Webcasting Games - Any Suggestions

Production value is key. Multiple cameras, direction and resolution quality are appreciated. I've watched a conference tournament game on line with one fixed camera, simulcast with the radio call. Call me a spoiled brat but it was sort of like watching 1970's british TV. "Do you want to watch Cheese or Beer, Audrey?"

That would be fantastic to have 2 or 3 cameras at one site for sure! We are working on the best band width and quality of picture, you are right about that. We are going to have the live feeds from the college fields and likely archive them on to our website for family, friends and college coaches to view. I've heard you can get your game on ESPNU for as little as $25K, should we go that route .

call up google.com and ask if they can host some of your good quality clips on youtube.com They bankroll youtube currently and have very extensive resources such as hardware and bandwith to setup quality webcasts. Use the standard mpeg video format so everyone can view it on any computer platform they use. I think dvix avi also runs on almost every computer system out there. Audio format should be mp3 embedded into the mpeg file.

These formats provide good compression [lesser bandwith costs for you] without sacrificing video or audio quality to a large extent. For audio get a good quality microphone for the audio commentators.
The rest of the viewing experience really depends on how fast of an internet connection your users have.

If you have more money later on, get some of small little cameras that can be mounted on a batting or catcher helmet and show interesting view to your audience. Alot of interesting stuff can be done. Biggest obstacle is money for video processing and video streaming hardware and software. Audio is far cheaper to do.

Also realize that your audience is mostly using a pc monitor that is 17-19 inches wide diagnolly and a video resolution of 1024x768. A few will have really highend stuff like a huge tv hooked up to their computer and a t1 connection. But most will have some form of dsl or cable.

Your videos shouldn't be larger than 800x600 but no smaller than 640x480 ideally. Some video players allow the viewer to view a 320x240 file in double screen size without losing quality, but that is something out of the range of my knowledge how to make.

On your end you will need alot of bandwith, alot of storage space, and alot of FAST hard drives and TONS of RAM.

Bandwith and FAST hard drives are the most expensive things on the computer end that you will need to purchase to put up a quality webcast.

Today consumer grade video camcorders and microphones provide good enough quality for your usage.

Yes, we got some very sporadic quotes when researching some options - literally prices all over the board from $500 - $2500/game. Several submitting quotes with just 1 camera, no announcer, to 3 cameras and pretty much an entire crew on hand. We aren't going to add webcasting to our events as a way to increase our prices but it would be cool for those parents that aren't able to travel every weekend to the games to be able to watch the games at home! We will go with a quality viewing as opposed to a tv crew and multiple cameras, though I am a huge fan of the catchers cam!

Thanks again, you are a huge help!

With the advent of very affordable technology it would probably be a good idea to hire a college video production majoring student [or a couple] and pay them a small stipend. They would be motivated to do a good job to show to thier future clients and employers.

The biggest labor is in editing the video for production use. Probably a better idea to first offer archives of the games until you get some more money for "live" webcast and a dedicated team of two to three people to staff each game. I would probably just start offering only highlight clips initially. A video editor would have to go through about 3 hours of footage for each game to splice them out and compile them into something nice looking for the families as a keepsake. They love that stuff. My own baseball league teammates absolutely loved seeing ourselves on video last year.

I used to be a league photographer for a men's very competitive softball league and it took me about 4 hours each night just to edit photos and post them on the website. I can imagine video editing is far more time consuming than what I did. My equipment consisted of a 4pixel fuji digital camera with a 8x optical zoom taking 1200x800 res shots.

If you choose to buy your own video camera equipment make sure it has at least a 32x OPTICAL zoom on it. Baseball fields are easily 50% bigger than softball fields.

Digital zooms are ghetto and shouldn't be used at all for quality work.

My not so humble opinions.

suggestion: put plenty of time, effort, and money into it so that you don't get off to a horrendous start. I've seen many lackluster prodution efforts only to be severely critisized for a terrible production and then that gets to the paper and on the internet and you have a mess that the sponsors don't want ANY part of. It happens all the time. I like the suggestion of the college students taking some of the responsibilites but ONLY if they are directed by someone experienced. They can really mess things up if not careful. It's like getting a hair-cut with a FLOWBEE, it can be done, but the results can be a clusterfark.

Good Luck!

I helped out in our video production department in college before they killed the video production program due to lack of funding. Good suggestion on the mentor for the students. There was ALOT TO LEARN about putting up a decent video broadcast. That huge pile of thick cables hooked up to all the equipment tipped me off that the production phase is not an easy thing to pull off professionally without some expert guidance.

My humble suggestions are the mere tip of the iceberg of whats required in hardware and knowledge. Most important is the people using it though.

Switchitter is also correct that corporate sponsors will go nowhere near you if your first videos on the internet [and later local networks looking to fil airtime] look like some of the stuff submitted to funniest home videos on grainy vhs tapes.

i agree with captlid. If you want to see a pretty good production, watch San Diego State baseball games (they are free on their web-site...just go to "schedule" and you'll find the "Watch" web-cast link). They do a very good job and have good camera equipment. It's hard to believe it's free. In between innings they have the multiple cameras talking shots of the crowd which is also on the big diamond vision screen in the outfield. People can see that they are on the big screen and they get good reactions out of them. Pretty nice stuff. They also do replays of every play and from multiple camera angles (very nice!). The cameras are good quality production level and the whole game is done fairly well.