Earlier this summer I spoke with 34 conference commissioners in Dallas about the tremendous impact that live streaming video is going to have on their athletics programs and the colleges and universities that sponsor them. This disruptive technology is being all but ignored on most college campuses and presidents need to take note.

The problem for many small college presidents today is that their schools are becoming invisible to the general public because they are being ignored by the mass media. Ten years ago, newspapers, magazines, television stations and radio stations routinely delivered features about the achievements of students, faculty and athletics teams. A staple of college athletics public relations in fact was the "hometown" release that placed the school name in the newspapers where potential students would realize the connection of that school to the community.

Today, those same media outlets are all being negatively affected by the Internet. They don’t have the space, the time, the money or the interest to give free publicity to small colleges and universities. That means the responsibility for telling a college’s story is now falling onto universities’ resources, which typically are inadequate to meet the challenge.

In Dallas I asked the conference commissioners, and later athletics directors, what percentage of the people who know about their university learned about it through their college’s Web site. Nearly everyone said 90 percent or greater. That is a significant admission. Already, awareness of their university’s existence is falling almost entirely on their own resources.

I then contacted several prominent small universities and asked them to research the following question: What percentage of the visitors to their Web site go to the athletics section? The response I received was in the 25 to 30 percent range. However, of the 10 most popular pages on those schools’ sites, five were athletics pages.

So what is wrong with that? The problem lies in the fact that the athletics Web pages at most schools are maintained solely by overworked, underpaid, poorly supported, sometimes part-time employees who are generally talented young people just out of college themselves — sports information directors.

The remaining 50 percent of the top 10 pages on college Web sites are maintained by highly trained, highly paid, full-time public relations and marketing professionals who have the use of professional photographers, copy writers and consultants and are responsible for creating and maintaining an image of the university that drives student enrollment and alumni giving. It may be time to rethink the allocation of resources — human and financial —-between traditional media (brochures, mailings, and other printed materials) and the popular new audio and video media.

The resource imbalance is bad enough today, but what happens when a college starts to stream live video of its sporting events?

Ten years ago, most colleges were totally unprepared for the emergence of Web sites as the disruptive communications technology they became. Back then, the athletics department was the first campus unit to have a Web site — not by choice, but in response to competition from other schools.

The responsibility for Web site development, content and management was literally "dumped" on sports information directors because no one else on campus would take ownership of that important opportunity. The turnover in sports information over the past 10 years has caused