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Sports broadcaster finds online audience
Jon Wekkin is a sports broadcaster whose play-by-play accounts of Twin Cities high school and college sports aren’t carried on any TV channel, cable network or radio station.
Instead, Wekkin and a team of professional announcers broadcast games at , where the menu includes live and archived hockey, football and basketball games, plus a smattering of wrestling and volleyball. Hundreds of viewers watch for free on nights when the website broadcasts multiple games simultaneously, most produced by a company crew on site.
Webcasting, or streaming live video and audio over the Internet, is hardly new. But in the age of YouTube, Wekkin’s Minnesota Sports Broadcast Network (MSBN) appears to be offering the most extensive high school sports webcasts in the Twin Cities. Schools pay $1,000 a year or more for the service.
Wekkin, MSBN’s owner and CEO, got the idea while he was a communications student at the University of Minnesota in the early 1990s. He was struck by the fact that rural high school sports were broadcast by local radio stations, while metro area high school games were rarely broadcast.
“It isn’t profitable enough for these bigger-market stations to incur the cost of sending broadcast crews to high school games,” said Wekkin, who started MSBN in 2005 using his own money and what he could borrow from relatives. “But with advent of web streaming, my thought was that I could use it to do multiple games simultaneously, which a radio station couldn’t do.”
“No one in the country was doing this when we started,” Wekkin recalled. “Because there was no business to pattern ourselves after, we were out there flying blind.”
The niche has since attracted several competitors. Fox Sports North, a regional unit of giant News Corp., also streams some high school games using professional commentators, but it offers fewer total games than MSBN does. Because Fox does the games as a sidelight to its pro-sports work, it doesn’t charge schools.
Other web-streaming firms, such as Webcast America of Annandale, Minn., and Stretch Internet of Mesa, Ariz., charge Minnesota schools for less-extensive webcasting service that doesn’t include the computer and camera equipment or the production expertise that MSBN provides.
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