The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Take Me Out to the Internet? Tune in to Baseball on the Web

Tuesday, Sept. 5, 1995, was a day to remember in cyberspace. It was on that day, at 4:35 in the afternoon, that the New York Yankees and Seattle Mariners made Internet history by commencing the first baseball game broadcast live via the World Wide Web.

The game was played in New York and carried on local radio in Seattle, but Internet users from Los Angeles to Lagos were able to hear the play-by-play by using freely available software called RealAudio and pointing their Web browsers at https://espnet.sportszone.com/, the hugely popular SportsZone site run by ESPN and Starwave. Such broadcasts are likely to be common in the future, underscoring both the importance of sports as an Internet subject and the significance of multimedia in the Internet’s future.

Regular readers of this column know all about RealAudio (distributed on the Web at https://www.realaudio.com/), and how it solved the problem of users having to download huge sound files to hear even a few sentences on the Internet. With RealAudio, by contrast, users of the World Wide Web can simply click on a sound icon and play the recording it represents without any tedious downloading.

In my view, such technology eventually will make the Internet an alternative radio system, with no need for federal licenses or expensive broadcast towers, and no limit on how far any broadcast can reach. (Check out my initial column on this at https://www.caprica.com/~akst/.) Taking their technology a step further, the folks at RealAudio found a way to make their product work for live broadcasts, although it should be noted that the ball game won’t be the first time it’s been used in this way. Live RealAudio was demonstrated for a small group of listeners on Aug. 24 with the live broadcast of some remarks by Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates at the Windows 95 launch event in Redmond, Wash.

The Mariners-Yankees broadcast on the Internet is exciting, but Marconi’s reputation is unlikely to go into eclipse. The sound quality isn’t great, and although Internet users all over the world had access to the broadcast, the system was only able to accommodate several hundred of them at a time. Rob Glaser, president of Seattle-based Progressive Networks, which makes RealAudio, says capacity in the tens of thousands is a few months away. (Glaser is also a part-owner of the Mariners.)

All that said, it was still a thrill to listen to play-by-play of the first major league baseball cybercast, and from Yankee Stadium yet, where so much of baseball history has been made (and where I saw my very first game). The Mariners announcers, alerted to the momentousness of the occasion, took the trouble to welcome Internet users from all over the world, and between innings we all got to hear about traffic conditions on I-5 in Washington State. Live baseball on the Internet, playing even as I type! I begin to get a lump in my throat just contemplating the whole new vistas of time-wasting this opens up for me.

Along these lines, the baseball broadcast is just the latest sign of what a sports-crazed place the Internet tends to be. There are more than 3,000 sports sites out there on the World Wide Web, and ESPNet SportsZone is one of the most visited locations in any category, reportedly even outdrawing the Playboy site, with which it presumably competes for the same male Web surfers who make up a substantial majority of Internet users. The most popular sports sites on the Net are so busy, in fact, that you will sometimes find them frustratingly difficult to reach because of the crush of users.

SportsZone is content-rich and well-produced, offering sports lovers lots of free news and information (including current betting lines, for those so inclined). But if you’re willing to pay for the service, you get access to some columns and other features not available to those who haven’t paid. Subscriptions cost $4.95 per month, and I was able to sign up live using Netscape’s secure transaction technology, which encrypted my credit card and other information before dispatching it from my computer to that of SportsZone.

For all the fuss about SportsZone, though, my own favorite sports resource on the Internet may well be The NandO Sports Server (at https://www2.nando.net/SportServer/). Run by the Raleigh News & Observer, which has gone further in bringing its content to the Internet than just about any other newspaper, this is a great source of information about sports of all kinds and has the best baseball statistics, team and otherwise, that I’ve come across. (One note of caution: the NandO Sports Serve is free, but in requiring you to register, it demands to know your income, and then transmits this information unsecured.)

Other sports sites worth checking into include the new NFL site at https://nflhome.com/, where you can look up the NFL rule book in Dutch should the need arise, and Sportsline USA at https://www.sportsline.com/. Also, there’s the Fox NFL Web site, at https://www.foxsports.com/Sports/TV/index.html. This is not to say that big-money sports are the only kind on the World Wide Web. On the contrary, visit Yahoo, GNN or any of the other indexes, and you’ll turn up plenty on archery, canoe polo and footbag as well as basketball and football.

By the way, if you missed Tuesday’s Mariners-Yankees game on the Internet, you can install RealAudio and listen to today’s game between the same two teams, which is also scheduled for 4:35 p.m. For those who prefer football to baseball, the University of Oregon plans a live Internet broadcast of its opening home game against the University of Illinois live on Sept. 9 at 7 p.m. Point your web browser at https://www.goducks.com/.

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Daniel Akst welcomes messages at akstd@news.latimes.com. His World Wide Web page is at https://www.caprica.com/~akst/.

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Take Me Out to the Web

I expect that someday, all baseball games will be available live on the Internet. Until then, you can keep up with every single play by visiting the remarkable Instant Baseball site at https://www.InstantSports.com/baseball.html/.

Instant Baseball offers play-by-play descriptions of every major league at-bat in every major league game, thanks to a network of reporters in every ballpark. You can even get the play-by-play of your favorite team by electronic mail--though you may not want to explain to your boss why “Boggs singles to left” has suddenly flashed across your screen.