Effective December 31, 2008, I will be drastically reducing my personal involvement in providing webcast production and consulting services, a move that will likely have the net effect — at least for the time being — of lessening the production schedule of Bullpen Media and D3Cast.

This is an extremely personal decision, and one that I will further explain here, but I also want to try and anticipate some of the questions that might arise from this announcement, as well as thank a number of people. This decision does require declining — and in some unfortunate cases, rescinding — some webcast production commitments, an outcome for which I genuinely apologize to the affected parties.

However, I do want to stress that there are some contingency and transition plans currently being developed, ones that will hopefully result in D3Cast's continuing ability to travel to, produce and webcast events through New England and the Northeast into the future.

It has been a crazy seven years since I first got the idea to expand radio coverage for Tufts athletics by creating a dedicated live webcasting site called JumboCast, which quickly led to adding video coverage, which then quickly led to opportunities (as D3Cast) to provide live video coverage of college and amateur events throughout New England, especially for the schools of the New England Small College Athletic Conference, for whom JumboCast and D3Cast have webcast over 30 conference championships since 2002. This has led to the chance to produce high-profile webcasts such as the 2006-2008 Head Of The Charles Regattas, and many NCAA Division II and III Championship events, both as D3Cast and directly for the NCAA. It has constantly been a fascinating experience for me, from both a technical and business perspective.

But the reality is simple, although its clarity to me has been embarrassingly slow in sharpening. Despite a increasing number of schools and entities that we've been fortunate to work with recently, Bullpen Media/D3Cast is still, at this point, a part-time job — a part-time job with bursts of a full-time (or more, at some points of the year) time commitment. In addition, I have a full-time job and a family, with two kids under the age of five. There is not enough time for me to do even a merely adequate job in all these facets of my life, and they have all suffered from my attempt.

And so, to prevent myself, and my family, from completely unraveling at the seams, I am going to take a step back for a while, to watch my kids' soccer games, have dinner with my wife, maybe even read a book or something. (I hear they're good.)

I do want to thank several people personally, acknowledging, of course, that in doing so, I may leave people out, an act which I assure you is an error of omission.

• To all of you who have watched our webcasts, thank you. Your emails of encouragement and thanks (and your countable clicking on our streams) have proven to the schools or entities writing the checks that their investment is worth it, and has made all of us feel like we were doing something groundbreaking and worthwhile.



• To all our clients, my many thanks for your continued business, and your patience and faith in me. Especially to you, I would say — hang on, we're working on ways to still get your events covered. Special mention to a number of NESCAC schools: Alex Kantor and Suzanne Coffey at Amherst, Gwen Lexow and Andy Walter at Bates, Marcella Zalot at Colby, Brad Nadeau, Erin Quinn and Rick James at Middlebury, Brian Katten at Wesleyan, Dick Quinn, Kris Dufour and Kris Herman at Williams. Also, my thanks to Andrea Savage and Dan Fisher of the NESCAC itself. (Although they've only been a client in NCAA tournament situations, thanks also to Jim Caton of Bowdoin for his help.) Also, thanks to Brian Granata and Russ Rogers at Stevens Institute of Technology, the Eastern College Athletic Conference, and the staff at the Head Of The Charles Regatta.



• To everyone that initially made JumboCast possible in the 2001-2004 timeframe, especially Neal Hirsig, Bill Gehling, Matt Penney, Ben Oshlag, John Casey (who built me a press box, he reminds me every time he sees me), the Board of Overseers for Athletics, including Steve Solomon, Nancy Stern and Dan Kraft, Trent Adams, and the generation of Tufts undergrads, led by Steve Poon (and now by Matt Kaufman, Jason Tarricone and Teddy Minch, among many others) that transformed it into a vibrant, independent student media organization at Tufts, thank you.



