I had this email exchange yesterday with Tina Yokoyama, Customer Service Specialist (khyokoyama@berkeley.edu)


Tina,

Any word on the CMS webcam? It's already been almost a week since you said it was being worked on. Lots of folks look forward to seeing the progress on a daily basis (I'm one of them). Now, with the long outage, it has become a subject of derision and ridicule for many on the fan blogs. Bad PR, too, at a time when the department needs all the positive energy it can create.

Her reply:

The Memorial Stadium webcam is temporarily offline due to technical difficulties which are being looked at by the company who oversees the webcam maintenance. Unfortunately we do not have an ETA for when the webcam will be operational again but we do not intend for it to be permanently taken offline. That is all I have heard from our media team thus far (and I've been checking in with them often) but hopefully it will be operational again within the week. I can assure you that once it is back live, you will see accelerated progress from the last update that was shown! Thank you for your patience!



Go Bears!

Tina

Is Tina Yokoyama the only proactive member on the AD staff that responds to queries? They should have someone go out there once a day to take photos of the field, north end, south end, as well as the westside stands and post them on the official Cal website until the web camera is once again operational.

...the webcam issue burns me, but it burns me for reasons that go waaaaay beyond just the inability to see the daily progress on the renovation. No, for me, the webcam's "temporary unavailability" is a microcosm of all that is wrong with not just Cal athletics, but the University of California at Berkeley as a whole.

Here you've got a simple, cheap tool in place to keep fans apprised of construction progress. As the progress continues, the excitement builds, and maybe some folks who were on the fence about season tickets decide to hop back on the "Rebuilt Memorial" bandwagon. Then, without any forethought, you disable the camera, irritating the diehards, and doing nothing for the casual fan who might have checked the camera now and then. And, to add insult to injury, the better part of 2-3 weeks pass and the problem has not been rectified despite numerous inquiries.

My beef with Cal (the institution) is that there seems to not be an urgency about many other things besides webcams.

Example 1: Fundraising is haphazard instead of being a unified voice and format from a central development office. Once a decade or so, Cal mounts a massive fundraising campaign, but in the intervening years, fundraising is a joke compared to the solicitations I've received from my graduate schools.

Example 2: Branding. I know we've covered this ad nauseum, but there are so many variants on the school's name / logos. It boggles the mind that we have not settled on some standardized approach. In all the years, how can it be that the flagship school in the crown jewel of public higher education in this country has not come up with better branding? I will never understand why Texas is always "Texas" and Michigan is always "Michigan," whereas California is alternately Cal, California, Cal-Berkeley (ugh!), Berkeley ("that's our academic brand"), UC Berkeley, UCB, etc.

Example 3: as an undergraduate, I loved my experience, but the administration did not exactly make it easy to get through unscathed. No one is asking for hand holding, but the administrative side of Cal was at times bureaucratic and highly impersonal when I was there. That has to impact future donations, by the way.

Again, a long rant, but this webcam silliness touched a deeper, more sensitive nerve.

Amen, brother! You are correct on all accounts. It's pathetic.

Well stated, BBB.

It is a simple thing, but important as Cal tries to sell the ESP seats and remake the image of the ATO. Many of our fans are excited about coming back to Memorial. I was probably checking the webcam every 2-3 days.

Unfortunate that the webcam has not been fixed in a reasonable timeframe.

I tweeted Jeff Tedford about this issue last week, but he tactfully avoided addressing it in his Q&A.

Looks like they finally fixed it. 'Control Camera' is showing an image from yesterday.

I just checked the control camera because you said it was live. Hehe. Unfortunately the last pic was taken at 12:30am. I can see the press box and stadium proper have electricity and lights show through the tunnels. I will have to look again tomorrow morning so I can see the progress since June 6.

Good to see the camera back in service. Looks like they are putting in the field.

dinan3;841901982 said:

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Ugh, unbelievable! It took them two weeks to post a note assuming our patience. At least we know that they know that we know the Web Cam is not working.............

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Working!

^ about time!