Raycom Sports has chosen Swarmcast to provide the backend infrastructure for live Internet streaming during the 2009-10 season of all Atlantic Coast Conference football and basketball packages. The Swarmcast Autobahn Live platform, which Raycom Sports relied on for streaming of last year’s ACC basketball tournament, will be put to use every weekend.

The rights landscape in college athletics is more perplexing than the triple-option play — and that’s before social-media applications like Twitter and Facebook enter the conversation. This season, fans are reporters, reporters are fans, and a photo collage for a personal blog can constitute copyright infringement. The nation’s toughest — and, recently, richest — athletics conference, the Southeastern Conference (SEC), attempted to get ahead of the curve this season by releasing a stringent (anti–social-media) policy but has since retraced its steps. The current version of that media policy targets the commercial use of game film, but the debate about where social media ends and copyright begins rages on.

Last Saturday, the Navy Midshipmen football team nearly upset Ohio State, one of the nation’s true powerhouses. And while the Midshipmen showed up with fighting spirit that nearly overcame superior talent, they also had another weapon: Panasonic P2 HD camcorders, which have improved coach and player analysis of practice and game video.

The Big South Conference has been successfully streaming live events from all its member schools for three years, but successful streaming is no longer enough. Rebranding its broadband channel from The Big South EDGE to the Big South Network and upgrading to the NewTek TriCaster Studio, the conference has increased the production values on all 600 events that it will stream this year, beginning with more than two dozen on Labor Day weekend.

The Southeastern Conference is home to many of the nation’s largest athletics powerhouses, and the video content owned by those institutions has thus far been a largely untapped resource. This year, however, XOS Digital is helping those schools tap into that store through the XOS Vault, a digital-asset-management system that serves as a backbone for the SEC Digital Network.

The Sept. 12 matchup between college-football powerhouses USC and Ohio State will be transmitted live from Columbus, OH, to the Galen Center on the USC campus. There, invited guests will view the game projected using Sony SXRD 4K technology.

This is the first in a series of weekly articles by David Lind, Executive Producer, WIUP-TV, going behind the scenes at Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s TV production of the school’s 11-game football season. Lind offers insight into what it takes to produce college-football coverage in a cost-effective manner. Here, he gives an overview of his program and tells how the first game went.

For the 2009 football season, Kitay Productions has increased its stable of clients, bringing high-quality productions to mid-major football scoreboards up and down the East Coast. In addition to Saturday-afternoon productions at Towson University’s football stadium, Kitay Productions will now be producing scoreboard shows for the U.S. Military Academy (Army) and Columbia University. Also new to the company’s client roster this season is American University, for which it will produce a variety of video content.

XOS Technologies’ XOS Digital division teamed up with NCAA Football, the National Football Foundation, the College Football Hall of Fame, and hundreds of collegiate partners to produce new syndicated television and DVD series Great Moments in NCAA Football, which will debut the week of Sept. 14.

An Ikegami GFCam HDS-V10 flash-RAM HD camcorder and two Ikegami HDK-77EC native multiformat HD CMOS field cameras found a home in the HD-video control room at Boston College’s Conte Forum and Alumni Stadium.

Ithaca College’s Roy H. Park School of Communications in Ithaca, NY, purchased 20 JVC GY-HM700 ProHD camcorders from JVC Professional Products for its TV-production and cinematography courses.

North Dakota State University’s athletic program will use XOS Vault technology from XOS Technologies’ XOS Digital division to capture, preserve, tag (with specific game-related data), organize, manage, and distribute its collective sports history in digital format.

Two days, 12 hours, 120 interviews with Football Bowl Subdivision coaches? ESPNU will attempt that feat with its ESPNU Coaches Spotlight Special Presented by Dick’s Sporting Goods, which will air Monday, Aug. 31 and Tuesday, Sept. 1, from 2 p.m.-8 p.m. ET, hosted by ESPNU anchor Lowell Galindo.

ESPNU will follow ESPN’s College GameDay Built by The Home Depot to three sites as part of its new one-hour series, ESPNU Road Trip, which will kick off Saturday, Sept. 12 at 9 a.m. ET from Columbus, OH, when No. 4 USC visits No. 6 Ohio State.

The Men’s Lacrosse Rules Committee plans to experiment with instant replay in televised games this season.

Indiana University’s Memorial Stadium is getting several pieces of audio-visual and sports technology equipment in its north end zone, with the integration being handled by XOS Technologies.

SportsNet New York will kick off its live coverage of Rutgers University football Saturday at 3:30 p.m. ET, when the Scarlet Knights host the Howard University Bison in Piscataway, NJ.

