For the past several years, the ISC Network has produced multiple camera coverage with full commentary for 24 games from the annual ISC World Tournament. In 2015, we upgraded the streaming to high definition.
Due to increasing costs and limited available sponsorship dollars, the ISC has made the difficult choice to slim down the production of its streaming program in order to continue to make our games available for free to all fans worldwide.
With the North American economy still in recovery mode, and most of the sponsorship dollars coming from sponsors who already support their teams, we find ourselves at a crossroads with the program.
Other options considered for 2016 were:
• returning to the pay-per-view model, which the ISC utilized in 2010 – 2012,
• providing “play-off only” coverage of the final two days
• not streaming any games at all
While the pay-per-view model has been used increasingly at international championship tournaments, our preference has been to try to secure sufficient sponsorship such that we can bring the games to our fans at no cost. However, this means balancing meeting the needs of our fans around the world who want to watch the ISC World Tournament with the reality of increased production costs.
The “play-off only” coverage option that would include multiple cameras was seriously considered, however the production costs were still prohibitive at best and, due to a last-minute change of circumstances at our production provider, this option was also ruled out. Coverage would have been limited to only Friday and Saturday of the World Tournament, meaning fans would miss the bulk of the action during the week.
The third option really isn’t something that we want to consider, as streaming is essentially table stakes for most world-class international championship tournaments.
Therefore, we made the trade-off to go with the single-camera production with full commentary to provide broad coverage of at least 24 games throughout the World Tournament.
We encourage you to follow all of the games through live-scoring on the ISC website at www.iscfastpitch.com via Pointstreak and trust that you will continue to enjoy the free streaming on the ISC Network.
For additional information, please contact:
Larry Fisher
ISC Executive Director
iscfastpitch@gmail.com