I have been looking at the Southern Conference website for online viewing of basketball games and noticed that other than ESPN3 carrying a few games there is really nothing else. ASUN TV may have it's quality problems, but at least I get to see the away games.
Is the Southern Conference going to increase online availability or are we just screwed in the situation?

(01-23-2014 11:07 AM)islandpark Wrote:  I have been looking at the Southern Conference website for online viewing of basketball games and noticed that other than ESPN3 carrying a few games there is really nothing else. ASUN TV may have it's quality problems, but at least I get to see the away games.
Is the Southern Conference going to increase online availability or are we just screwed in the situation?

Yeah I worry about this also. For people like myself that live 4+ hours away, A-Sun TV is a fantastic option to have and as of now the Socon does not have that. I know the OVC does something similar to A-Sun TV, so we can only hope that the Socon is working on something equivalent to A-Sun TV.

I signed up for "SoCon TV"... but I never checked it to see how much they offer.

Hopefully our schools would continue the video service on our own individual websites if SoCon TV isn't working.

Surely ETSU and Mercer would not eliminate this going forward unless the infrastructure on the SoCon's end just is not there to support it.

I was curious though and tweeted @ the SoCon's official account asking if they had something like A-Sun TV or OVC Digital Network with access to live video of all Men's Basketball games. They did reply and indicated that they do not currently but are working on it. - So I guess time will tell.....

Mullins really screwed us not jumping on the OVC the minute they approached us. Failures in leadership has consequences.

Don't be surprised if we get rid of streaming all together. I don't know all the details but it supposedly takes quite a bit of money to stream these games and the athletic department isn't sure if it's worth the cost.

(01-23-2014 06:59 PM)BucNut22 Wrote:  Mullins really screwed us not jumping on the OVC the minute they approached us. Failures in leadership has consequences.

One of many, many ways he did that to us.

The reason there isn't a SoCon TV stand alone package is because not all the schools work with the same network and they have different content providers (Learfield, IMG, etc)

For instance Chattanooga has a contract with Learfield Sports (http://learfieldsports.com/university-partners/), they control our content through a partnership called Mocs Sports Properties and they are not willing to give up the our live feed for free to the SoCon office (I work during football and basketball season for Mocsvision, so I know a pretty good deal of how it all works). Chattanooga has invested a lot of money in their video content (website video, live streaming, and video board production) and they have a good group of subscribers to the network.

ESPN3 sounds like a great deal, but there is a down side...ESPN then owns any content they carry live on their feed...permanently.

Smaller conferences originally jumped on the ESPN3 idea because they got exposure for little investment. The SoCon hasn't been as inclined because schools like ASU, GSU, UTC and CofC had in-house production that produces a lot of content and didn't want their rights to broadcast taken away (in CofC's case, they actually spent nearly a half million and bought their own mobile production truck and paid on their own to put a number of games on CSS and ESPN3).

Of course, now 3 of those 4 schools are either gone or on their way out...so it will be interesting to see if things change. The squabbling will come from different content owners. I know UTC/Learfield are not willing to give up their feed for free, but they will definitely be in the minority. As with most mid-major conferences, the production varies wildly...UTC has full production with cameramen under each goal and a high cam. Some schools have one cam at the top and that is it (two years ago, UNCG just had two fixed cams at the side corners of the court and had someone switch between the two...btw, it was so bad that is was almost unwatchable). Some schools have full graphics packages with stats, clocks and game bugs (that is what I do), while others just pan over to the scoreboard during timeouts. Obviously, if you are doing minimal production, you don't really care if the conference uses the stream...but if you have actually invested money, you don't want to give it away.

BTW, if you want to see a little bit of Mocsvision...Gee McGhee made a 3/4 court shot at the half time buzzer tonight against Elon. It was the #1 play on the SportCenter Top 10. The video they used was from our broadcast of the game (all three angles).

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10152231515084783

Good information, chattanoogamocs. It makes sense that it's hard to get everyone to agree. I know Mercer has stepped up their game big time this year. Nice on screen graphics, pre-game intro, etc. It is the quality of an ESPN3 broadcast for sure. The on-screen bar at the bottom covers score, timeouts remaining, clock, shot clock...everything you would expect.

It would be terrible if Mercer gave this up, and I doubt they would. So maybe we will end up with our own "Bear Vision" subscription package. I wouldn't mind that. Especially if they started doing football too.

I hope they don't get rid of our live streaming, I'd even be willing to pay some kind of a subscription fee to watch our games.

(01-24-2014 02:32 AM)MercerFan Wrote:  Good information, chattanoogamocs. It makes sense that it's hard to get everyone to agree. I know Mercer has stepped up their game big time this year. Nice on screen graphics, pre-game intro, etc. It is the quality of an ESPN3 broadcast for sure. The on-screen bar at the bottom covers score, timeouts remaining, clock, shot clock...everything you would expect.

It would be terrible if Mercer gave this up, and I doubt they would. So maybe we will end up with our own "Bear Vision" subscription package. I wouldn't mind that. Especially if they started doing football too.

Agree. I was really impressed with Mercer's live stream when I watched ETSU play them a few weeks ago. I always project the games to my flatscreen and the quality of the stream looked like regular HD basketball game that you would see on a network station.

I think our graphics look great, I wish they could get a clock up though, even if they have to go old school and dedicate a cheap camera to one off to the side somewhere.
HD upgrades would be awesome as well, but that costs a ton of money and I'm sure most of the equipment being used is less than 10 years old.
Maybe with football we can see those upgrades.
ETSU needs to continue to stream its' games, even if the SoCon doesn't have something like asun.tv.

(01-24-2014 11:45 AM)Bucster Wrote:  

(01-24-2014 02:32 AM)MercerFan Wrote:  Good information, chattanoogamocs. It makes sense that it's hard to get everyone to agree. I know Mercer has stepped up their game big time this year. Nice on screen graphics, pre-game intro, etc. It is the quality of an ESPN3 broadcast for sure. The on-screen bar at the bottom covers score, timeouts remaining, clock, shot clock...everything you would expect.

It would be terrible if Mercer gave this up, and I doubt they would. So maybe we will end up with our own "Bear Vision" subscription package. I wouldn't mind that. Especially if they started doing football too.

Agree. I was really impressed with Mercer's live stream when I watched ETSU play them a few weeks ago. I always project the games to my flatscreen and the quality of the stream looked like regular HD basketball game that you would see on a network station.

And ETSU has always had nice streaming since I've been watching. It would be a shame if either team lost that, but I really don't think we will. It would be a small edge, but something you could even sell on a potential recruit so that their family/friends can watch them, and other SoCon teams cannot.

I'm sure most of us on here would be willing to pay too if it's a money issue