JUSTIN CHEN/YH

Putting Yale sports on the 'net

It seemed like a perfect fit.

Two years ago, Broadcast.com was a fledgling Internet company, specializing in transmitting live audio and video content on the 'net. At the time, Broadcast had inked contracts with over 100 universities to air the radio broadcasts of their athletic events. But Yale was not one of them.

Broadcast offered to broadcast all of Yale's football and men's basketball games for free. "Broadcast.com often charges institutions and teams to get their games on," Yale Director of Sports Publicity Steve Conn said. 'They wanted to waive that for us. If they got Yale, which is such a marquee university, it would make them look much better." Conn referred Broadcast sports marketing director Nada Usina to Yale's Legal Counsel Office to work out the details of a contract. A few months later, Conn contacted Broadcast, who he said told him, "We've talked to someone from your counsel's office, and it's not happening." Two years after the initial contact, a contract still has not been signed. Broadcast (known as Yahoo! Broadcast since Yahoo! acquired the company last year) does not list Yale on its college sports page as one of the Ivy league schools whose sporting events it airs. All Ivy schools except Yale, Penn, and Columbia are listed.

'Exclusive worldwide rights'

About a year ago, Associate Athletic Director Wayne Dean referred the Broadcast case to Yale Associate General Counsel Susan Sawyer. Dean gave Sawyer a copy of the contract and asked her to review it. "I revised the contract because I thought there were some problems," Sawyer said. "I returned to Nada [Usina] a revised agreement. At that point, Nada called me back, I tried her back, but we never hooked up. That's sort of where things left off." Sawyer said she has not been in contact with Broadcast for months, possibly since April.

If this game of phone tag had not failed, Yale and Broadcast probably could have come to an agreement, according to Sawyer. However, Sawyer did make some important revisions to the contract. "There were some issues of Broadcast.com's ability to use Yale's name trademark without Yale's consent," Sawyer said. In addition, Broadcast wanted Yale to sign a one-year agreement with a four-year renewal option, and Sawyer felt this was too long a period.

The main stumbling block was the clause in Broadcast's proposed contract granting Broadcast exclusive rights to the airings of Yale sporting events over the Internet, Yale Associate General Counsel Susan Sawyer said. The relevant clause read, in part, "The university grants the worldwide exclusive right and license to publicly distribute, transmit, perform, display, copy, prepare derivative works, and market the programming on the system, for the time period set forth above."

"The system," as defined by the contract, seemed to include just about any form of technology that could transmit audio, including other Internet providers, television, and radio. But in a later conversation, Usina told Sawyer that AM/FM radio and television stations were exempt from the exclusivity clause. Sawyer still objected to granting Broadcast exclusivity, for two reasons: "One, it's an area where technology is developing very quickly," she said. "Two, if you've worked with a company, and have known them for a period of time, you're less likely to balk at an exclusive agreement. Broadcast.com is a relatively new company, and Yale hasn't had any prior agreements with it. Most people would advocate being fairly conservative."

'People were very disappointed.'

However, many Yale sports already air on Broadcast, and they had already been airing for some time when Sawyer was in talks with Broadcast. Yale sports carried on WYBC-AM 1340 have been aired live on Broadcast since 1996, along with all other content on the AM and 94.3 FM stations, according to WYBC Director of Operations Wayne Schmidt. Schmidt said that WYBC pays a fee for this service; he would not disclose how much.

A Yahoo! spokesman said that Broadcast has been transmitting Yale sports almost since the company formed. The 1999-2000 WYBC athletics schedule included Yale football games, 18 men's basketball games, 16 men's hockey games, as well as one women's hockey game and one women's basketball game.

When asked if she considered WYBC's successful relationship with Broadcast when negotiating the contract, Sawyer said, "No. I think that's relevant information, certainly."

Having the games broadcast on WYBC without a contract between Yale and Broadcast has its disadvantages. Conn said that there was strong demand among alumni for the WELI-960 broadcasts of the Yale football games, because former Yale Coach Carm Cozza was doing color commentary. "We knew a lot of people would be very interested in hearing the old coach describe the current action of the team," Conn said. "People were very disappointed when we indicated we might be able to, and then realized we wouldn't."

Another disadvantage of the current arrangement is that Yale games are not archived, so someone who lives in a different time zone or who for some other reason is unable to listen to the live broadcast cannot listen to a game after it has been played. Broadcast archives the audio transmissions of games that it airs.

In addition, Yale is not part of the college-sports section of the Broadcast webpage. So a Yale sports fan looking for a Yale game cannot simply browse the Broadcast site and find a Yale game. He or she would have to know that WYBC is the radio station that carries Yale sports, that WYBC was aired on Broadcast, and be familiar with the schedule of WYBC's athletic broadcasts. A Yahoo! spokesman said that if Broadcast has not signed a deal with a college, but if it is already airing that college's games through the college's student radio station, it will not normally list that college on its college-sports page, out of respect for the school's name and legal property.

