Red Cast Really Sucks

[RichH]

Actually, the NCAA monitors coverage of men's and women's sports and whether they are comparable.  Ads placed by sports info, quality of programs, etc.  So while a woman may not file a Title IX action if her webpage is inferior to that of a male athlete in an equivalent sport, the NCAA recertification review look at an institutions commitment to women's teams in this context.

In that regard, the pep band has also been "encouraged" by Athletics to attend more women's events.

[css228]

Once the infrastructure is in place it can just as easily be used for Women's hockey. The sport that doesn't make sense from that perspective is football

Schoellkopf --> Football, Sprint Football, Men's and Women's Lacrosse. Would be worth it to me.

But from a Title IX perspective that's allocating resources to 3 men's sports and 1 women's sport. Which could be a problem.

[TimV]

Once the infrastructure is in place it can just as easily be used for Women's hockey. The sport that doesn't make sense from that perspective is football

Schoellkopf --> Football, Sprint Football, Men's and Women's Lacrosse. Would be worth it to me.

But from a Title IX perspective that's allocating resources to 3 men's sports and 1 women's sport. Which could be a problem.

You need some kind of smiley to indicate sarcasm, right?  Right??

[angrybear]

Tonight (Darthmouth) is really really really really bad.  Michigan vs. Notre Dame is very clear in High Def on NBC sports.  When is Cornell and the ECAC going to wake up and get quality TV & streaming exposure.  NBC is going to be broadcasting most of Notre Dame's ice hockey games as part of the deal to do continue to do Notre Dame football.  That and Notre Dame moving to Hockey East made the deal to NBC a no brainer.  Think that will help recruiting?  I do not understand why there is not high def streaming available for PS3, ipad2...etc.

Wow, where to begin with this ridiculousness? Do you REALLY want to compare Cornell athletics with the media conglomerate that is Notre Dame & NBC? I'm currently in law school at Notre Dame, and you're comparing apples with water buffaloes here.

I've lurked around here for a long while here, and I'd finally got fed up with all of the griping that I thought I'd expand on upperdeck's post take a close, honest look into what exactly it would take to pull off a high quality webcast.

I was flipping through the Comcast sports channels today and came across a Minnesota High School game that was worth watching.  They had excellent announcers, full replays and multiple camera angles with great coverage of the puck.  they never lost the play and they were always full of commentary and analysis as the game went on.  This was a high school game and it outdid most any of the college streams I have experienced.

For the sake of everyone's sanity, can we PLEASE stop comparing what you see online to what you see on Comcast SportsNet? I don't care if it's only a Minnesota high school game; you've got professionals using professional equipment and using satellite technology.

Games on TV - outside of North Dakota, and maybe Minnesota, I can't imagine any school makes money on a TV hockey broadcast. More accurately, schools (or conferences) pay the production costs up front and sell ads after the fact to try to recoup that cost. Even outside of hockey, unless you're one of about 20-30 schools around the country (and Cornell isn't in that group and never will be), nobody's coming knocking on your door to broadcast your games.

Infrastructure - I imagine this to be one of the biggest problems. When the rink was renovated, the press box was virtually ignored, save the creation of a camera bay that tv crews don't even use. If you get to a tv game early enough you can see the tv crew pulling cable through the rafters over A/B, meaning the press box likely isn't wired properly. I'd guess that outside of minor updates, they're trying to pull off 2000s technology with 1960s infrastructure. I highly doubt Sidearm Sports is the problem - given all of the video options out there, I'm guessing they're probably the most favorable in terms of hosting this, but I still can't see them doing more than a 50-50 split with Cornell over the revenue. The lack of infrastructure brings me to...

Equipment - a bigger deal that you might think. That stuff's not cheap. There's a wide range of cameras out there, from $1,200 to $80,000. The average price for a quality camera would be in the range of $10,000. Don't think you can cut corners here; they currently use cheap little mini-cams, and we all know what type of picture comes from those. Like anything else, if you put garbage in, you're going to get garbage out. If you expect to be able to see the numbers on the backs of the sweaters, you're going to have to spend some serious cash. To couple your video feeds together, you're going to need a Tricaster (add graphics, replays, etc.); the low-end of those costs $12,000. Add into that cables, tripods, monitors, mixers, etc. (figure another $5,000) and you're looking at about $40k in start-up costs. Given their full-year cost, and assuming a 50-50 split of revenue, that'd be nearly 1200 full year subscribers just to pay the start-up cost. Do they have that kind of subscriber base? I doubt it. I would also assume your equipment lifespan to be no longer than four years, so it's not like it's a one-time thing, but more of a continual investment. Those tv games we love? There's a reason why they bring in a semi trailer full of video equipment (and have you even looked at the size of their cameras?). Even if you broke down that cost over four years (which I think is stretching it - by that fourth year, everyone on here would be complaining about the quality from obsolete equipment), you're still looking at 300 full year subscribers just to cover the cost of the equipment, and not even...

