[Patrick Seeney]

I agree, there needs to be one unified network, or at least a scalable model that teams can adopt, or even organizations (such as FIRST in Michigan). The biggest downside I see to current methods, especially Ustream, is the ads that we are subjected to. We are letting ustream make money off of people viewing FIRST events. If we were able to cut out the middle man, we would open up the possibility to getting some big sponsors other than the typical technologically related sponsors. Imagine if Coca Cola sponsered a bunch of regionals in exchange for x amount of times for their commercials to run as well as maybe a banner ad on the regional webcast page. I think that you could run these webcasts like college sport events. In between matches when there is down time you could cut to 30 second commercials of the big sponsors that support the event. If say Coca Cola was sponsoring the broadcast, they could have a little watermark somewhere, or in the score board like you see on college sports.

I think this could also allow for teams to create 30 second promo's about their team, that way for the teams at the regionals, those could play during the in between matches and during timeouts. THis would give teams that nobody knows about a chance to be featured for 30 seconds, and the viewers at home could feel more connected to teams. This could also open the doors for another award category for best promo video. With the amount of matches that go on at each regional, teams could all have their promo videos play at least once.

In the end, the web is the future of online media. It used to be that media was produced for TV and then repackaged for the web, we are currently starting to see the opposite. With the amount of content on the web, and with many shows saying "check out our website for more content," it would seem logical for this to follow the same path. By taking out the middleman (ustream) we can use the money that could be generated from the ads that we all see to be invested in broadcast equipment that could travel from regional to regional.