North America is famed for its addiction to football. In fact, almost all of its college institution has its own teams. Even when it’s a small campus, it has a team of burly athletes that slug it out on the field. These teams have their own complete non-football crew. For instance, it has a team of enthusiastic cheerleaders and brass band. It might also be surprising for third-world countries, but almost all of these institutions have their own standard football stadiums. These venues are filled into the rafters when tournament time comes once every year. Most popular stadiums, those that have capacity of more than 60,000, are The University of Michigan’s Michigan Stadium, Penn State’s Beaver Stadium, University of Tennessee’s Leyland Stadium, and Ohio State’s Ohio stadium. With all these elements combined, it forms a microcosm of the American society and shapes local culture in outskirts of America.
The importance of collegiate tournaments is slowly being felt. Televisions are starting to broadcast important North American collegiate leagues. These tournaments are also becoming the focus of media attention. Big-times Super Bowl champions are more often discoveries from these small leagues. This in turn pushed for the broadcast of live football collegiate games in televisions and in the internet.
Now that football mania has spilled to the rest of the world, it is becoming imperative among media sources to think of other ways in providing the demand for videos. In the internet, this is addressed by Coolstreaming. Coolstreaming is a new software application for Internet TV that utilizes P2P technology. P2P technology is characterized by two things: lower bandwidth and cheap broadcasting.
In streaming videos on the internet, broadcasters have to meet demand by allocating bigger bandwidth to their website. In layman’s terms, users demanding for videos in an Internet TV will bug down the system due to sheer number. The scale of audience will crowd the system, making the website unavailable most of the time. P2P technology, which is utilized by Coolstreaming, addresses the issue by chopping bits of video content into smaller packets. These packets travel to individual personal computers hooked in the network. These computers will share some of its bandwidth as it receives video content, because they are as well transmitting video contents to other members of the network. By dividing the bandwidth requirements, video streaming becomes cheap. Broadcasting is not anymore a sole role for providers, but for users as well. Inexpensive transmission of videos means anyone can share video information to anyone around the world.
CoolStreaming does not require any additional hardware in personal computers. It runs on Windows programming language, which is found in almost all personal computers around the world. It is also compatible with universally used media players like Windows Media player and Real Player. Live football games can then be played real time in PC.
With Coolstreaming, collegiate live football games are not a monopoly anymore of TV broadcasting stations. Videos about the games, especially live coverage, can be accessed through Internet TV platform such as CoolStreaming.