Labor - my personal opinion is that this is probably their biggest problem. Cornell uses students, which is fine, but my experience with the kids at Cornell is that the vast majority of them haven't done any type of physical labor in their lives, and don't intend to do any once they walk out of Schoellkopf, degree in hand. Add into that, how much are those kids getting paid? Maybe $10 an hour? More likely minimum wage, whatever that is anymore. So you've got some kid, untrained in video production and making $8 an hour - just how motivated are you going to be working for that kind of scratch? It's not like Cornell's got a media production major that you could get kids who want to go into that, like Syracuse does, so you're not even able to persuade people that it'll help their career. You could farm out that to Ithaca for some kind of credit, but that would take an agreement between the two schools, which won't happen. To straight away hire kids from Ithaca or Syracuse, you're going to have to pay a lot more than minimum wage to get them to give up damn near every weekend (figure they're there from 5pm until 10pm for a hockey game - when I was in school, those were prime drinking hours) from October to March (between hockey and basketball) - and that's not even thinking about football or lacrosse or any women's sports.

Bottom line - unless someone wants to pony up the cash for a video streaming endowment that's going to pay out about $20k a year, what you see is probably what you're going to get. I hate to say it, but our best chance for quality video streaming went out the window when the decision to renovate Lynah was made over building a new arena. A new arena would have modern wiring, proper camera facilities (that would get over the students so you wouldn't lose the puck in the near corners) and would likely have a video board inside (with camera equipment and staff to match). Unfortunately, that's the trade-off; would you rather have Lynah or would you rather have crystal-clear video streaming? Take your pick: tradition or modernity, you can't have both. Having seen what Notre Dame did with their new building, it makes me sad about what might have been at Cornell.

Cornell is an elite school with computer and communications departs.  Let the students produce and engineer the games in the best technology available.

That's such an ignorant comment it's not even funny. Do you REALLY think Cornell's computer department is working on better ways to stream video? Cornell's communications department isn't a true communications department in the sense you're talking about.

[semsox]

So all that being said......how does RPI TV work then?

[marty]

Tonight (Darthmouth) is really really really really bad.  Michigan vs. Notre Dame is very clear in High Def on NBC sports.  When is Cornell and the ECAC going to wake up and get quality TV & streaming exposure.  NBC is going to be broadcasting most of Notre Dame's ice hockey games as part of the deal to do continue to do Notre Dame football.  That and Notre Dame moving to Hockey East made the deal to NBC a no brainer.  Think that will help recruiting?  I do not understand why there is not high def streaming available for PS3, ipad2...etc.

Wow, where to begin with this ridiculousness? Do you REALLY want to compare Cornell athletics with the media conglomerate that is Notre Dame & NBC? I'm currently in law school at Notre Dame, and you're comparing apples with water buffaloes here.

I've lurked around here for a long while here, and I'd finally got fed up with all of the griping that I thought I'd expand on upperdeck's post take a close, honest look into what exactly it would take to pull off a high quality webcast.

I was flipping through the Comcast sports channels today and came across a Minnesota High School game that was worth watching.  They had excellent announcers, full replays and multiple camera angles with great coverage of the puck.  they never lost the play and they were always full of commentary and analysis as the game went on.  This was a high school game and it outdid most any of the college streams I have experienced.

For the sake of everyone's sanity, can we PLEASE stop comparing what you see online to what you see on Comcast SportsNet? I don't care if it's only a Minnesota high school game; you've got professionals using professional equipment and using satellite technology.

Games on TV - outside of North Dakota, and maybe Minnesota, I can't imagine any school makes money on a TV hockey broadcast. More accurately, schools (or conferences) pay the production costs up front and sell ads after the fact to try to recoup that cost. Even outside of hockey, unless you're one of about 20-30 schools around the country (and Cornell isn't in that group and never will be), nobody's coming knocking on your door to broadcast your games.

