All-Access | by Pat

A few days ago, UND.com (the official ND site) announced a major revamp of their coverage of Notre Dame football, with a drastic increase in the amount of content and multimedia, and best of all, that it would all be free.

Looks like the first piece of this overhaul is here, in the form of a new multimedia page. According to the release, the media player will be upgraded in the coming weeks (which is nice) but for now there are a number of videos that should keep you busy until Media Day on Sunday kicks off the 2006 season. There are individual game highlights from the 2005 season, highlights of the 1988 and 1993 seasons, a Rockne locker room clip, the Top 20 plays in ND history, and a bunch of other stuff.

I have a suspicion that this "free" access has an expiration date; I hope I'm wrong. But this is great, and long overdue. Notre Dame has a wealth of historical footage and video and it's nice to see the University making it available.

UPDATE: just talked with someone at UND.com, and we've learned that there are no plans to charge an access fee for any of this stuff going forward. So that's good.

One bit of bad news: unfortunately, the Air Force game is still going to be pay-per-view online via CSTV.com. Apparently it's in the contract with the MWC and CSTV that if the game is streamed, they charge a viewing fee, and there's nothing ND can do about it.