[olug] HuskersNSide Football WebCast

[Eric Penne]

The following is an email I sent to the people at Huskers.com:

You have a great site that I usually go to first when looking for
husker information. Why would you require me to use an internet
browser, media player, and operating system from a confirmed monopoly
to view the Husker game?  You will not see me sign up for a
HuskersNSide account because of this.  Even though RealPlayer uses a
proprietary codec they still produce a viewer for other operating
systems.  You should strongly consider not requiring Windows Media
Player and IE for broadcast of the games.  Using standards based web
creation will increase your readers.    Other browsers such as Opera,
Mozilla, and Netscape support these standards as does Internet
Explorer, therefore it doesn't make sense to only support one browser. 
Using RealPlayer as a streaming media format also makes sense because
then just one encoding server can support Windows, Mac, Linux, and
other platforms.  These other platforms make sense to support because
of the nature of approximately 10% of the viewers to this game will be
on campus.  The University of Nebraska has a very diverse computer
base.  Many of the viewers will be using MacOS and Linux.  Depending on
where your stream would be coming from it might be possible that most
of the traffic would be internal to campus and therefore not eat up as
much external bandwidth which would be much more efficient and allow
you to attract more external customers for the game.

Nevertheless, you have chosen to require software from a monopoly,
software that doesn't support all of the possible viewers/customers.

Eric Penne
Lincoln, NE
epenne at yahoo.com

=====
Eric Penne - epenne at ieee.org

One nation, under God, INDIVISIBLE.

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