Infrastructure - I imagine this to be one of the biggest problems. When the rink was renovated, the press box was virtually ignored, save the creation of a camera bay that tv crews don't even use. If you get to a tv game early enough you can see the tv crew pulling cable through the rafters over A/B, meaning the press box likely isn't wired properly. I'd guess that outside of minor updates, they're trying to pull off 2000s technology with 1960s infrastructure. I highly doubt Sidearm Sports is the problem - given all of the video options out there, I'm guessing they're probably the most favorable in terms of hosting this, but I still can't see them doing more than a 50-50 split with Cornell over the revenue. The lack of infrastructure brings me to...

Equipment - a bigger deal that you might think. That stuff's not cheap. There's a wide range of cameras out there, from $1,200 to $80,000. The average price for a quality camera would be in the range of $10,000. Don't think you can cut corners here; they currently use cheap little mini-cams, and we all know what type of picture comes from those. Like anything else, if you put garbage in, you're going to get garbage out. If you expect to be able to see the numbers on the backs of the sweaters, you're going to have to spend some serious cash. To couple your video feeds together, you're going to need a Tricaster (add graphics, replays, etc.); the low-end of those costs $12,000. Add into that cables, tripods, monitors, mixers, etc. (figure another $5,000) and you're looking at about $40k in start-up costs. Given their full-year cost, and assuming a 50-50 split of revenue, that'd be nearly 1200 full year subscribers just to pay the start-up cost. Do they have that kind of subscriber base? I doubt it. I would also assume your equipment lifespan to be no longer than four years, so it's not like it's a one-time thing, but more of a continual investment. Those tv games we love? There's a reason why they bring in a semi trailer full of video equipment (and have you even looked at the size of their cameras?). Even if you broke down that cost over four years (which I think is stretching it - by that fourth year, everyone on here would be complaining about the quality from obsolete equipment), you're still looking at 300 full year subscribers just to cover the cost of the equipment, and not even...

Labor - my personal opinion is that this is probably their biggest problem. Cornell uses students, which is fine, but my experience with the kids at Cornell is that the vast majority of them haven't done any type of physical labor in their lives, and don't intend to do any once they walk out of Schoellkopf, degree in hand. Add into that, how much are those kids getting paid? Maybe $10 an hour? More likely minimum wage, whatever that is anymore. So you've got some kid, untrained in video production and making $8 an hour - just how motivated are you going to be working for that kind of scratch? It's not like Cornell's got a media production major that you could get kids who want to go into that, like Syracuse does, so you're not even able to persuade people that it'll help their career. You could farm out that to Ithaca for some kind of credit, but that would take an agreement between the two schools, which won't happen. To straight away hire kids from Ithaca or Syracuse, you're going to have to pay a lot more than minimum wage to get them to give up damn near every weekend (figure they're there from 5pm until 10pm for a hockey game - when I was in school, those were prime drinking hours) from October to March (between hockey and basketball) - and that's not even thinking about football or lacrosse or any women's sports.

Bottom line - unless someone wants to pony up the cash for a video streaming endowment that's going to pay out about $20k a year, what you see is probably what you're going to get. I hate to say it, but our best chance for quality video streaming went out the window when the decision to renovate Lynah was made over building a new arena. A new arena would have modern wiring, proper camera facilities (that would get over the students so you wouldn't lose the puck in the near corners) and would likely have a video board inside (with camera equipment and staff to match). Unfortunately, that's the trade-off; would you rather have Lynah or would you rather have crystal-clear video streaming? Take your pick: tradition or modernity, you can't have both. Having seen what Notre Dame did with their new building, it makes me sad about what might have been at Cornell.

Cornell is an elite school with computer and communications departs.  Let the students produce and engineer the games in the best technology available.

That's such an ignorant comment it's not even funny. Do you REALLY think Cornell's computer department is working on better ways to stream video? Cornell's communications department isn't a true communications department in the sense you're talking about.

Apparently you have been hitting the books too much (not a bad thing) and lurking too little because as semsox has noted this completely negates your suppositions:

Student Run Video @ RPI

This was live streamed until RPI's contracted service -B2 - complained.   It is  now an archive service for hockey

[Rosey]

Blah blah blah

Sorry, but as others have pointed out, this is utter horseshit when you see what students at other schools are actually doing.

And FWIW I'm not suggesting that Cornell's hockey streaming has to be as awesome as CBS's online offerings: I'm simply asking for better video quality and a cameraman who has some idea of where the puck is. I'm even willing to sacrifice overlays for the clock/score/etc., if they're too difficult to implement, simply to get 30+ fps video that I can watch in a window larger than a postage stamp (or even on, say, an actual TV!) without getting a headache from the artifacts, blockiness, and ghosting and without it going down or being unavailable because someone tripped over the power cord and didn't notice. You can get something 10x better than RedCast with a very cheap consumer video camera and free software. Age did it TEN YEARS AGO, back when streaming video was still pretty immature.

