What's needed? And how much does it cost? Or rather, how little can one spend and still have a watchable webcast? Ok, I know my questions are a bit simplistic. I'm lacking in the technical expertise. But in true research fashion, here's the larger research question behind my questions. I am a WPS fan. Please save your "who cares about women's soccer for another place. I do not live in a WPS city. I am grateful for the FSC weekly broadcast (even while I want to fire their terrible camera operators). But having only one game a week available for fans to watch is no way to build fan interest & a league. For all of its ahead of the curve activity in various social media (eg twitter & facebook) I believe WPS is really missing the boat in not having more webcasting. To their credit, the Chicago Red Stars are webcasting every home game. But what about the rest of the league? This is a league that needs to control costs and I get that. I also get that a company does not want to devalue their product (eg too low of a price point for tickets) so I assume there is a quality level for webcasting below which would make WPS look unprofessional. But I have no idea what it takes on the IT side to actually produce a webcast much less archive it for later viewing. The games are already all being filmed for scouting. Would the type of camera needed for webcasting be radically different than what they most likely are already using? (see, I really am ignorant here). I assume there are server and bandwidth requirements that may cost lots of $$. Is it ridiculous of me to think that a league should try to use something like veetle to broadcast their own material even on a delay if the stadium doesn't have the proper sort of internet access (and what sort of access would that even be)? So, denizens of the Technology forum, will you please educate me? What does it take to put out game webcasts and/or host more than 2-3 minute highlight clips of games? Am I, lowly fan, being completely ridiculous and ignorant to think that WPS teams should be able to pull together more webcasts without spending tons and tons of cash they don't have?
I've never webcasted anything, but I frequently watch videogame casters on justin.tv and they have tips on broadcasting. Really, all the teams would need is a camera, laptop, and an available wifi connection. They'd just go to ustream or jtv and sign up for free. Then they could link their feeds to their websites. The good thing about these sites is they automatically archive the casts. Is that a bit unprofessional? perhaps...but it's free. As far as setting up their own webcasting...I have no idea how much the server space/software/etc would cost