PigTV

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"When can I see paintball on Television?"

That was a common feedback question to the World And Regional Paintball Information Guide (WARPIG.com). In the spring of 1997 we came up with an answer – PigTV.

It's not about pigs, but it is TV. PigTV is Paintball Television. At a time when video distribution over the Internet was in its infancy, and it was rare to see more than a two or three minute clip, we started streaming full length television programs covering major events in the rapidly growing sport of paintball.

Our first webcast was 32 minutes in length and covered the combined National Professional Paintball League (NPPL) and Great Western Series (GWS) tournament in Las Vegas, Nevada. When we fired up our computers the next morning, our first piece of fan mail came in – from Finland – thanking us for conveying the look and feel of a professional American paintball tournament. We realized then that we were actually broadcasting to a worldwide audience – something that has traditionally required the power of massive corporations. Television was being democratized.

Over the years PigTV has used some of the most brutal of "guerilla production" techniques. The 1999 Las Vegas NPPL episode started with a night spent in a desert ditch, was shot with a compact camcorder, edited in a notebook computer, and uploaded to WARPIG.com's servers via wireless modem - from the desert in Nevada. Literally an entire production suite was packaged in a single backpack with no use of power from the grid or access to phone lines.

As Internet connectivity has matured, so has the way we have delivered PigTV. Early shows were streamed in heavily compressed, small video for 28.8 Kbps modem connections. These advanced to 56K, and eventually 200K streams for users with high speed connections.

We are proud to announce that as we head into our tenth year of webcasting paintball programs, PigTV is going broadband. We've more than doubled the size of the data pipe, delivering more than twice the resolution for a bigger, sharper picture with even better audio.

We've also done away with the need for player software to watch PigTV. Simply going directly to www.PigTV.net, or clicking “Video” in the menu bar at WARPIG.com will allow anyone with a broadband Internet connection and a web browser equipped with Adobe Flash and Java plugins to tune in and watch PigTV.

Following the untimely passing of the owner of PigTV's web hosting provider, PigTV programming was in a state of stasis for most of the 2006 season. However, now that we have set up and tested our new hosting and streaming solutions, the ball is rolling forward from tournaments that were shot over the year but not released, and also on new shows in pre-production that are going in a new content direction.

We are also busily converting past shows from their broadcast resolution masters for broadband delivery, meaning past episodes can be seen with a level of clarity that was not previously possible. Look for regular new releases of past shows in the coming months as we transfer over this library of more than 20 hours of paintball programming. In the process, audio re-mastering means that technical and historic interviews are that much easier to follow.

PigTV Classic episodes – shows from 1997 through summer of 1999 are still available to view online at dialup modem speeds, in Real Player format.

Looking forward to our tenth year of webcasting paintball programs, and taking advantage of newer technology to provide a more enjoyable experience in paintball education and entertainment, we want to say thank you to you, the viewers of PigTV who are the reason and the encouragement for us to do what we do.

Thank you,

-Bill and Dawn Mills – owners/publishers WARPIG.com

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