Contingency Plans

Yea, these are the times that try men's souls. The Big Ten Network is probably not coming to many people who would like to watch the Appalachian State game. But the internet is here to help.

Options other than the bar:

1. MGoVideo. Remember MGoVideo.com? You should. It's pretty cool: a bittorrent tracker focused exclusively on Michigan athletics. I have emailed the site's operator about plans for the opening weekend:

Something should be up about two or three hours after the game. I've suggested a 1.5GBish avi and then maybe a DVD later in the week for big games but I don't have any clear agreement with the uploader yet.

Torrents tend to go faster when more people are active on them and there are plans for FTP sharing to get a number of seeders up and going, so this has the potential to be a relatively rapid answer to the problem. You probably wouldn't get the game down until Sunday morning, but it's not like Appalachian State or EMU is really in doubt anyway. I will post a link to the torrent as soon as it becomes available on Saturday. For you to take advantage of it you'll need to download one of the many BitTorrent clients -- I use Azureus -- but from there it will be a matter of clicking and waiting.

Positives: reliable, good quality copy of the game.
Negatives: takes a long time. Dubious legality.

2. Sopcast. I don't know much about this "sopcast" thing but I do know that soccer dorks use it to watch games from all over the world thanks to the the valiant efforts of a few guys with massive upload bandwidth. Essentially, it's a slingbox that you broadcast to the internet at large. I don't have the time (arrrgh previews arrrrgh) to set this up myself, but anyone with the technical ability and resources to set up a sopcast of Appalachian State, please let me know and I'll put up links to the appropriate items.

Positives: immediate.
Negatives: could blow up. Scalability questions. Dubious legality.

On the "dubious legality": no one's going to track you down because you downloaded the Appalachian State game. At some point copyright owners might attempt to shut down the trackers or sopcasters, but there's no precedent for anyone taking action against a downloader AFAIK. Unless you are really amazingly paranoid it should be of no concern.