I noticed this as well when it came on after our game the other night and we were still bringing in the feed at work. I would like to know from anyone in the Athens area if the video is clean, or if it hitches there, as well.

I also noticed not all the video did it, it seemed to be mostly video that we had acquired (WMU footage, wherever it came from, looked fine). It shouldn't be a format incompatibility, as both WOUB and STO are broadcasting in 1080i.

What it looks like to me is a simple field dominance issue.

What do you mean by "our"? That was a Kent home game, so that would be their people doing the stream, no? Or the conference. Wouldn't be us, right?

ESPN3 or mac-sports.com? Either way, could be bandwidth to your house (ISP, congestion in the neighborhood if you're on cable), bandwidth in your house (other users, wifi signal strength if a computer was moved, etc.), or other computer resources (RAM, etc. -- I've often found closing my browser entirely and restarting it during halftime helped quite a lot with ESPN3 streams for football games this fall; Flash can be very prone to memory leaks).

Most streams will continuously evaluate how well your computer is keeping up with the video playback and adjust accordingly (usually streams are delivered in small chunks, which would account for the 10-second improvements - in all likelyhood the program thought, "hey, lets give the higher quality a shot," then said, "nope, not working well enough, back down we go").

I haven't watched it in a long time, but the last time I did it was sent as an interlaced, SD feed which when upscaled without being deinterlaced will look awful.

It needs to be sent out in 1080p and letting whoever rebroadcasts it deal with the translation. That could be done in a matter of minutes with free software, but seeing as how my job is to watch television and I see people whose job it is to know how to perform this simple act not know how to do it, and in this case it's kids who aren't being paid or are being paid very little...