I don't get why anyone would defend the shittiness of this service. You have to be willfully ignorant or incredibly stupid to assert that RedCast is the best Cornell can reasonably be expected to offer. Since I don't know you, I can't judge which is the case.

[CowbellGuy]

While you're not wrong, you're still coming at it from a TV production standpoint. You can legitimately cut some corners for a webcast. First off, you're not broadcasting in HD. You will probably do just fine with something like a Canon GL-2, which I think is already a step up from what they're using now. You're absolutely right that a big part of the problem is the camera operator. Someone who knows what they're doing will make a huge difference.

Again, this isn't TV. You don't need a Tricaster. Graphics can easily be handled through software and if you throw something like a Datavideo DV Bank at each camera, you've got replay capabilities at about a grand a pop. I submitted a proposal a few years ago the last time they switched providers, which was completely ignored, probably because it came from me, but for a workable 2-camera setup, you're looking at around of $8000 in startup hardware and software, plus around $2000/year for server costs and labor.

[Aaron M. Griffin]

Blah blah blah

Sorry, but as others have pointed out, this is utter horseshit when you see what students at other schools are actually doing.

And FWIW I'm not suggesting that Cornell's hockey streaming has to be as awesome as CBS's online offerings: I'm simply asking for better video quality and a cameraman who has some idea of where the puck is. I'm even willing to sacrifice overlays for the clock/score/etc., if they're too difficult to implement, simply to get 30+ fps video that I can watch in a window larger than a postage stamp (or even on, say, an actual TV!) without getting a headache from the artifacts, blockiness, and ghosting and without it going down or being unavailable because someone tripped over the power cord and didn't notice. You can get something 10x better than RedCast with a very cheap consumer video camera and free software. Age did it TEN YEARS AGO, back when streaming video was still pretty immature.

I don't get why anyone would defend the shittiness of this service. You have to be willfully ignorant or incredibly stupid to assert that RedCast is the best Cornell can reasonably be expected to offer. Since I don't know you, I can't judge which is the case.

In response to angrybear:

Perhaps it is institutional arrogance, but most Cornellians cannot fathom that RPI or other institutions can produce a product that is vastly superior to what we endure with RedCast. I agree with them. It is absurd and selling Cornellians short to think that this is the best we can do.

I am familiar with the media fiascoes that are major sports university campuses. I am currently a law student at Penn State, so I can appreciate well the difference in the media coverage that surrounds institutions of the academic ilk like Cornell and those of the perceived athletic ilk like Penn State and Notre Dame. So, I understand that there is a (possibly) substantial difference in market for our sports product and the way that the universities represent themselves to the general public.

I know that better quality video and production can occur easily. Penn State is still a club hockey program. It provides free streaming video for both home and away games that far surpasses the quality of video that RedCast offers. The "production crew" is an older Canadian man (Steve Penstone), his wife, and one assistant. The University pays none of them. The University did not purchase the production equipment. So, barring the unlikelihood that Steve Penstone is independently wealthy and decided to invest thousands of his own wealth in providing free streaming coverage of Penn State Icers hockey, there is a cost-effective and qualitatively better way to provide streaming coverage of Cornell hockey to Cornellians.

Now, I agree that Lynah is not the easiest location from which to broadcast. The infrastructure is not on par for high-definition broadcasts with what is at Compton Family Ice Arena or what will be at Pegula Ice Arena. I concede that. I would err on the side of the history that Lynah has over desiring a new rink for the mere purpose of better broadcasts. Better broadcasts can still be achieved for Cornell hockey as evidenced by my free streaming, higher quality coverage at Penn State. If one thinks it is easier to broadcast from the current Greenberg Ice Pavilion at Penn State or any other ACHA rink than Lynah, I find it unbelievable.

[Ben]

Just a small point about graphics: for one of the recent basketball games (I think it was the Albright game) they didn't use the score graphic but had a camera trained on the scoreboard and patched that in to one corner of the screen. Unlike the graphics, it updated automatically (obviously), showed team fouls, individual fouls,the possession arrow, etc. While hockey doesn't have all of those other important bits of information to keep track of, showing the Lynah scoreboard instead of their mediocre graphics would at least show us how much time is left on a PP or PK.

