The University of Mississippi Athletics
STAFF BLOG: Video Productions Gaining Notoriety
3/27/2010 | Athletics
OleMissSports.com publishes blogs by the Ole Miss athletics department's senior administrators and key personnel to offer fans added insight into the overall operation of the department. J. Stern is in his 20th year at Ole Miss and serves as Assistant Athletics Director for Ole Miss Sports Productions.
March 26, 2010
For all of us in Ole Miss Sports Productions, we strive to produce television-level work in our productions that you see on our RebelVision webcasts and the videoboards of our various sports venues. If you've never seen our baseball streams, log in for tonight's series opener against Florida, and you'll find it to be of comparable quality to Saturday and Sunday's telecasts that will be on CSS and ESPN360.com.
The RebelVision stream is about to get even better when we go high definition starting with next weekend's series against Tennessee. We first started using HD video equipment in fall 2008 when we introduced the new videoboard at Vaught Hemingway Stadium. It's considered cutting edge technology in college athletics, and we were recently featured on the website for NYC-based trade publication Sports Video Group (SVG).
Carolyn Braff, Managing Editor for SVG, researched our work and was impressed with our operation here at Ole Miss. As a result, Shane Sanford, our internet and graphic design director, and myself will host panel discussions at the Sports Video Summit coming up in Atlanta. My topic is "Get in the Game! Define Your Media Strategy," while Shane will speak on "Best Practices in Web Video Production."
March 31, 2009
In my time at Ole Miss, the role of our video productions department has been in constant change. When I first arrived here in 1990, no one could have dreamed that one of our biggest functions would eventually be a producing live video for the internet, but in this age of instant information, webcasts have become hugely important for our fans.
In this blog, I am hoping to shed a little light on some of the issues fans run into when watching our productions on RebelVision. Live steaming video does not need to be confused with a progressive download (i.e. YouTube, Hulu, etc.). We stream over 100 live events each year, and for the most part, they come off without a hitch. However, since computers, internet service providers (ISP) and users are different, there are sometimes isolated problems that occur in "the last mile," meaning what happens from your computer to your ISP. One thing to note is if a live stream is working for one person, it is working; it is just not working on your computer.
Here are a few items to keep in mind to avoid streaming issues. First, verify your available bandwidth. You will need consistent 750 kbps downlink bandwidth in order to view streaming video, which means the cheapest internet package may not be fast enough. Also, despite what some ISPs claim, "actual" bandwidth available to you may not be what you're contracted to receive, and local/regional variances in download speed do occur. Fans can check their connection speed at http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest (more than one test is recommended). Second, avoid running other applications at the same time that you are trying to watch a stream. If you are running any applications using upload/download features (i.e. music sharing sites, peer-to-peer applications, etc.), you are impacting your overall available bandwidth, which can downgrade your connection speed. Finally, know that computers are moody. Very often, simply restarting your computer can put your video/audio back on track.
If after all this you still have trouble using RebelVision, the best thing to do is contact JumpTV Customer Care toll free at 1-877-967-3267. The RebelVision subscriber base has risen almost 60 percent in the past year, and we hope to see that number jump even higher as we work to provide you with more and more multimedia features.
March 24, 2008
While athletics department offices like compliance or media relations have a similar format from school to school, video production seems to be different everywhere you look. Some are completely operated by outside communication groups, others are done through local TV stations, and many are a combination of one or the other.
At Ole Miss, our multimedia production is handled in-house in conjunction with TeleSouth Communications. Including myself, Ole Miss Sports Productions has a staff of three, plus an additional three to four student workers.
Among our responsibilities, our staff oversees and supervises production for all video board shows and graphics (JumboTron at football and ProStar at basketball and baseball). We contract with Total Production Services for the Freelance Crew.
For football games, the most popular segment on the video board is undoubtedly the celebrity Hotty Toddys. The first celebrity one was in 1998 with the cast of NBC's "Today's Show," and we've been coordinating it ever since. Among the celebrities we've had include Shepard Smith, Russell Crowe, Snoop Dogg, Jeff Foxworthy, Elvis Costello, Ray Romano, Tim McGraw, Tom Brokaw and U.S. astronauts from space.
People often ask how we get the celebrities to do this. The easy ones are the celebrities that have connections at Ole Miss or are associated with the school. With regards to the others, we make lots of calls, send lots of e-mails and try to put our demo DVD in their hands. We've learned that agents, managers and publicists are not the best route to take, but if we can get it to the actual person, it makes it a lot easier. If anyone has a relationship with a celebrity and think they might interested, please contact our office at sportstv@olemiss.edu. Like the Beatles. song, "we get by with a little help from our friends."
Our office also produces all coaches television shows, which include Ole Miss Basketball with Andy Kennedy and the upcoming Houston Nutt show. The shows have earned numerous honors, including Telly Awards, Communicator Awards and awards from the Mississippi Association of Broadcasters.
An ongoing project for our department is converting our endless 16 mm film archives to a more usable format. Many of the historic games have already been digitized, and like the coaches' shows, game replays, and other video features we produce, they help make up the content for RebelVision, which is owned by TeleSouth and managed by our office.
Another key responsibility of our department is to provide TV Networks and local stations with Ole Miss footage. Major networks in particular may not keep file footage for every school, so when they put together a segment on a Rebel player or coach, they turn to us. Our office also produces about 70 satellite feeds per year following games and press conferences to provide highlights for TV outlets that cannot be on-hand.