The Atlantic Sun Conference announced today that it will re-launch its ASun.TV (www.asun.tv) service through a revamped agreement with NeuLion, Inc. (TSX:NLN). ASun.TV Web casts approximately 600 regular-season and championship contests annually. The internet broadcasts feature a variety of A-Sun sports, including all home men’s and women’s basketball games. Schools also produce and air multiple soccer and volleyball games in the fall, baseball and softball in the spring, and even selected special events such as graduations.

Mitch Green joined The Mtn.—MountainWest Sports Network as supervising producer, where he will coordinate and produce all facets of the regional sports network’s live event production for Olympic Games sports telecasts, as well as producing select football and men’s basketball games.

Daktronics will design, manufacture, and install a new integrated video and scoring system at Alex G. Spanos Stadium on the campus of Cal Poly, home to the school’s Mustang football and soccer teams.

Leave it to football coaches to spoil the fun. That might be stretching a point, but a few years back, some in their ranks noted their players' obsession with video games (the "Madden NFL" and "NCAA Football" games in particular) and suggested that these games might serve as terrific teaching tools. And after that, it was only a matter of time before the line between work and play was blurred.

MSG Varsity, the Cablevision Systems-owned Madison Square Garden Network spinoff dedicated to high school sports, will launch on the cable operator’s New York-area systems Sept. 24, Todd Spangler of Multichannel News reports.

Fox has signed a four-year contract extension to show the Cotton Bowl, keeping the network involved in college football, according to SportsBusiness Daily.

Aggressive stadium owners looking to keep their facilities occupied and cost-effective are landing a handful of major-college football games, most recently inducing Indiana to play a Big Ten matchup with Penn State in Landover, Md., next season. But those moves are likely to remain more exception than rule.

J-E-T-S JETS JETS JETS! Even if you're not into sports, there's a pretty good chance you've heard that chant before. And there's a pretty good chance you'll be seeing a lot more of it if Gary and AJ Vaynerchuk get their way. That's because they want to start a trend that every New York Jets fan uses the #J_E_T_S_JETS_JETS_JETS hashtag on Twitter before games and after every touchdown. And guess who is behind the idea: The New York Jets.

Ohio State's men's basketball team couldn't go to Italy. Otherwise, Ohio State's nearly $120 million athletic department has navigated the current economic climate while barely breaking stride.

After spending the offseason lobbying Congress for greater access to college football's richest postseason games, the Mountain West Conference will have a chance to make its case on the field with a handful of showdowns against teams from leagues with automatic Bowl Championship Series bids beginning this weekend.

With Michigan investigating allegations of NCAA rules violations in its football program and a possible NCAA investigation to follow, the Wolverines could face possible sanctions because several players leveled the same charges.

The most successful college in the country has no athletic program. Perhaps it is a scary harbinger of the future to realize that the business of college athletics may someday be out of business.

The AT&T Cotton Bowl announced a new four-year contract with FOX Sports that will bring the game into prime time for its 2011 bowl after next season.

Up until Monday afternoon, the future of the state’s biggest college football rivalry was at risk. That’s when the announcement was made that the series had been extended for the next 11 years and returned to its rightful place: Denver.

City rivals Pitt and Duquesne will play the final college basketball game at Mellon Arena on Dec. 2. The schools held a news conference this week announcing that Duquesne has agreed to move its home game to Mellon Arena, which is scheduled to close next year.

Instead of gearing up to run cross country for Grove City High School in Ohio, Andy Bennett is training for a marathon.

Central Michigan University recently approved the proposed renovation of Rose Arena and its surrounding facilities. The Events Center, as it has been dubbed thus far, carries a $21.5-million price tag.

Six of Duquesne's eight scheduled televised men's basketball games this season will be against Atlantic 10 Conference opponents, the league announced today. The Dukes' A-10 schedule is highlighted by an ESPN2 game on Feb. 21 against Dayton at 1 p.m. at Palumbo Center.

With professional sports teams cracking down on social networking Web sites at their practices, now the Southeastern Conference (SEC), one of the nation’s leading college leagues, has entered the fray.

Notre Dame football fans will soon be able to stream live games—or relive the school's past pigskin glories—via their iPhones.

Oregon athletic director Mike Bellotti expressed disappointment and frustration Friday regarding the multiple replays of the LeGarrette Blount punch shown on the big screen at Bronco Stadium immediately after Thursday's game.

Six news organizations sent a letter last week to the commissioner of the Big Ten Conference protesting provisions of the athletic conference’s 2009 press credentials policy that they say will restrict how journalists cover conference sports.

Florida sports fans weren’t the only ones hooked by the University of Miami Hurricanes’ 38-34 triumph over the Florida State Seminoles Monday night, as ESPN said the college football game averaged 5.82 million households and 8.406 million viewers, based on a 5.9 rating, Susan Miller Degnan of The Miami Herald reports.