.

How about the fact that the football team blows?

Josh Herman '99 wrote:

How about the fact that the football team blows?

Surely not nearly as important an issue as finding a way to make a few bucks off the Internet broadcasts.

Someone should send Andy Noel the Trustees' report on athletics. He's not even at the tree level, but rather the twig--while the forest burns all around him.

I like the tactic of letting the AD know that if/when you subscribe, that Cornell can count on the fact that the same or greater amount will be deducted from the regular donations to the university. Let them understand that this will hit them in the pocketbook.

everyone should remember its a pricing scheme set by Yahoo not cornell right? also this will all go out the window when cornells new IP pricing scheme goes into effect.. people will be in effect paying 3 times for 1 feed...

Yahoo chose the price - Cornell chose to join the network.

AFAIK, Yahoo is not involved. It's RealNetworks and the Official College Sports Network (OCSN).

True, but, nonetheless, bra's point remains valid.

Instead of leveraging the Internet to make it as easy as possible for alums to connect with the athletics program, the knuckleheads put up barriers.

hi all
just gotta say that this stinks. some of us are poor graduate students who really don't want to pay as much as it would cost. other bills are a bit more important. oh well. it would have been nice to listen to game when I had time. too bad for students who will be over seas. i wont be in the country in nov/dec and i was hoping to listen over the web. c'est la vie. i will try the sites of the other schools. let us hope that cornell realizes the error of their ways soon

Unlikely, unfortunately this will be the future.With stations being taxed for the songs that they play, I suspect you'll be seeing less and less free radio online. It burns me that I can buy online without paying taxes, but have to pay for programs.

If you're paying for "Cornell's new IP pricing scheme," aren't you on campus? If so, why would you pay $7/month for the online feed of a radio broadcast you can get for free?

And even assuming you were paying for it twice (see above), what do you perceive as the third time?

Beeeej

What is "Cornell's new IP pricing scheme"??

maybe they should increase the broadcast power so i can listen on the radio in good old bing.

Al,

I seem to remember quite a few nitwits in residence on the hill. The more things change...