Reserve Game Footage

[BornCaley]

Im sure there are many of us out there who follow the fortunes of the reserve team as well as our youth teams.

I for one would like to see footage of our reserve team games.

I think both of the OF show reserve games on their respective TV channels, but we probably dont have enough of a fan base for a subscription based TV channel. However i do know some team websites in France/Spain show reserve games on their site

Im going to ask this as part of the Boardroom Banter to get an official response.

thoughts?

[PullMyFinger]

thoughts?

I think you're pissing in the wind, good idea though. We can't afford to broadcast the first team let alone the reserves.

[Scotty]

Dont need to broadcast it, just make footage available.

[Guest birdog]

I would hope that, being a professional top flight club, ICT record these sort of matches for training and team selection reasons. It would not be too hard to upload short highlights to the official site and would maybe even get a few more people visiting the official pages.

[caley100]

Only time i've seen camera's at a reserve game is when the old firm are up, and thats only for their own tv station on setanta.

Maybe some dedicated soul will record it, edit it and upload it to Scotty or Don for the online fans, mind you having seen a few reserve games they really would need editing!

[RossP]

A short highlights package would be a good investment on the main sight I feel. Even a small subscription of a few ? a month would pay for the equipment, wages and time involved in recording and editing 5 or so minutes of reserve games. For many overseas fans, this would be the only way they may see footage of our players playing against teams outwith the Old Firm (without the use of Arabic channels or Setanta).

[davie]

Something like this? http://www.oddgrenland.no/article.php?Id=1...;Template=oddtv

Shows the highlights during the week after a game, a wee speil by the Manager and bobs your uncle. The guy who does it says that it's dead cheap and brings in loads of visitors to their web site. BTW, they have a fan base the same size as ours.

Edited March 18, 2009 by davie

[BornCaley]

sounds like we are in agreemeent.

regarding the cost of a camera, easy!...all you need is a digital camera and an editing suite.

and as Sotty says, just make the footage available on here or the official site..

I think the Boardroom Banter thing is locked so may the Mods can include this in their next meeting

[Scotty]

OK, this is a subject where I have done a fair bit of research ..... There are a few issues with various aspects of online broadcasting whether it is audio or whether it is video but the biggest stumbling block for the club would likely be bandwidth costs. I have made a few suggestions to Kenny and hopefully he will pass these along.

Copyright

The club have non exclusive rights to use video footage from the likes of Setanta, BBC etc for display on their site, they also have the right to broadcast live audio worldwide using their own or BBC commentaries, and live video feeds outside of the UK.

Technology

The technology required would depend on what the service offered would be. At its most basic level, the club could provide the video highlights of all games after the fact. This would be a very basic setup and just requiring of them to make clips available to registered members either for free or for a small subscription fee. It would probably be similar to accessing something like YouTube but paying for the privilege !

The next step up from there would be to provide the same clips and add on a live audio feed. the technical aspect of this would not be that complicated if they used the BBC feeds as they would just stream it from their website instead of the BBC. Again this would need to be member based as the feed can be geo-blocked depending on who the opposition is if not streamed from either club's site.

The whole hog would be a package with the option of live video, live audio and archived highlights. This would basically be ICT TV and would require a fair bit of thought as well as hardware/software, personnel and not least probably some significant hosting and bandwidth expenses.

Existing Agreements

PTV - the suppliers of the club website - offer a platform for providing this kind of service. You may have seen it on other PTV sites. I dont know what their rates are like, but over the last few years when asking the question about online coverage, the answer has always come back to cost so I assume it has been looked at and deemed too expensive for the potential returns. I also do not know what is in the club agreement with PTV ... could they actually start providing coverage using their own proprietary platform without breaching any contract agreement ? Did they consider this issue when agreeing the contract ? Was it even an issue at the time ?

My suggestion to the club was basically to start small. I am in the middle of revamping a site I have been playing around with since Toronto FC came into being and it contains photos and video from TFC games. Its nothing special, but users can login and look at all the pictures or view the videos in a YouTube style - nothing too fancy or complicated.

It would be a very short leap to form some sort of joint venture - a fans/club partnership if you will (like Hibs Interactive) and create a site similar to this for ICT as a test and see how it worked. If it fitted the bill, then it could be scaled up to include audio feeds and even live streaming video. However, once again, the biggest issue is bandwidth costs. We have unlimited bandwidth on here but sacrifice a bit of speed to get that. If we wanted unlimited bandwidth coupled with lightning fast speed we would have to pay an appropriate charge to get it (and we cant afford that )

The club will get there in the end, I am sure of it, but its baby steps right now ..... and it needs to be something that will potentially pay for itself either through subscriptions or a combination of subscriptions and sponsorship.

[Renegade]

I had a wee look a this stuff a while back and I see Falkirk offer live coverage of all home games for people who live outside the UK for ?4.99 a month. On the whole though I reckon ICT just don't want to do this.

[Scotty]

interesting.

However, what is also worrying is that the component they use for registration for the service has well know (SQL injection) security vulnerabilites that as of yesterday have not been fixed even though they were first reported in June 2008 !

If I was advising ICT, I would certainly suggest they ask Falkirk how they can provide such a service for that price, but steer well clear of that particular subscription component !