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Broad audience WeMedia bringing Paralympics to the web
Updated: Monday October 16, 2000 12:26 PM
By Luba Vangelova, Special to CNNSI.com Unlike the IOC, which barred webcasters from events in order to protect the interests of television rights holders, Sydney Paralympics organizers sold both television AND webcasting rights to their Games. Therefore any Internet user with a 56.6K or faster connection will be able to watch live coverage of Paralympic events at his or her desktop. The official Paralympics webcaster is We Media, a U.S.-based multimedia company that publishes WE magazine and a web site (http://www.wemedia.com) for the disabled community. (We Media also bought the U.S. television rights to the Paralympics; it will produce highlight packages for CBS Sports, Fox Sports Net, and Pax TV.) The company will begin webcasting half an hour before the opening ceremony on Wednesday (7:30 p.m. Sydney time, or 4:30 a.m. EDT). It will then post up to three simultaneous streams of mostly live coverage on its site throughout the 11 days of competition. The streams will run from 9:30 a.m. until 9:30 p.m. Sydney time (6:30 p.m. the evening before until 6:30 a.m. EDT). The rest of the time, visitors will be able to watch archived video footage that they can start, stop and skip through at their leisure. Those with slower modems will be limited to We Media's non-video coverage, which will include results, standings and feature stories. The length and depth of the web coverage will mark this as a landmark Internet event, says Rick Gentile, We Media's executive producer. The company has practiced webcasting smaller events -- such as the U.S. Paralympic track and field and sailing trials -- over the past six months. "We learned a lot about what graphics are readable and what kinds of camera moves are compatible with Internet coverage," Gentile says. "And we're still learning." We Media will use the host broadcaster's feeds (provided free to rights holders) and supplement them with its own footage. In addition to cameras stationed at the four "live" venues, We Media will rely on six crews it can deploy as necessary to tape events elsewhere. From a visual standpoint, webcasting is still less reliable than broadcasting, Gentile says. So the audio "is critical," he adds. "That's why we hired very experienced television commentators." Gentile says We Media has "absolutely no idea" how many viewers the webcast might attract. The company is advertising its Paralympics coverage on billboards in Sydney and three American cities. A handful of other web sites (including CNNSI.com, on which wemedia.com is paid sponsor of the site's Paralympics section) have also arranged to link to its site. We Media will have spent about $20 million on its Paralympics television and web projects. It expects to recoup only about $5 million of that in revenue from its television packages and various corporate partnerships. But Gentile says direct profit was not the company's goal. The Paralympics are the "most dynamic and galvanizing" event for We Media's customer base, he says; the company hopes the webcast will be "a traffic builder and a 'put-er on the map-er'" that will lead to future business deals. "Success or failure will not be determined by the size of the audience so much as whether we can pull this off," Gentile says.
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