Alums Keep Tabs on Teams Via Cyberspace

To listen to his beloved LSU Tigers play football, Andy Johnson took to the streets, driving around the Boston suburbs on a Saturday night and tuning in on his car radio.

His wife thought his behavior was a little odd, but Johnson knew he wasn’t alone.

“My wife has no idea what college football in the South is all about,” said Johnson, 33, of Swampscott, Mass. “I told her there were probably people all over doing this.”

For Johnson and thousands of other frustrated fans who try to follow their college teams from afar, the solution may be just a mouse click away on the Internet.

“We’re their connection to salvation,” said Mark Cuban, president of Dallas-based AudioNet. “Alumni are just going gaga over it.”

Cuban’s year-old AudioNet helps relay live radio broadcasts each week for more than 80 schools, from Division I-A Miami to Division III Albion College.

On a home computer with audio capability and the right software, fans can usually enjoy clear, AM-radio-quality sound.

“It’s basically like being able to listen to the radio, but you can listen to it anywhere in the country or anywhere in the world,” said Dharm Guruswamy, 24, an Atlanta resident who uses the service to follow his alma mater, Maryland.

Fans unable to watch their teams on television have long relied on creative ways to follow games, whether it be a sports ticker on TV, a costly telephone service or a friend’s phone beside a radio in another city.

Since many people pay a monthly flat fee for unlimited Internet use and the software is free, costs for a service like AudioNet are relatively low.

The broadcasts use Progressive Network’s RealAudio software, which encodes the sound, transmits it in data packets over the Internet, decodes it on the other end and then plays it back, all within seconds.

“This is exactly the kind of things we would have hoped would come out of this technology,” said Jay Wampold, spokesman for the 2-year-old Progressive Network. “This is a great use for it, to have the ability for people to listen to games who otherwise wouldn’t be able to.”

Fewer than two dozen schools had their games online at the end of last season, but the selection expanded greatly this year. Cuban expects more than 100 by the end of this season, and many schools will also offer basketball and other sports.

“The Internet is another medium for us to get our name out there,” said Jon Jackson, sports information director at Southern Methodist. SMU’s Sept. 9, 1995, game with Arkansas was the first to be broadcast on the Internet.

Guruswamy listens to Maryland games and coach Mark Duffner’s weekly talk show from a Georgia Tech computer lab.

“It’s just really convenient,” the graduate student said. “There are some games that aren’t televised and it actually gets me into school to get some work done for two or three hours, unless the game is a blowout.”

Rutgers University officials had no idea their games had entered cyberspace through broadcaster WOR until happy alumni began calling. The athletic department soon will begin promoting it in all its alumni mailings.

“It’s excellent and it costs me nothing,” said associate athletic director Kevin MacConnell. “It’s a no-brainer.”

That was the idea, Cuban said.

“We wanted to create a scenario where there was one place to go where you could find almost any college football game and it had to be something unobtrusive for the schools,” Cuban said. “It had to be easy to do.”

The broadcasts were the brainchild of Cuban and partner Todd Wagner--two frustrated Indiana alums who found it hard to catch all of the Hoosier basketball games.

“We said, ‘Let’s see if we can make it happen over the net,’ and we started running with it,” Cuban said.

On a recent Saturday, more than 75,000 people tuned in to listen to nearly 50 college games, with some games attracting as many as 5,000 listeners, Cuban said.

AudioNet generates revenue from web-page advertising and commercials that run when a user connects to a game. Commercials specifically aimed at the Internet audience could eventually be dropped into the broadcasts.

“This gives us the opportunity to reach people who are outside the standard radio audience,” said Roger Gardner, general manager of the sports division of Learfield Communications Inc. of Jefferson City, Mo.

The company holds the broadcast rights to Arizona, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Purdue and Wisconsin games and makes them all available on the Internet.

“We don’t have a full appreciation of where this will be able to take us in terms of marketing,” Gardner said. “We’re really in the infant stages of this thing.”

John Hook, 36, of Knoxville, Tenn., used to spend as much as $15 to catch the end of a Penn State game through a pay-to-listen telephone service. Hook, who occasionally uses the Internet service, hopes the technology progresses beyond improved audio.

“In another two or three years, I expect to be able to pull in the television broadcast of the game right through my computer,” he said.

The Web site for AudioNet broadcasts is https://www.audionet.com.

Games broadcast by Learfield Communications are available at https://www.gamecruiser.com.

The RealAudio software is available at https://www.realaudio.com.