The University of Mississippi Athletics
Ole Miss Athletics To Launch TV Web Site September 23
9/17/2002 | Athletics
Sept. 17, 2002
OXFORD, Miss. - The Ole Miss Athletic Department announced Tuesday that it will launch a video-based Web site, OleMissSports.TV, Sept. 23. The Web site, which will be membership-based, will stream its first live event Monday with Rebel football head coach David Cutcliffe's weekly press conference.
The first 1,000 fans that sign up by Sept. 30 will be entered into a drawing for two free West side skybox tickets to the Rebels' Oct. 5 Southeastern Conference showdown versus No. 10-ranked Florida. Fans can sign up at OleMissSports.TV with Visa or MasterCard, and the cost of the service is $12 per month, $65 semi-annually or $120 per year. The Ole Miss Athletic Department is working with DAXKO, a Birmingham, Ala., based company, on the project.
"A lot of schools are going to membership-based sites," said Brad Teague, Associate Director of the Loyalty Foundation. "We are doing that as well, but we are focusing on the video side. It's not going to be your typical athletics Web page. It's going to almost be a TV station Web site, and it's called OleMissSports.TV. We picked a name close to our official athletics web site name (OleMissSports.com) so it would be easier to remember for the fans."
The new site will offer live video streaming of events such as coaches' weekly press conferences and possibly the coaches radio call-in shows as well as Web casts of selected baseball games, soccer games, volleyball matches and other events. The site will also offer archived video of post-practice comments from coaches and great games from the past. Another feature the site will offer is an area where subscribers can sign up to receive email notifications when Web casts for certain sports or events will occur.
"We're going to talk to the coaches after practices and games and put it up on our site," Teague said. "We want to emphasize that we're going to give people right now what they will read in tomorrow's paper. We're also going to give them more than what will be in tomorrow's paper.
"We're going to do a lot of events live, and we're going to give time to all sports. Obviously, we can't be everywhere to do live video streaming so there is also going to be a lot of archived items. Past great games are going to be on the site so fans can click and watch the entire game or portions of it. It's going to be a learning process, so we encourage those who subscribe to offer feedback."
According to Teague, the site is looking to replay current Ole Miss football games, but Southeastern Conference rules state the re-broadcasts or Web casts must occur 48 hours after the contest is played. He also said that Ole Miss games in the SEC Soccer Tournament, with the exception of the title game, will be streamed on the site. Ole Miss is hosting the tournament Nov. 7-10 in Oxford.
"We're not planning to do a direct mail campaign to announce the site," Teague said. "We're relying on word of mouth, and some already know about the site. Our goal is to have 5,000 subscribers by the end of our third year."
For those subscribers who have problems with the site, contact the Loyalty Foundation at 662-915-7159 or umaalf@olemiss.edu.
