Hoop Streams Score Major Points with College Basketball Fans

XOS Technologies, Inc., the leading technology provider for maximizing the value of content, commerce and services for sports organizations and fans, today announced that a growing amount of sports fans who can t travel to NAIA tournament games are finding an appealing solution in the growing trend of broadband parties.

NAIA schools such as Kansas Wesleyan University (KWU) in

Salina have opted for an alternative to expensive and time-consuming game travel. Thanks to a streaming partnership between the NAIA and XOS Network, a business unit of parent company XOS Technologies, KWU was able to implement the NAIA Official Invite package for a group broadband party.

We decided to hold two group viewings for both Round One and Round Two, said Heather Smith, KWU Dean of Student Life. We were able to do this at no charge to the student body and we had a great turn out. Both times we drew a crowd of nearly 200 fans!

Smith said the XOS broadband streams provided an opportunity to foster additional buzz and excitement for the school s basketball team. We made an entire event out of these broadband parties, she said. We offered refreshments and held a Best Dressed Fan contest where we awarded stadium blankets among other fun prizes to the winners.

In addition, the school leveraged the second broadband party to include sports fund-raising and donated nearly $200 in concession funds to the KWU baseball team, who attended the event to work the concession stands while cheering on the KWU basketball team. We re really glad we decided to do this for our fans, Smith said. Everyone had a great time, the stream quality was exceptionally high and we used the opportunity to reinvest into another one of our outstanding teams.

Thanks to schools such as KWU, the NAIA more than doubled its basketball streaming subscriptions halfway into the 2007 season, when compared to its total subscriptions for the entire season last year.

Broadband video continues to become more prevalent and widely accepted as the quality improves, said Harry Stiff, XOS vice president of consumer marketing. Fortunately for XOS, we began our streaming services by leveraging optimal feeds of the best digital video content. We then offered these video streams to fans exclusively through our Network partnerships with more than 150 leading sports organizations, including the NAIA.

The NAIA and XOS will continue to stream through the semifinals on Monday, March 19.