Let me preface this post with these are MY opinions and in no way, shape or form are the official stance of my employer. I also want to state that this post isn’t really a rant but just a statement regarding the day-to-day state of affairs in the always-on lifestyle I have been blessed with.
Since 2003 I have been frightened by late September and early October. The National Hockey League (NHL) preseason begins around this period. There are many reasons why this knots my stomach and I may cover a few of them in this post.
Preseason hockey is a curious animal, there is often no radio broadcasts nor television broadcasts however if a franchise wishes to stream video they need to abide by traditional broadcast blackout rules. On this I call BS.
I get the idea that regional sports networks (RSN) want to protect certain rights that they have paid for. I have questions about this approach. For instance if an RSN is so protective of these rights than they must see value in the broadcast of these preseason games, right? If there is value in these games why are the RSNs not interested in broadcasting them? I know many times it comes down to what is in the contract and if the RSN has agreed to broadcast the preseason games but if there is value then why not renegotiate so that they could be broadcast. My beef here really isn’t with the RSNs, they have been operating in their world for a lot longer than I have been around but in this “new” digital landscape shouldn’t there be a way for us to broadcast our story without being penalized in some manner? Some of this may be dirty laundry that I am airing but like I wrote at the top of this post this is my opinion of the circumstances I find myself in the middle of.
If we choose to stream a preseason game (using the telescreen feed) it must be with consent from the RSN and prior notification to the league. We are also required to make sure the stream is gated and not shared outside of our DMA (Direct Market Area). This is the crux of the issue for me. If an RSN is unwilling or has no interest in broadcasting a preseason game and if the visiting team’s RSN is unwilling or has no interest in broadcasting the game, why then must it be gated to only the home team’s DMA? As far as I know this mandate comes from the league but I could be totally wrong on that point. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.
To me this stinks of an “if I can’t have it no one can” attitude. An attitude that threatens to keep the sport of hockey in the constant shadow of other major sports. This is also a prime example of how digital media continues to outpace traditional media and established bodies are currently not nimble enough to make the necessary changes at a pace fast enough to satisfy their respective fans. For these companies it may be difficult to get ahead of this curve, especially when the curve starts to look like Lombard Street.
By the way, kudos go to Comcast Mid-Atlantic. We have been fortunate enough to work with an RSN that does not mind if we stream preseason hockey and has been gracious enough to allow us the rights to do so.
Apart from the political football I have just outlined above there are some other items that scare me about the start of autumn. Streaming also comes with a number of technical chasms needing to be breached. No one is insurmountable but I often feel as if the rains of September also pour down technical difficulties.
A look at what a Tricaster screen looks like
We have this great piece of hardware called a Tricaster. This black box technology essentially boils down a television studio into a 20 LB box (when you haul it around it sometimes feels heavier than that). As long as you have a video signal & audio feed going in and an internet line going out you can stream a show. Often one of these key elements struggles to appear. Most of the time it is the audio that causes the problems. It is an odd thing about audio, people often leave it to the end thinking it is the least important ingredient but if it is wrong it will be the first complaint you receive.
This September has been especially grueling from the technology standpoint. It seems like the gods, or gremlins, of technology turned a spiteful eye in my direction. Internet streams that worked one day failed the next, telephone lines used for streaming preseason game audio failed just before air time, video compressors cut out unexpectedly. One after another technologies that I have come to rely on failed. It was like a line of electronic dominoes that someone decided to knock over.
The scariest event of the month this year had to be the Rookie game between the Capitals and Flyers. We were all set to go live and hadn’t realized we (it might be more appropriate to write “I” here) needed to change streaming formats from Windows Media to Flash. We did try to change midstream but I found out a few days later that the publishing point we needed hadn’t been set up anyway. We kept shooting and saved the game to post later. Even that had issues with the conversion and posting process sputtering and choking until failure.
The one thing above all else that is motivating myself and the individuals that I am fortunate enough to work with, is keeping fans of the team happy. This is the reason we post so much content and look for new ways to reach people or to make the site more accessible. Why a crew of three and one-half people (there are four, but at one point or another we are all working on non-web projects therefore the deduction) essentially ends up on call 24/7, 365. Yes, I have worked on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
In the middle of all that I had agreed to speak at a social media conference taking place in San Francisco. I finished up my presentation and reviewed it on the plane, landed in California around 1AM Pacific, caught some shuteye, got up and reviewed it again. The presentation went fine, although I had created the presentation in Keynote and needed to convert it to Powerpoint. I stripped out the fonts and replaced them with Arial to make sure there weren’t any issues with the Mac to PC translation. It ended up looking a little more bland than I expected. I spoke right after lunch and joke that I hope it was the food and not my presentation that was putting people to sleep.
Since this post is getting a little long suffice it say the rest of September went about the same. It is to be hoped that things will improve from here on out. I will try to follow the advise from a British 1940s poster: Keep Calm and Carry On.