• To all the folks that have worked on our webcasts, my immense appreciation. You have tolerated my foibles well (or at least quietly); I’m sure you have no inclination to see a last-minute crew request, rat's-nest of cables or late payment from me again any time soon. Special thanks to Will Reigeluth, Andrew Kambour, to Leighton McLellan, Steve Cruickshank, Mike McKinnon and Natalie West (my spring 2008 interns) and above all, to Todd Bloniarz, who, for twelve years, has been an incredibly loyal, versatile and valuable colleague.



• Without getting the chance to work with Jim Akimchuk of CTN Media and Marc Ruskin of FASTHockey.com, this would have been a much shorter and far less interesting ride. Thanks for pushing me.



• Many people, including the ones listed above, have been intimately familiar with the ups and downs of Bullpen Media and D3Cast, and have provided assistance ranging from a sympathetic ear to large donations of their time, including Pat Coleman, Kala Danca, Derek Falvey, Chris Gervais, Matt Kaufman, Amy Kennedy, Jim McHugh, Steve Poon, Kevin Smith, Paul Sweeney, Jason Tarricone and Brian Young. Thank you. I appreciate your efforts, friendship, and counsel more than you can possibly imagine.



• And to John Servizzi: thanks for being so desperate for producers for the NCAA project that you were willing to overlook the fact that I had almost no live video production training or directing experience whatsoever, and that all I really knew how to do was run a TriCaster. Thanks for teaching me, for letting me learn on the job, for giving me the original glimmer that Bullpen Media could become an actual business, for the occasional (okay, frequent) Pelican box shipment, for our mutual sharing of struggles and successes, and for being such a good friend through it all.
  
  
• But most importantly, to my family, who have been, in turn, saintly tolerant and angrily protective as they have watched me try to careen through these past few years: thank you for your patience. I'm sorry it took me so long to figure out I couldn't do it all.

I have been unsuccessful in building an adequate infrastructure of people, equipment or capital to continue the business in its current form. I freely admit that my entrepreneurial instincts are not as keen as many of my other talents, and that I have too often run my small business like a hobby. However, as I said earlier, a transition plan is in the works, one that will hopefully keep live video of small college athletic events in New England on the web.

I'm still passionate about the concept of live video webcasts for small college and amateur athletics. I still believe that adding professional video production elements like instant replay and fancy scorebars with running game clocks to these webcasts at an affordable cost provides huge value to the presenting entities. And I still earnestly believe that there is a business model somewhere in here. And I will continue to help look for it — just without putting another 200,000 miles on the RAV-4 for the time being.

Questions

So who else can I get to do my games? As you probably know, the webcasting space – and most especially the "video production for webcast" space – is an extremely nascent market. One of the blessings and the curses about D3Cast is that there are currently very few similar outfits. However, feel free to contact me personally for suggestions.

Are you going to do anything in the webcast production space after January 2009? It is quite likely that I will continue to produce 6-8 NCAA Championship events a year for the NCAA, directly for their webcast production partner WebStream Productions. In addition, I am hopeful that our three-year relationship with the Head Of The Charles and the New England regional of the NCAA D3 baseball tournament will continue into 2009 and beyond, and I also may continue to do some work with FASTHockey.com. Beyond that, the thing I'm likeliest to do in the near future is to work occasionally with an outstanding new generation of student staff at JumboCast.

Can we still contact you about producing events? Yes, but only with the understanding that I may begin to more frequently exercise my heretofore vastly-underutilized option to say no.

What about the D3Cast archives? Events done after 9/1/2008 will be kept in the D3Cast archives for the length of their written or verbal agreement with the host institution. (The D3Cast archives will be re-populated as of 1/1/2009.) For the other, older archives, at this point, my best guess is that I will attempt to seed some sort of a peer-to-peer network with the archive files, to make them available for download. Something like a BitTorrent solution.

Other questions? Feel free to contact me.

Again, I wish to reiterate my thanks to all you – Bullpen Media and D3Cast's clients, co-workers and audience – for your business, your assistance and your support during this transition period. I appreciate your understanding while I catch my breath, however long that may take.

Sincerely,


Steve Clay
President, Bullpen Media