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GREENSBORO -- Much like a giant communications company, N.C. A&T is bundling an Internet package. The university's Webcasting of its home football games intends to offer a service to its constituency and real-life work experience to its students.

And all without making anybody wait in a queue.

A&T is using football season -- including today's 1:30 p.m. homecoming game against Morgan State -- as a free trial run for what it hopes will be a subscription-based model of live-event video streams. If the logistics progress, a schedule could be firmed up as soon as the upcoming basketball season.

Links to today's game will be available on various university media: the institution's general Web site (www.ncat.edu), the athletics Web site (www.ncataggies.com) and an athletics donor locale (www.thevictoryclub.com).

The concept took shape when Aggie Stadium's new scoreboard was constructed and an accompanying video system was installed in 2005. The university then had the means to offer three camera angles to viewers in the stadium, and it knew it could integrate that video into an Internet feed.

Bruce Clark, a lecturer in the school's journalism and mass communication department, is the de facto producer and a liaison between students and technology. He staffs the events with as many students as possible.

"It's an excellent opportunity to give the athletics department exposure and to give students hands-on training," Clark said. "A very important component to this is to make sure we keep students involved."

In the past three years, Clark said, several A&T students have accepted internships or full-time positions with ESPN. The bottom-line benefit is cost containment; Clark estimates total expenditures of $15,000 in 2008.

Students operate the cameras, oversee graphics and ensure that the university's servers can handle the traffic, which has ranged from 300 to 600 viewers per game. Homecoming is expected to top those numbers because of its historical importance to an alumni base that, like the rest of America, may find its travel restricted because of economic circumstance.

Clark's technical partner in the venture is Carter Bing, whose title is converged networks video manager. Suffice it to say Bing knows what he's doing. In 2001, two think tanks named him one of the 50 Most Important African-Americans in Technology.

"He's the man. A brilliant engineer," Clark said. "We provide the audio and video sources; he encodes and decodes the information and distributes it to the server, which allows it to go to the public."

We'll take his word on that. We do know that event streaming at A&T made its debut at commencement exercises in December 2004 and has expanded to other venues.

With the technology in place, the project needed a marketing arm. Former A&T baseball player Walter T. Johnson, owner of a Greensboro-based firm called Stage One Entertainment, took that charge and is the play-by-play man on the broadcasts. His foil is Alan Hooker, who still holds the Aggies' career records for overall completions, touchdown passes and passing yardage 21 years after he played his final game.

"We've still got things we need to work out -- servers and other technical stuff that I have no idea about," said Wheeler Brown, A&T's athletics director. "(Johnson) came to me with the idea of doing this for profit. This (football) season we're trying to work out the kinks."

Nationally, the concept is not entirely new. UNCG is in its second full year of Spartan All-Access, which will offer more than 100 events between fall, winter and spring sports during the 2008-09 school year.

Clark said he has received feedback from soldiers in Iraq who enjoyed the games. People with presumably less stressful jobs in Canada and England have offered their thanks as well.

"We have gotten great response from people from all parts of the country," Clark said. "They think it's a worthwhile endeavor."

Contact Rob Daniels at 373-7028 or rob.daniels@news-record.com