for those thinking of buying the i2sports feed

[upperdeck]

I'm not sure if its been made widely known but the home hockey games will soon be on free over time warner. for those who have local cable you might want to go game by game of you are thinking of using i2sports..

it doesnt help those of us outside town but it should help a few..

[billhoward]

It would be real nice if Time Warner cut a deal to bring the MSU games back from Michigan, although the freight costs for the feed would be probably more than they want to spend. Make an interesting supply-and-demand question -- what would you pay to see the game live in Ithaca on TV?

[upperdeck]

if they have friendly cable crew out there they could send the whole feed here via the internet for next to nothing.  the rights fees may cost too much .. its too bad they always look into these things as they happen instead of months ahead.. they could have easily created a survey from the webpage to see damand and decide on costs/PPV or something that made sense moneywise.

[billhoward]

Maybe the Internet backbone could handle a broadcast feed at broadcast quality. But not anybody's personal connection. On a simpler level, perhaps some enterprising Friend of Cornell Hockey who's in Michigan could, ah, compress and, er, redirect the feed over to Ithaca.

If you got caught, it would make for an interesting cross-examination of the Time Warner or Comcast plaintiff:

Q: And you decided to sue these penniless Cornell grad students because ...?
A: They were stealing valuable rights from us.
Q: Did you ever think of offering a live telecast?
A: No, it would have cost too much money.
Q: But the defendants did it for free.
A: That's theft, not paying us for it.
Q: Did you consider offering it it for free or for a Pay Per View charge?
A: We determined we couldn't collect enough money. Not enough people wanted to watch.
Q: Tell me again you're suing?
A: Too many people were rippng us off.

This is when we need CSTV2, CSTV3, CSTV4 ... CSTV10.

[billhoward]

If Time Warner offers a local telecast, that's going to kill i2Sports. Let's hope TW has the brains to offer a PPV streaming feed of the game over the Web. Maybe in conjunction with i2Sports, which would put them back in business with Cornell again, and i2Sports wouldn't have to drive the truck down to Ithaca.

[Beeeej]

How would a local telecast kill i2sports when most of i2sports's customers are doubtless outside of Time Warner Ithaca's service area?

Beeeej

[billhoward]

I don't know if the i2Sports realm is half Ithaca and half outside or what. But suppose i2Sports is just hanging on by a thread -- I don't know if that's true either, but I don't see anybody cracking the Forbes 400 running this outfit -- and you lose the perhaps quarter of your customers who are in Ithaca, that might the difference between being in the black and in the red. OTOH if they can just pick up and redistribute the Comcast feed, they don't have production costs but they do have rights costs.

I don't know that the majority are "doubtless" outside Ithaca but I do agree it's a good chance the majority lives outside.

For me, I'm hoping they continue the Webcasts because, crummy as the quality is, five bucks for video and audio beats five bucks for audio only.

[Rosey]

Bill, I find listening to hockey to be essentially worthless.

"McKee puts it in the near corner, picked up by McCutcheon.  Skates to the blue line, dumps it in the Harvard end.  blah blah blah"

It's hard to get a very good feel for a game listening to play-by-play like this.

Even the ass video i2sports gives us is about one million (give or take) times better than the audio broadcasts.  I would pay $0 for hockey audio, and I do whenever Cornell's on the road: opponents' broadcasts, when they're free; the box score when they're not.  The video is totally worthwhile, though.

FWIW, I'd be willing to pay more than $5 per game if I could get TV-quality video.  If i2sports is paying some exorbitant amount for their bandwidth (e.g., $300/mbit/sec * 1 month), then their marginal bandwidth costs are something like

.3 mbit/sec (current stream quality) * $300 * (3 hours / 1 month) = approximately 36 cents per extra stream at current stream quality

This is a huge margin, obviously before counting their other production costs and the hardware required to push a greater number of streams.  If they triple the stream quality (1 mbit/sec is close to TV quality with modern codecs; 4 mbit/sec is TV quality with MPEG2), their bandwidth costs are a little over a dollar.  I'm willing to pay more than $1 more for a TV-quality stream.

