By Jim Junot, Sports Information Director
Virginia Union University
CoSIDA Technology Committee
One of the main issues facing all schools is getting exposure on television. We've been lucky at Virginia Union, with the men's basketball team having a national prominence.
But television exposure is a rare commodity. Even local stations only have a few minutes each day to convey the entire day's sporting events. This means that many schools are left out.
Posting video to the internet is also prohibitive. Many schools don't have the bandwidth to handle large video files.
Enter Youtube.com.
Youtube.com is a web site that I came across one day while monitoring my kids' internet activity. It was one of their favorite places. My son was able to see soccer clips from all over the world, while my daughter could watch music videos.
"Youtube is like MySpace with video," my daughter said.
An idea came to me. If people can post videos of their cats, why can't I use it to profile VUU's athletics?
VUU is a small private school (1,700 students) in Richmond, Va. But even with the success of the men's basketball program, television coverage of Division II basketball is rare, and in other sports it's non-existent.
What if I could use YouTube as a way to bypass the limitations of television coverage and showcase our athletic program? How much would it cost? Could it be a source of revenue generation?
A quick visit to YouTube.com answered the first few questions. YouTube, as it turns out, is ad-driven, so it's free to use.
You'll need to sign up for a free account. That can be done by going to YouTube.com, and clicking "Sign Up." On the Sign Up page, you'll need to enter a valid e-mail account, a user name, a password (twice), your country of origin, postal code, your gender and your date of birth.
Be careful to unclick the box that says "Sign up for the Weekly Tube e-mail" unless you want to receive a weekly e-mail about YouTube. The final step is clicking the "Sign Up" box and you're ready to go.
The way YouTube works is that it takes video in Windows Media format, and then converts it to Flash video. The only limitation is that the original file cannot be larger than 100 MB or 10 minutes in length.
At VUU, we don't have a television production department, so the creation of the videos was the next step. This is surprisingly simple. I used a Sharp Viewcam camcorder with an S-Video port. S-Video is better than composite video because of the picture quality.
The only cost involved was a video capture device. Video capture cards can be bought at most department or electronic stores for under $50. I use an All-In-One video capture card for my desktop, and a Dazzle Fusion capture device which attaches to the USB port on my laptop for road games.
The software to create the videos is also free. Microsoft.com offers Windows Movie Maker as a free download for IBM PCs.
There's the entire set-up, and the cost is $50 or less.
I used the 2006 CIAA Football Roundup as the setting. I recorded head football coach ArringtonJones III and CIAA Commissioner Leon Kerry.
So now I had the footage and the software. There was one final piece.
How could I use this to generate revenue?
I took a page from other video web sites such as AOL and MSNBC. I noticed how those organizations put 15- or 30-second commercials before the start of each video. I reasoned that if they could do it, I could do it also.
I received a 30-second television commercial from the school about fall enrollment. That was my opening piece.
After creating the video, the size was 83 MB and seven minutes in length, plenty within the parameters of YouTube.
Uploading is simple also. After signing in, the last tab on the right of the screen is "Upload." You give your video a title, and a short description. You also need to fill in the field called "Tags." These are search parameters that help people find your video. You can enter as many as you want, separated by spaces.
You chose which category YouTube will place the video in, and in most cases you'll probably use "Sports."
Once you're done with this, you'll go to Page 2, where you'll choose which file from your hard drive will be uploaded. You'll also choose whether to make the video Public or Private. Choose Public if you want the world to see your video. Once you've done this and tell the upload to begin, YouTube does the rest. There is an interval of about five minutes where YouTube processes the video and makes it available to the public.
One more important thing, and I consider this the best aspect of YouTube.com.
Once the file is processed, you can go to "My Videos" section of YouTube and see your video. On the right of the screen is the term "Embed." If you copy this code, you can then paste it into a web page on your school's server. This can be on any page, and it's seamless, so any visitor to your site will see your video on your school's web format. The only thing is a small YouTube "bug" in the lower right corner of the screen.
At VUU, we're planning on using this for all sports.