I happen to be a CIO who is also a sports fan and supporting my university’s athletic programs is a benefit of the job. IT’s involvement with Athletics in recent years has been based on the technology needed for broadcasting our sporting events. A good partnership as IT needed to perfect video streaming techniques and Athletics was looking for any exposure they could get. Early on we had excess bandwidth to offer up for video streaming of events. Last year we learned a lot about streaming and video production, etc. Some success and failures, but it was a lot of fun and with parents of the athletes the primary benefactors.

Well we got some exposure mostly with having a NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship, so there was increased demand for improved digital presence for Athletics. We solved a big need by outsourcing our Athletics website, but improving the video streaming was the big problem. The issue for streaming had to due with my lack of excess bandwidth (read my last blog post). We outsourced our athletics website to Presto so I inquired about their involvement with video streaming. They pointed me to Stretch Internet, which has provided us with a very acceptable and improved solution. Now we are having more fun improving our video production quality. We’re granting internships to students in our Cinema and Media Communications program, selling sponsorships to pay for the broadcasts and seeing early viewer numbers that are telling us this is good for exposure. Something tells me we have again set the bar up a notch and I think this will provide positive support for our university.