But, in response to some of the statements about i2sports not making lots of money off this: you're probably right.  For example, they have a very low-rent website that makes it look like a 2-bit operation, even if the service they provide is very valuable.  They only accept paypal.  Yikes.  A little cash dropped on a better website plus a more professional payment system would go a long way toward winning deals with other schools that may be looking for a way to keep their alumni in touch.  But I digress.

Cheers,
Kyle

[French Rage]

krose, well said.  Other than just listening for goals hockey is too fast and all over the place.

[billhoward]

[Q]krose Wrote: Bill, I find listening to hockey to be essentially worthless. "McKee puts it in the near corner, picked up by McCutcheon.  Skates to the blue line, dumps it in the Harvard end.  blah blah blah"

[/q]

If i2Sports started up in say 1998 and did an IPO in 2000, they'd be deca-millionaires. Far dumber ideas made people rich. This is actually a good idea, suffering from the classic Internet problem of "great idea, not enough people signing on."

Hockey is a hard sport to do on radio. Correction, hard to do well. It takes a good announcer to keep up with the game. You have to leave the right stuff out.

On the second Harvard goal, I heard a WHCU replay  that went something like this (this is what I recall hearing as the tenor, not the exact words): "O'Byrne winds up at the point for a slapshot. A One-timer. In traffic. [pause] Goaaaal!" It was as if the speed of light for the goal lamp had somehow dropped to about 186 feet per second en route to the pressbox. It's a lot easier to say, "Handoff to 44, Marinaro. He's up the middle for 3 ... make it 4 yards ... brought down at the, let's see, 25. Tackle by Lambert."

You're right that one order of magnitude increase in speed (10X) would put you in the range of a good MPEG stream. Of course, you are (i2Sports and/or the viewer) going to pay more for 3Mbps of QOS-guaranteed speed as opposed to an 3Mbps *average* speed. But we're tantalizingly close to that as a typical speed everyone might have, say less than 5 years out.

I mentioned before that even today you could do a MovieLink style slightly delayed broadcast at higher quality, eg you start streaming the game at 7pm and it starts spooling off disk about 10 minutes later once there's enough bueffered, which is when you start watching.  Problem is whether it's worth their while to do two streams, buffer the video, etcetera.

And you're also right that the codecs are getting way better, too. Even at sub-1 megabit bitrates, the quality creeps up.

[KeithK]

Yes, hockey is harder to well on radio than football (and baseball is much better than football).  But as one who has been listening to Cornell hockey most weekends for the last six years let me tell you that I get a lot out of the radio broadcasts.  Very far from worthless.  But maybe I've just been spoiled by Grady and and Adam.

[CUlater 89]

For many years, I found that I enjoyed hockey more on the radio than on TV, because on the radio the announcers knew they had to go the extra mile to describe what was happening (or maybe I've just convinced myself of that, because I was reduced to listening to the Islanders Cup victories on my transitor radio since we didn't have cable, let alone Sportschannel, back then).  With poor TV directors and camera work, it took away from my enjoyment of the game.

Of course, to me Roy Ives was awesome -- I can still remember player "quarters" in the 4th floor lounge of Donlon when Dadswell was making all those saves in the '86 ECAC semis and finals.

I've also enjoyed Marv and Kenny Albert doing the Ranger games, and Sam Rosen and Mike Emerick broadcasting the Stanley Cup finals on the radio.

[Jacob '06]

Best hockey radio line in my life (at least I think it was on the radio) "Mateauuuuuuu Mateauuuu" scoring the game winning goal in game 7 against the devils.

[atb9]

Come on guys, it's not like our fraternity cook who listens to NASCAR on the radio...now that was silly but I understand listening just to hear "score updates"...but Adam W was awesome and there's nothing like picturing the game in your mind.  I haven't listened to the radio this year but Wodon defintiely spoiled me.

[icethepuck]

I live out of town.. Thank God for i2sports..worth every penny!