U Texas Streams Athletic Events

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 03/10/08

The University of Texas has taken its Longhorns athletic events online to broaden the reach of its collegiate sporting programs to a much larger audience.

The 50,000-student campus has implemented ViewCast Niagara encoding systems and Niagara GoStream portable streaming encoders to capture and stream live video from any location with Internet access, as well as enable archived video for VOD viewing. The program has expanded its coverage to 20 different intercollegiate teams, including football, baseball, soccer and women's volleyball. The Longhorn sporting events are made available at an online Athletics media center at http://www.texassports.tv/.

According to a statement from ViewCast, the school has moved from a subscription-only service to funding by sponsorship. "Since we switched to ViewCast, the quality of our streaming video offerings has increased considerably and so has the audience--which has enabled the program to become self-funded," said Jim Sigmon, manager, media production for the university.

To cover multiple events, the university's production team mounted ViewCast Niagara encoders into mobile broadcasting vehicles, enabling them to stream audiovisual content from up to three live events simultaneously.

"These systems provide plug-and-play encoding functionality that gives us everything we need to begin encoding right out of the box. We don't have to be experts in that area to make this work. Our production crews simply plug their cameras into the ViewCast encoders, connect to the Internet, push a button and start streaming," said Sigmon.