Tom Irish, SM '55, a Yale sports fan living in Orlando, Fla., did find out about WYBC's sports broadcasts through a link on the Yale Athletics webpage, but he said that many other alumni were not aware of them. "One thing I wish the Athletic Department would do is publicize this more," Irish said. "I passed the word on to my Yale Club friends here, and they were not aware. I think it would be good for WYBC to take an ad in the Yale Alumni Magazine."

Vincent Teahan, SY '71, LAW '74, listened to the Harvard broadcast of last year's Harvard-Yale game, and he found himself pleasantly surprised with the quality. "The Harvard guys did a tremendous job," he said. "What I liked about the way they did it was the sheer objectivity." However, Irish, who has had trouble getting the WYBC audio stream to play on his computer, and therefore listened to Yale's opponents' broadcasts, was disappointed with the quality of the Cornell, Brown, and Princeton broadcasts of football games against Yale. "Since it was their guys doing it, it was obviously very pro-that team," Irish said. "They do not do as good a job as the Yale people do at saying who just got the tackle. WYBC is much better at telling you who did what for both teams."

Around the Ivies

While Yale would clearly benefit from having its games aired on Broadcast, Yale is also an attractive prospect for Broadcast, for reasons other than the marquee value of Yale's name. "Yale and other Ivys have alumni across the world listening to this stuff," Cornell's Director of Athletic Communications Pat Gillespie said.

The interest of Ivy alumni in hearing athletic broadcasts of their alma mater is demonstrated by their enthusiastic use of a service called Teamline. For around $30-40 per game, a fan receives a radio broadcast of his team's game over his phone line. Teamline's latest ranking of listener interest in its schools showed that seven of the Ancient Eight were in the top 20. Yale was ranked No. 1.

Princeton Associate Athletic Director Curt Kehl said that Princeton used to be consistently ranked in the top five by Teamline, but the Tigers slipped to 12th after signing a contract allowing Broadcast to air its football and men's basketball games. When a listener chooses to listen to the broadcast of a particular college, that college gets a share of Teamline's earnings. But Kehl said, "We knew we'd lose some revenue. Nobody was getting rich from the money they were getting from Teamline."

Kehl and representatives of other Ivy League athletic departments who have signed deals with Broadcast said they are very happy with the service. "I haven't had any complaints about them," Kehl said. Gillespie said he didn't see any drawbacks to the Broadcast service, especially because the company now takes care of all the technological details. Gillespie said that Cornell alumni were a big reason for Cornell signing on with Broadcast three or four years ago. "The alumni were really pushing it, that's how it got started, they really wanted hockey on, they wrote to broadcast.com," he said.

Not all Ivy schools have signed on with Broadcast, though. Shaun May, Penn's Director of Sports Publicity, said that Penn did not sign on because, like Yale, they were wary of the terms of the contract. "We talked to them this year, and they wanted a four-year deal," May said. "We're not comfortable doing something that long, because this whole thing is changing so soon. Once we came back with maybe one year or two, they were not too interested." Penn's student station, WXPN, currently airs the games it broadcasts through its own server. Other Ivys did not have the same problems as Penn negotiating a contract with which they were comfortable. Kehl said that when Princeton received a contract from Broadcast, "our guy changed it around a little bit. As far as legal agreements go, [the changes] were pretty minimal." Harvard student Russell Rivera '00, co-sports director of student station WHRB, said, "Our contract is for two years; it should expire in November. They wanted us to sign for four, we wanted to sign for two." Through Broadcast, Harvard has been airing supplemental broadcasts of games that are not on WHRB. Broadcast waived the fees for football and men's hockey, and charges Harvard approximately $40 per game for other sports. "When they offered us football and hockey for free, we jumped on it."

Inking the deal

If Usina and Sawyer make contact again, the prospects are good for an agreement to be reached. A Yahoo! spokesman characterized the negotiations between Broadcast and Yale as ongoing. "This agreement anticipated going from 1999 to 2003," Sawyer said. "There is certainly a very good possibility this will get signed and take effect, assuming the athletics department wants to do that."

Conn is certainly in favor of reaching an agreement. "My stance was, the games are already on the radio, and I know there are people who want to listen to us on the web," Conn said. Then there are those, like Teahan, who may not know they want to listen to Yale sports on the web until they stumble upon the option, and who are brought closer to Yale sports as a result. "I was working on my desk on a Saturday afternoon, the day of the game when I noticed there were certain games being broadcast by streaming RealAudio, which I had newly installed on my computer, and one of them was the Yale-Harvard game," Teahan said.

Teahan, who lives in Clinton Corners, NY, was a fan of Yale football, and football in general, until he witnessed "The Game of The Century," the heart-wrenching Yale-Harvard 29-29 tie in 1968 in which Yale blew a 16-point lead with three and a half minutes to play. "That is like a terrible drunk getting you off alcohol," Teahan said. "I distanced myself from sports after that." But after listening to this year's almost-as-exciting Yale-Harvard game, which ended with Yale winning, 24-21, on a last-second score, Teahan turned to his wife and said, "I'm sad I didn't go. This could have gotten us back into football games."

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