A couple years ago I had a discussion with some friends and colleagues of mine over the future of NCAA television coverage.
I maintained that the networks would eventually be cut out of the product and that, as real broadband technology hit the mainstream, the schools themselves would provide games to fans over the internet.
The result would be that schools would get the bulk of the advertising dollars and could charge fans directly for viewing the game. Every game would be available on line and on demand. And with the digital age cutting production costs to heretofore unheard-of levels, any school could afford it.
Imagine being able to watch ANY game on line, from any angle.
My friends and colleagues were skeptical, but the first step toward this happening for major conferences occurred over the summer with the birth of the Big Ten Channel.
I wrote at the time that:
..the natural evolution will then be to create individual team channels, which will eventually render the networks obsolete. Athletic departments will hire their own announcers and use their own crews to produce a game telecast geared toward the fans of the program.
Why have a Gary Danielson or a Kirk Herbstreit fly in and pretend to be an expert of the school they are covering (usually based on items they had to hurriedly crib from a weekly press release) when a school can use someone who really knows the program? The advent of the digital age has made the production process less expensive and schools are already heading that way with ‘All-Access’ video on official websites anyway. Networks beware!
So when I read this story from USA Today on the increasing number of webcasts in college football, it seemed like the future was arriving a whole lot faster than I had previously thought.
The big TV networks simply aren’t interested in the little Ivy League.
But the Ivy League and other small conferences may have found a way around that — the Internet.
Many schools, and now some conferences, have begun showing football and other sports on their websites.
“We can produce our own television and reach, literally, the entire world on the Web, without having to go through the issues of, is there cable availability? Is there satellite availability? Is there advertising support?” said Jeff Orleans, commissioner of the Ivy League.
He expects most of the league’s sporting events will be online within seven years.
Big Sky Conference’s Northern Arizona offered webcasts of home football games last year. Using the four cameras already set up to provide replays on the stadium scoreboard, the school added audio from their radio broadcasts along with continually updated statistics.
“Our fans love it,” said Steven Shaff, a spokesman for the school’s athletic department. “We had people in Alaska, parents of students in Canada, watching our games last year.”
Read the entirety of that story and you can see the direction that sports coverage is heading.
It’s inevitable.
To survive, print journalists have been forced to wade waist-deep in the muck of the internet.
Soon, TV will follow or risk becoming endangered.
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