[Chris '03]

showing the Lynah scoreboard instead of their mediocre graphics would at least show us how much time is left on a PP or PK.

If it didn't phase like crazy.

[kaelistus]

You can get something 10x better than RedCast with a very cheap consumer video camera and free software. Age did it TEN YEARS AGO, back when streaming video was still pretty immature.

Here's the key to everything. Age did it, 10 years ago. For free. And it was way better than RedCast. Cornell decided to kick Age out and contract an inferior service - then charge us for it. So we can argue back an forth about what Cornell can afford or cannot afford.. Except we know what we had and they choose not to use it.

[billhoward]

So all that being said......how does RPI TV work then?

Exactly. And if Cornellians are grooming to run NBC rather than run gaffer's tape, we could always reach across town to Ithaca College, which is the go-to for students who understand TV production.

(It must suck to be the Cornell student who's the camera operator if he or she frequents eLynah. Nobody's performance gets dissected more, or more critically. They probably check each day to see if they're now the subject of a second Not the Answer thread.)

[The Rancor]

So all that being said......how does RPI TV work then?

Exactly. And if Cornellians are grooming to run NBC rather than run gaffer's tape, we could always reach across town to Ithaca College, which is the go-to for students who understand TV production.

(It must suck to be the Cornell student who's the camera operator if he or she frequents eLynah. Nobody's performance gets dissected more, or more critically. They probably check each day to see if they're now the subject of a second Not the Answer thread.)

my thoughts exactly- a cornell IC partnership for hockey broadcasts? why not?

[angrybear]

Blah blah blah

Sorry, but as others have pointed out, this is utter horseshit when you see what students at other schools are actually doing.

And FWIW I'm not suggesting that Cornell's hockey streaming has to be as awesome as CBS's online offerings: I'm simply asking for better video quality and a cameraman who has some idea of where the puck is. I'm even willing to sacrifice overlays for the clock/score/etc., if they're too difficult to implement, simply to get 30+ fps video that I can watch in a window larger than a postage stamp (or even on, say, an actual TV!) without getting a headache from the artifacts, blockiness, and ghosting and without it going down or being unavailable because someone tripped over the power cord and didn't notice. You can get something 10x better than RedCast with a very cheap consumer video camera and free software. Age did it TEN YEARS AGO, back when streaming video was still pretty immature.

I don't get why anyone would defend the shittiness of this service. You have to be willfully ignorant or incredibly stupid to assert that RedCast is the best Cornell can reasonably be expected to offer. Since I don't know you, I can't judge which is the case.

Oh, where to begin with all of this...

This may be hard for some on here to read, but as long as Cornell is the type of school where the vast majority of students (not all, but most) have a superior sense of entitlement, what we have now IS as good as we should expect. Why is RPI's better? Because they have a video production MAJOR. You have students going to school there who have their own Video Production business before even enrolling in school. Frankly, RPI's is better because their students have the same level of intelligence that Cornell's do, but without the silver spoon stuck up their ass.

And you're right, Age was doing this a decade ago, and do you know why it was better? Because he cared about it. As I stated earlier, but you were too ignorant to read, Kyle (apparently Age is the only one who bothered to read that, so props to you, sir), do you think some student making minimum wage and giving up their Friday and Saturday night CARES about the quality of the job they're doing? Do they care if they've kicked out the power cord accidentally? The students who truly care about Cornell hockey are in the stands, not running a camera.

As a Cornellian, the arrogance of some people here absolutely makes me sick to my stomach. The idea that Cornell should offer the same level of service as the media giants that are major college athletics is absurd. The same level of pride that alumni and boosters have in the athletic department - even for club sports - isn't the same at Cornell as it is at a place like Penn State. So yes, you're going to have people volunteering their services to do streaming. My guess is that once Penn State goes varsity, Steve Penastone will be pushed out in favor of the Big Ten Network.

Another part of that arrogance is the assumption that IC is clamoring to come to East Hill to give their services for free. Ithaca's got their own very successful athletic department - they don't NEED Cornell, yet why is it that folks like Bill Howard and The Rancor assume they do?

It's just amazing to me how people want this and they want that, but when you start to point out all of the costs associated with that, and all of the reasons for doing so, those things are no longer needed. One of the lasting memories that I have of Redcast came just last year, when the women's team played in the NCAA game at Lynah, all of the women's games first-round games were streamed free - the RedCast production was the best out of BU, BC and Wisconsin. This continual sentiment that "everyone's service is better" doesn't always hold true.