BANGOR, Maine — On the hardwood at the Cross Insurance Center, John Bapst High School and Old Town High School are battling in basketball. A small crowd is in the seats of the cavernous auditorium.
Many rows above the floor, Dale Duff handles the play-by-play announcing as a video camera tracks the game action.
Duff has been one of Maine’s leading sports broadcasters for years. But this game isn’t going out over TV or radio.
Instead, it's being live-streamed, available to be watched by fans of the schools anywhere they can connect online.
And it's one of 14 Maine high school games being streamed this day by WHOU.live.
The live-streaming operation is based in Houlton and has become the dominant provider of high school sports broadcasts in Maine.
“We will end up, by the end of the year, doing something around 1,800 broadcasts around the state,” Fred Grant, owner of WHOU Radio and WHOU.live and founder of the live streaming business, said.
“We’ve covered basketball on radio for decades," Grant said “And I thought we could try video on this. So we added video, pulled audio from the (radio) announcers, and we were off.”
Twelve years later, the live streaming has expanded to cover games in many parts of the state, all fed over the Internet into the WHOU Houlton office, where a team of producers watches them, adds scores, graphics, and commercials, and then sends them out on the live stream. Grant said they can sometimes be streaming as many as eight games at the same time.
Adding video to what had previously just been radio coverage, he said, was an instant hit with fans.
“It’s a big difference. There’s that tradition of radio, but for them to actually see what’s happening…and being able to see the faces of the kids and people in the stands really makes a stronger connection, not just to the home team but teams around the state. It's really quite remarkable,” Grant said.
At first, Grant was just covering games in Aroostook County. But he soon saw the opportunity to expand. That’s why he hired Duff to coordinate game coverage with schools in the Bangor area and handle many of the play-by-play duties.
“In the early days of streaming," Duff said, “Coaches didn’t like it because opposing coaches could watch the stream and scout and not have to travel. So there was some pushback.”
That, he said, has turned around.
“Now today every coach wants a stream so they can watch it," Duff said.
WHOU.live is a business, and Grant said they initially hoped commercials would cover the costs, but that didn’t work. So they tried a different approach: make the viewers pay.
“Three or four years ago, with the approval of MPA (Maine Principals Association), we switched our model to a subscriber base. So for $10 a month, someone can sign up and watch the games. And it's really the subscribers that allow us to cover as much as we do.”
He said there are “thousands” of subscribers. Some join just for a month or so, others for the full year.
They have added more schools to the streaming list and expanded this year to cover regular season games in the Portland area.
Grant and Duff both said the demand for live-streaming high school events “exploded” when the COVID pandemic hit, and that interest hasn’t waned.
WHOU.live covers virtually all high school sports—basketball, hockey, and cheering in winter, football, soccer, and volleyball in the fall, baseball, softball, lacrosse and even track in spring. They also cover some graduations and musical performances.
“People want to see the teams and the players and want as much as they can get,” Grant said. “So it keeps the best part of our communities and the best parts of our schools connected. There’s something authentic about high school sports and high school activities that you can’t find in any other sport as far as I’m concerned.”
Duff said the streaming lets those connections extend far beyond the local area.
“People now want to see the game wherever they are. I hear all the time from grandparents out of state, down to Florida for the winter, brothers, and sisters off to college," Duff added.
All of them, said Grant, are now able to connect to the kids back home and cheer them on.
He plans to expand to more schools and more games next year — and maybe sooner.