On Wednesday, Sept. 22, Whitman introduced a new video service allowing people to stream home volleyball matches live online. As the basketball and baseball seasons start, home games for each time will also be available to watch through the Whitman website.

Stretch Internet, the company with which Whitman partnered, works with various athletic organizations to provide them with streaming videos. Several other schools from the Northwest Conference already use Stretch Internet; George Fox University, Linfield College, Pacific University and Pacific Lutheran University all stream their videos via Stretch.

These games, however, are not free to watch. Viewers pay $9.95 to watch one game or $39.95 to have access to all the games of a single sport. A season pass for all the streaming videos costs $59.95.

Using a third party company such as Stretch Internet to stream video is not a the only option for sports coverage. Whitworth University streams all their videos with their own technology.

Whitworth has used live streaming video of their home games for four years now, according to Whitworth’s director of sports information Steve Flegel.  For Whitworth, the picture is not as big, but it is completely free.

They also have streaming video for more sports including: football, basketball, soccer, volleyball, softball and swimming. For the football and basketball broadcasts, they add radio play-by-play as audio.

According to Flegel the streams get decent viewership.

“We get 20-30 viewers per event for most of the sports,” Flegel said. “Football averages 80-100.”

For the past two years, Whitman streamed video of these games without using a third party much like Whitworth. The athletic department made the decision this fall to switch systems and brought in Stretch for assistance.

According to athletics director Dean Snider, there were two main reasons for this switch: video quality and support.

“The quality of the video needed to improve,” Snider said. “Stretch provides the technical support that we are not staffed to provide.”

This increase in quality and support gives a much more professional feel to the video streams than before.

Most students on campus see the price as too much to pay for access, particularly since they are free of charge to see in person.

“I don’t think that I would pay that much,” said sophomore Sara Behrens. “Especially since I am right here on campus.”

However, according to Snider, students on campus are not necessarily the target audience. Parents and alumni who do not have the opportunity to see the competition live make up a large part of the target audience.

“They have the chance to see their kids play even when they are not on campus,” Snider said.