Bandwidth cops making March Madness a little less mad this year
It’s that time of year again: March Madness is upon us. Surely, your own graphics department has already prepared brackets, ready to fill in when pairings are announced Sunday evening on CBS.
And then the games begin. First-round games on Thursday and Friday. Second-round games throughout next weekend.
And all of them — except Tuesday’s ‘play-in’ game — will be available for live streaming:
But will there be an audience left, once companies crack down on streaming video?
USA Today’s Michael McCarthy reported a couple of interesting anecdotes atop Thursday’s A1:
Jeff Withers, branch manager of Collins Electrical in Stockton, Calif., says he’ll use a tool called SmartFilter to block employees from the online coverage. “It takes up too much bandwidth. It’s not something they should be doing during work hours, anyway,” Withers says…
Paul Pominville, technology director for the Howell (Mich.) Public School District, says he is a huge sports fan but widespread viewing of the games on school computers nearly overwhelmed his limited network last year. He says he has no choice this year but to employ a filtering technology called Webwasher to slow streaming video of the games to a crawl. “I’ll make it so painful you won’t want to watch it,” he says. If he doesn’t, “I’ll have half the curriculum department in my office complaining.”
Think these guys are nuthin’ but Blue Meanies? Think again.
The problem of cube farm residents screwing around on the internet on the company’s dime is at epidemic levels. The Wall Street Journal’s Bobby White reported last week:
Carriage Services Inc., a Houston funeral-services company, recently discovered that 70% of the workers in its 125-person headquarters watched videos on Web sites like Google Inc.’s YouTube and News Corp.’s MySpace for about an hour a day.
“I almost fell out of my chair when I saw how many people were doing it and how much bandwidth those sites sucked up,” says Jeff Parker, the company’s information-technology administrator. He quickly blocked access to both sites.
So you can see why companies out there in USA-land might want to shut off the bandwidth gravy train.
But what happens when news breaks? White, again, in the WSJ:
Schemmer Associates Inc., an architecture firm in Omaha, Neb., tapped OpenDNS last year to block unwanted video after experiencing substantial network slowdowns. Scott Bennett, network manager for Schemmer, traced the problems to some interns who watched online videos on blogging sites and social-networking portals. In December, Mr. Bennett installed the OpenDNS system that categorizes and filters Web content.
Later that same week, the system received its first major test when a 19-year-old high-school dropout shot and killed eight people, including himself, at a shopping mall across the street from Schemmer’s offices. During the ordeal, Mr. Bennett says Schemmer’s employees wanted to watch online news reports, but were blocked. Without the new system, says Mr. Bennett, the network would have crashed.
“The system saved me from what could have been a huge problem,” says Mr. Bennett. “I had pretty much the entire office come over and tell me how upset they were at not being able to see reports online. And I told them, it could have been worse.”
How will newspapers — many of which are just now getting into online video in a big way — deal with companies essentially standing on their garden hose?
And where will it end? They’re cutting off streaming video now. But tomorrow, they could close off access to entire domains.
Our domains. The ones we’re counting on to bring in the bucks we’re no longer getting from our print operations.
I can see a day when news organizations bid to become the one-and-only authorized source for online news for specific companies. What would your paper pay to serve a captive audience in your town’s largest office building?
In the meantime, if you want to watch March Madness, you might fire up the ol’ Tivo instead. Sounds like you might not be able to watch it at your desk this year.
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GOOOOO EAGLES!
And a special shoutout to alumni or students at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C. By winning the Big South Conference title last weekend, Winthrop earned an incredible eighth trip — over the past ten years — to the NCAA Tournament.
Andy Burriss/The [Rock Hill, S.C.] Herald
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I worked as a student assistant in Winthrop’s Sports Information Department. My freshman year, in fact, was Winthrop’s third season of men’s intercollegiate basketball.
It’s been interesting to watch the program grow over the 24 years since I graduated in 1984.
Congratulations, Eagles!