I thought I should start a new thread, since the last one was getting a little far from the original topic. Here's a slightly edited message I wrote in response to the explanation of why the Athletic Department had gone with RealPass:
QuoteI would have an easier time accepting this if they really had explored the obvious other options, and consulted people in the Cornell hockey fan community (particularly people in Ithaca with substantial computer experience) who could have helped out. And those of us who are not local would likely have been willing to make donations to make free internet broadcasts possible if we had been approached with a "we can only make this work with some financial contributions" appeal. Instead we got to find out about it from a press release, and to add insult to injury that release tried to spin this as good news.
I said a while back I could give a list of reasons why switching to RealPass sucks. Here are the ones that come to mind:
1. Obviously, paying for the broadcasts is a disadvantage; of course, as mentioned above, it might have been necessary to shell out for donations anyway, but making the contributions on the producer rather than the consumer side would have been preferable for several reasons:
a. The money would all be going to offset the expense of the broadcast, rather than into the profit margin of an outside professional company
b. Experience has shown that proprietary computer services are a much larger hassle than free ones; free broadcasts can easily be accessed from any computer without having to first set up the subscription/authorization/licenses
c. Non-subscribers who only want to listen to a fraction of a game on the spur of the moment will now find themselves unable to. It's been common practice over the past few years (during which most ECAC games were webcast) for fans listening to a number of games to gather in chat rooms to exchange game updates. I would often switch to another team's broadcast during a Cornell intermission to get an update on an "uncovered" game, or after a Cornell game had ended because someone had tipped me off to an exciting development. (I heard the last two goals in Union's improbable 3-2 overtime comeback victory over RPI in January 2000 that way.)
2. The press release boasts of using "the most advanced media player available". Unfortunately, RealNetworks only makes their RealOne Player for the Windows and MacIntosh operating systems, and not for any unix environment such as Linux, which is used by many Cornell alums in scientific disciplines. When a webcast "upgrades" its format, this frequently renders it incompatible with the older versions of its player. People like me used to be able to listen to audio broadcasts in our primary Linux working environments with the old RealPlayer, but needing to use RealOne will force us into the less useful Microsoft Windows environment.
3. When the HockeyCam project was first started last season, it contained only video, and many of us tried watching the HockeyCam while listening to a RealAudio broadcast. Because the two streams were not synchronized (each one had a different length buffering delay), it was very difficult to follow the action of the two together. When the audio feed from the radio was added to the HockeyCam, it was a substantial improvement and made it easy to follow the game on line as never before. (And incidentally the picture quality of the streaming QuickTime was phenomenally better than any RealVideo I've ever seen.) If the radio feed is removed from the HockeyCam, it will be a step back in the on-line viewing experience.
I also think it does a disservice to people like Mark Anbinder, Age Manocchia, Kyle Rose, Greg Berge, Keith Kannenberg and myself, who have volunteered time and resources to produce or enhance on-line content for Cornell hockey fans because we enjoy living in a world where such things are available, to have Athletics reduce such decisions to a "business model".
MacIntosh?
Age Manocchia '98 wrote:
QuoteMacIntosh?
Cosa?
If you're referring to the platform on which I had trouble getting the QUOTE tag to close on the edited post, it's Mozilla 1.0.0 running on Debian GNU/Linux 3.0.
Or are you saying that RealOne is not available for Mac either? I had the impression it was one of those things that worked on OS9 but hadn't been ported to OSX (aside: rah rah unix). I have no direct experience, though.
I think Age was commenting on your misspelling of "Macintosh."
Yes, RealOne works on Mac OS X, though it's only in beta. I suspect that's one of the reasons the service has been so flaky for me. In other words, it's not really a cross-platform product yet.