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May 9, 2010 I have previously written about how our ever-changing technology has impacted the way sports are covered by the media when I wrote of Kyle Kujawa and his blog, Babcock’s Death Stare. Over the past couple of months I have had the ability to participate in another technology that is changing the way sports are disseminated, and it promises to transform sports media in a even more beneficial way than the blogosphere has up to this point. Last week I briefly mentioned the role that Big Ten Network plays in Big Ten expansion. By ensuring that all Big Ten football and men’s basketball games are televised, and the ad revenue is funneled directly to the participating universities, the network has been extremely profitable for its 11 university members, to the tune of $20+ million annually. The original goal of BTN was to make money, and it is certainly doing that. But another goal was to give non-revenue sports more televised coverage. In the past, non-revenue sports have suffered from a lack of television coverage since there is little demand for content. Bringing in a satellite truck (which costs thousands upon thousands of dollars) to air a Michigan football game live makes economic sense. Millions will watch the game across the country and ad revenue more than makes up for the cost of televising such events. Doing the same for a water polo match that attracts only a few hundred viewers at most doesn’t. By developing a first of its kind “Flypack” technology, the Big Ten Network believes it has found a way to profitably televise such non-revenue events. The Flypacks cost the Big Ten Network a one-time investment of six figures, and is basically a satellite truck that fits in just a few large boxes. It does not have the ability to air content immediately on the regular BTN channel, but the events are streamed to the internet, and to the Big Ten Network in Chicago in HD. For $2.99, anyone in the world can watch one of these events, and once edited, the events can re-air on the regular television channel. Further reducing costs is the fact that the Flypacks require minimal on-location manpower. Often, the on-air personalities, director, and producer are all in Chicago, watching the streams from all cameras set up. Only a handful of videographers are needed on site to work the cameras, greatly reducing travel costs. The elimination of a satellite truck and travel costs for five or six people normally needed for an on-location shoot greatly reduces costs. But BTN took cost reduction a step further. In this past year, it began its “Student U” program, which contracts students at various Big Ten schools to conduct Flypack broadcasts of non-revenue sporting events on their campus. This completely eliminates all costs as the students are unpaid by BTN. It’s a deal that makes perfect sense- unpaid students greatly decrease the costs of airing non-revenue sports, students get great hands-on experience that is not available anywhere else in the world and BTN has a steady stream of employable students that are already intimately familiar with how the network operates. So what’s the upshot of all this? Of course, predicting the course that technology takes is always an exercise that is sure to make the prognosticator look foolish. Fully aware of that danger, I’ll make several predictions. Over the next three or four years you’ll see nearly every sporting event on a Big Ten campus televised, at least online. The technology will spread throughout larger universities in the country, and event to minor league sports. Finally as the technology becomes cheaper and cheaper, we may even see a trickle down to high school sports. Imagine being able to watch your son’s 3pm Wednesday baseball game while at work. Imagine not having to sit in the elements for 4+ hours at your daughter’s track meet, and instead being able to see it live on your computer for less than it would cost to see the meet in person. Of course this reality would not occur for many, many years and maybe not even then. But nobody imagined that a communications system originally developed by the Department of Defense in the 1960s to survive a nuclear attack would one day become the primary way people communicate today. That communication system is being used by you right now- it’s the internet. (c) 2010 Novi
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