Garrett Lanzy writes, on the ECAC Game of the Week via RealVideo,
 
> The good news is:  bandwidth isn't an issue.  The feed is 20KB/sec
> (allocated as 15K for the video stream and 5K for audio).  There
> shouldn't be any problem receiving it over a 28.8K (or faster)
> modem.
>
> That bad news is:  with that low of a bandwidth, the video is
> small and "slow scan".  (The resolution is 160x120 pixels, i.e.,
> 1/4 of VGA resolution, and the frame rate averages about 2 frames
> per second.)  It's a slight improvement over just audio, but not
> a whole lot.  At that resolution, it's very difficult to even make out
> the lettering on the screen when they put the scores up.
 
One of the drawbacks I discovered the one time I watched a cricket
match via RealVideo is that since they have the picture and sound from
a TV broadcast, the play-by-play is sparser, assuming you can see
what's happening, and so it's often worse than just listening to a
radio broadcast.  The ideal netcast would be sound from a radio
broadcast and picture from TV.  Unfortunately, no one puts that out,
and you can't really do the Jack Buck/Hank Stram Monday Night Football
trick of listening to one feed and watching another because you
wouldn't be able to get the time delays synched.
 
Did you encounter this problem with the ECAC RealVideo?  Or were the
TV anouncers more verbose than usual?
 
(BTW, I'll be looking forward to seeing it in any event; who'd have
thought I could watch ECAC hockey at any frame rate in Switzerland?)
 
                                          John Whelan, Cornell '91
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                                     http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/
 
"We've got a whole mess of penalties"  -- Cornell PA Announcer
   Arthur Mintz, after the Cornell-Union brawl 1998 December 4
 
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