The Game meets the 'net

AYON NANDI/YH

During the Yale-Cornell football game of Sat., Nov. 7, Tom Irish, SM '55, itched to watch his alma mater on television. Unfortunately for Irish, the game was not broadcast to his home in Florida. So he surfed the web, looking for updates on the game. When Irish reached the website of Cornell's football team, he did a double take. The page read, "Cornell football live on the Internet via broadcast.com."

Cornell is one of approximately 150 universities nationwide that have signed deals allowing broadcast.com—a company that specializes in transmitting streaming audio and video content on the Internet—to transmit regular radio broadcasts of the universities' athletic events live on the Internet, free of charge for anyone with a web connection and the RealPlayer program. As of press time, Yale was still not one of those 150 universities. But the Yale-Harvard football game will be carried by broadcast.com, and Yale and broadcast.com are currently finalizing plans to transmit all radio broadcasts of Yale sporting events on the Internet.

Behind the pack

According to Irish, this development should have come sooner. After seeing that Cornell provided broadcasts, he fired off an angry email to Yale's athletic administrators. "I blasted the athletic department for not providing Yale with what Cornell and Princeton had," Irish said. "I was assured that 'we' were working on it, and that the problem was with the legal ramifications."

Indeed, along with Cornell and Princeton, Harvard and Dartmouth also transmit their football games via broadcast.com. Yale's sports publicity director Steve Conn wants Yale to do the same. His goal is to broadcast more than just football. "Every athletic event that's broadcast on the radio, we're trying to get on the Internet," he said. To do so, he has begun discussing the possibility with broadcast.com.

This move is partly in response to feedback from fans like Irish. "I'm the person that's getting the emails and phone calls from people who are saying, 'I'm getting Dartmouth and Cornell [football broadcasts] but not Yale. What's up with that?'," Conn said.

While Bulldog fans have not been completely bereft of options for live broadcasts, they've had to ante up. Teamline, an Ohio-based company, transmits broadcasts of Yale football games over the phone anywhere in the country, but the service costs more than $50 for a three-hour football game.

While its deal with Teamline costs Yale nothing—indeed, Yale gets a share of the revenues—broadcast.com's services will be free to fans and, possibly, to Yale. The prospect seems too good to be true, and so Conn is currently "trying to make sure there aren't going to be any drawbacks."

Limitless possibilities

The founders of broadcast.com (formerly audio.net) couldn't find any drawbacks either when they first explored the possibility of using the Internet to broadcast live audio. Co-founders Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, now President and CEO, respectively, both graduated from the University of Indiana and are huge Hoosier fans. "They started with the fact that they were living in Dallas and they wanted to listen to Indiana basketball games," Nada Usina, sports marketing director for broadcast.com, said.

The Internet seemed like the perfect medium for a start-up venture. The company would not have to provide any new content, it wwould simply digitize existing radio broadcasts and transmit them—a nearly instantaneous process. It could also avoid the long-distance charges nessecary for a service like Teamline.

The fledgling company's first broadcast was in November 1995, feeding the local KLIF-570 station's play call of the Arkansas-Southern Methodist football game to the Internet.

From there, broadcast.com's rise was meteoric. By the fall of 1996, according to Usina, the company was broadcasting the games of more than 50 college football teams. Today, 150 colleges and universities are broadcasting on the Internet exclusively with the company, and "we have relationships with many more," Usina said.

Yale currently falls into that second category. Last year, all of Yale's men's ice hockey games were broadcast by the company, and broadcast.com currently provides continuous transmission of the Yale station 94.3-WYBC-FM.

However, Conn and the company are negotiating to extend the relationship between Yale and broadcast.com to include exclusive broadcasting rights. Conn expects broadcast.com to sweeten the deal by offering to waive the typical $100-per-game charge. "They're willing to waive the costs for some institutions. It probably looks good, for marketing and public relations," he speculated. Usina would not comment on the details of broadcast.com's contracts with colleges.

That the company can afford this generous offer is a testament to their enormous success. Usina said that broadcast.com earns revenues from providing live video feed of events for companies "that are both mainstream and technology-based." For example, Microsoft might pay the company to transmit video from quarterly shareholders' meetings on the Internet. Advertising revuenues, which are proportional to the number of daily visits to the site, earn broadcast.com a $520,000 daily.

The company has branched out to offer continuous broadcasts of radio stations, entertainment programming like World Championship Wrestling, and live breaking news. "We did a broadcast of the Bill Clinton video and the Lewinsky-Tripp tapes," Usina said. But its biggest moneymaker lies in the company's roots—sports broadcasts. In 1997, 500,000 people tuned in to catch the Super Bowl on the site. The company is always looking to expand its sports coverage, including adding broadcasts of more college sporting events. This meshes well with Conn's plans to transmit to the Internet all Yale sports that are broadcast on the radio.

Keeping up with the Bulldogs

The news of Yale's plans to strike a deal with broadcast.com sat well with Yale's varsity athletes. None of the athletes interviewed had heard about the possibility of the new deal.

While some players' parents live close enough to attend home games, others, like football long snapper Steve Petrie's, CC '01, who live in Minneapolis, must follow the Bulldogs on the Internet. "My Dad watches USA Today on the Internet and they have updates about every two minutes," Petrie said. "I think my Dad will enjoy hearing the play-by-play instead of just seeing numbers."

A left defenseman for Yale's ice hockey team, Keith Fitzpatrick, TD '00, who hailsfrom Long Island, said, "My parents try to go to all the games." But "they will use the Internet if they happen to miss the game." Fitzpatrick expects fans as well as family to use the broadcast.com service to follow the 0-2 hockey team, "as long as we start winning. If we lose, no one's going to want to listen."

But unlike the sports-crazed alumnus who insists Yale's teams must win, Irish just wants Yale to keep up to date with the latest technology. "I am pissed that Yale is in the back seat rather than the forefront on this matter," he said. Soon, Irish may no longer have reason to be pissed, as he watches and listens to Yale sports from the comfort of his computer.

David Goldenberg contributed to this article.

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