Sweet idea!

[mred]

From the Big XII MBB official release:

Tourney Time and Transistor Radios
Big 12 women’s and men’s basketball fans are encouraged to bring their transistor radios to follow the conference tournaments on the institutional radio networks the league announced last week. The Big 12 will provide four transmitters that will allow a low power frequency inside Municipal Auditorium and Kemper Arena at the conference basketball tournaments – women’s at Municipal March 5-7, 9 and men’s at Kemper Arena March 7-10 in Kansas City, Mo. This will enable the fan to bring a transistor radio (walkman, etc.) to the arena and hear his/her radio network or any of the institutional radio networks during the tourney(s). Frequencies for those who bring transistor radios will be announced over the public address at the games and posted on scoreboards. This will be available for every game of the men’s tourney and March 5-6 of the women’s event.

[schooner2]

Too cool. I'm adding walkman to my packing list. I suppose when ISU is in there it will get too raucous to hear what is being said over the radio http://hoopscoop.net/ubb/smile.gif

[YCN]

Great idea!

Now, if they could do something about those 6.5 kilobit internet broadcasts, which have far less quality than regular AM radio. Most everyone has at least 56K modems these days, and 20 kilobit audio with buffering would sound pretty close to FM, and wouldn't threaten continuous dropouts from buffer underruns.

Right now what bothers me about these ultra-cheap netcasts is that you cannot really hear the sounds of the court or the crowd. It is a very diminished form of content delivery only slightly better than teletext.

Let's put it this way - the broadcasts at 6.5Kb mean less than a grand total of 8 megabytes streamed to your computer in 2 hours, which costs very little. It is so little that advertising income FAR outweighs the price of the bandwidth. If the conference and the schools could understand that part of the way to foster interest (and therefore attendance and donor attention) is to provide a quality delivery of their sports product to the fans who tune in (and we aren't talking about millions of people here) then common sense dictates that penny-wise, pound-foolish drastically applies to this situation.

BTW, my computer can typically download the entire bandwidth of a Yahoo 2-hour broadcast in well under 90 seconds, and I am far from the fastest guy out there. I can stream CD quality audio without even being aware of a bite out of my concurrent browsing speed.