Whats the deal with I2sports

[Will]

I'm not an expert, but I imagine the server load would be the most costly part of the equation.  Of course, then again, maybe Cornell is making money hand over fist here off the deal.

[CowbellGuy]

Only if you're paying for amount of  data transferred. In most cases you pay a flat fee for a certain amount of bandwidth. That's not how it works at Cornell, however, where someone came up with the arcane and half-assed idea to charge $2/gb to curb the abusers. I'm guessing i2Sports uses a Cornell connection to feed the stream to their base of operations where their servers live and rebroadcast from there. Chances are they get whatever they need from SU and there's no effect on the Cornell end of things.

[jtwcornell91]

Just to check, neither of the links for this weekend's games actually works yet, right?  They're trying to deliver a stream that seems not to exist.

[upperdeck]

good luck trying to use the i2sports site to get signed up its a mess.. in any case if you want it and sign up now its seems to only want to charge $60..

[jtwcornell91]

Actually, I just got a mail that they're cutting the rate to $50 because the archive feature won't work for the first half of the season.

[JasonN95]

[Q]Cornell's official broadcaster, Jason Weinstein[/Q]

Is that right, Adam Wodon is not doing the play by play? (I guess I haven't been paying enough attention.)

[billhoward]

Cost to create the broadcast, such as it is, is the same whether it's for 10 people or 10,000. Yes, you need more bandwidth to serve up to more people, but in the scheme of things, it's not a huge load. If there's a backhaul charge to get the feed from Ithaca to Syracuse, it's not a big amount and it's the same regardless of how many viewers get the feed.

I don't know the numbers, but I'm betting the Web viewers are in the hundreds for Cornell hockey. Maybe 1,000. I don't think it's 2,500 and I doubt it's more than the 3867 who actually get into Lynah in person. If it's 1,000 and you bring in $5 a person, that's $5,000 and nobody's getting rich once you bring down a truck with, what, three people, even if they're not pulling down John Madden salaries or even ESPN road crew salaries.

This is not the NCAA basketball tournament where tens of millions of dollars change hands.

Last year I watched maybe five or six games, plus four in person. I bet even a lot of good fans don't watch every Webcast. I love hockey but the video feed is pretty meager stuff - tiny image, no replay, the only way you know the puck goes is is that about 10 pixels onscreen behind the goal all of a sudden burn bright red.

How many of you have watched more than ten Webcast games last year?

[jtwcornell91]

[Q]billhoward Wrote:
How many of you have watched more than ten Webcast games last year?
[/q]
I'm pretty sure I watched at least part of ten games.  I think I watched every home game besides the four I attended.

But then I'm nuts.

[Al DeFlorio]

[Q]jtwcornell91 Wrote:

 Actually, I just got a mail that they're cutting the rate to $50 because the archive feature won't work for the first half of the season.[/q]
Season pass now $49.99 per i2sports web site.

[Jordan 04]

Ok.

So any suggestions on whether I should go with i2 or just the RealAudio radio broadcast?

I did the radio broadcast for some games last year, never did i2.  After trying to watch some of the i2 archives, I'm a bit jitterish about their ability to provide a quality streaming feed.  How was the quality last year?  Any hiccups in the feed?

[crodger1]

I think AnneDVM and I missed 2 home games on the net (one to watch the women play at Harvard).  Didn't make it to a single home game in person

Oh, and I should add that (using IE on XP) I would right click on the video, copy the url, then open that url with Windows media player so we could watch either 3/4 or full screen.  Sure, it isn't the best image in the world, but it is way better than just radio.

LGR!

[crodger1]

If you are getting just one, then get the realaudio -- that way you can get the away games also.

I didn't have many problems with i2sports.  There were a couple of glitches in just one or two of the games, and overall I was very pleased.  I'll note that I have a cable modem, XP, use WMP, and have a computer that's about a year and 3/4 old.

I wish they had an instant replay, but we typically had the game on the web radio downstairs as well, which was generally a little ahead, so if Adam got very excited we knew to pay extra attention.

LGR!

[jy3]

is there a free link to listen tonight? anyone aware? ::help::

[CowbellGuy]

Something else occurred to me last night. I believe Colgate televises their home games on their school network, which means i2sports has zero production involved. Just grab their video and stream it for, one would imagine, a much cheaper fee.