A new webcasting contract signed by Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) last month could force the Streaming Sports Network (SSN) to pack up its camera crews in Canadian schools.
Until now, SSN held the webcasting rights to all the CIS national championships, except football, in addition to webcasting many regular season and conference games in three of the CIS’s four conferences.
But SSN’s contract expired at the end of the 2011-12 season and the CIS signed a new three-year contract for the national championships with American webcasting company Stretch Internet, effective immediately. That puts SSN in a precarious position, according to owner Bengt Neathery.
“Basically without having at least 40 per cent of the schools as well as the national and the conference championships, it’s not possible to get the advertising you need to sustain the cost,” he explained. “Without the national championships, it would not be possible to attract a national sponsor.”
Neathery said that the loss of potential ad revenue means that the company may be forced to shut down.
“It jeopardizes everything,” he said. “It basically puts it out there that we might have to wrap the whole thing up.”
For the CIS, the move to Stretch Internet will take university sport webcasting “to the next level,” said Michel Bélanger, the media relations officer for the CIS. The Canada West conference already uses the company for its webcasting, and is partnered with over 50 NCAA Division I schools in the U.S.
“They have tons of experience,” Bélanger said. “In everything that they do, whether it’s offering live stats during the game and all kinds of features, they’re really at the forefront of everything and they’re really a company that’s going to take us to the next level in webcasting.”
Even though the CIS chose to move away from SSN, Bélanger credited the company with getting webcasting in the CIS off the ground.
“We were nowhere when it came to broadcasting the CIS championship,” Bélanger said. “SSN built the CIS webcasting brand into what it is today so for that we’re always going to be thankful to them.”
While the switch to Stretch Internet won’t necessarily save the CIS much money — Bélanger said they’ll still spend about $40,000 on webcasting this season – it allows for the money to be spent differently.
SSN was directly involved in the production aspect of the webcasting for over half of the championships, Bélanger said. But the new model with Stretch means that the host schools, most of which already operate their own cameras, will simply need to send their stream to Stretch for the webcasting. The CIS no longer has to cover travel costs to the championships for those involved in the webcasting.
“We polled all the hosts and all of them said ‘no, we don’t need any help on-site,’” Bélanger said. “We always knew that this is something that would happen but we didn’t think it could happen this quickly. We realized we could move to a model where our schools were doing all the production.”
But that hands-on approach is something SSN prides itself on, Neathery said. The company works with students to put together the stream, and provides opportunities for camera operators and commentators at each school.
“The goal . . . was to try to put out a good product and let students, not only the athletes but also the [journalism and communication students] who are involved have a place to hone their crafts, and that’s going to be lost,” he said.
Neathery said that as of right now, SSN will continue to webcast their partner schools’ games while the company explores its options.
“It’s still pretty fresh so we haven’t decided to wash our hands of it or not,” Neathery said. “We have to do a lot of budgeting, a lot of people put their heart and soul into this on our end, it was a heartbreaker.”
Shelley Coolidge, head coach of the Carleton Ravens women’s hockey team, said that the potential loss of SSN during the regular season and conference playoffs would be damaging.
“From a women’s hockey perspective, we were very supportive of SSN coming in to broadcast our games,” said Coolidge. “It’s an incredible opportunity to get women’s sport into a place where our girls’ games can be viewed and it’s not something that was typical in female sport in general.”
And helping athletes is a part of SSN’s mandate, Neathery said.
“The whole idea was to generate revenue through sponsorship and advertising that we can put back into athletic programs and bursary funds for athletes,” he said.
“That was the entire goal, plus it was to give some legitimacy and credibility to university sport, and have the athletes being complemented by again the journalism students, communications students, the different people on campus, the different volunteers, the community builders that wanted to get involved, to play their part. So it wasn’t just simply streaming games.”
Neathery also acknowledged the financial considerations that the CIS no doubt took into account when signing the new contract.
“I think it’s important to know that the CIS does the best that they can do,” he said. “They’re under tight constraints as well. The CIS has moved to a simplified model where the host school bears the cost of doing the broadcast and simply sends a stream back. That’s the less expensive way of doing it.”
“However, we’ll see what the product ends up to be,” he added.
Stretch Internet will make its CIS streaming debut in November with the women’s rugby and field hockey national championships.
