US college football teams adopt digital game film swap

18.09.2006
As the 2006 college football season gets into full swing, the Texas Longhorns not only have a new freshman quarterback, Colt McCoy, they also have a new way to exchange game film with their competition.

"Last year it was mandated through the Big 12 that we would all be doing Internet exchange for the 2006 season," said Mike Arias, the video coordinator for the Texas Longhorns. "How we used to do exchanges of game-day films for our next game is they would go out on Sunday. You'd have to get up at 5 a.m., find the earliest flight out, send the film out, then wait for the team you were playing next to send their last game to you. That film wouldn't get here until two or three, or even five or six in the afternoon on Sunday, then we'd have to go in and analyze the film."

Arias said the Longhorns and most of the other Big 12 schools now use Orlando-based XOS Technologies Inc.'s Internet Exchange Solution to more quickly and efficiently transfer film over the Internet. XOS uses a file transfer product from Lexington, Mass.-based Ipswitch Inc. to deliver its product.

Using the Internet2 consortium's high-bandwidth Abilene Network -- which each university in the Big 12 Conference is connected to -- video of entire games can be downloaded in less than two minutes per gigabyte of data. That allows teams to begin game preparations earlier in the week, saving them time and money and making it possible to operate more efficiently both on and off the field.

"In the time-intensive and highly competitive sporting environment our partners operate in, the rapid turnaround and successful transfer of extremely large files is critical," said Raymond Thompson, Vice President of product marketing at XOS Technologies, said in a statement.

"So we've eliminated having to travel to an airport, which sometimes took an hour and a half to two hours' travel time; we eliminated having to wait all day to receive an exchange," Arias said. "On the Internet, if it takes me an hour to move a 19GB file and it's at 10 o'clock at night and I'm done by 11 on Saturday night, I'm basically 15 or 16 hours ahead of schedule. So this technology has drastically improved our capabilities and what we do and XOS was a huge partner in all of this.