The Ebays and YouTubes are a-changin'
UNC has announced it will be relaunching the athletic department web site on July 1st as GoHeels.com. Here is the official release.
As Tar Heel fans enjoy the summer and prepare for the 2012-13 athletic season, Carolina Athletics is proud to announce the relaunch and redesign of its official website. Beginning on July 1, the new official home of Carolina athletics will be GoHeels.com.
Working with Tar Heel Sports Properties, a division of Learfield Sports, and digital media partner NeuLion, the new GoHeels.com will be your official destination for everything Tar Heels, continuing all the great content of TarHeelBlue.com while adding new and improved features to enhance your online experience, including:
A sleek new design created to deliver the latest in UNC sports and offer engaging ways for fans to interact with all Tar Heel athletics programs.
Increased access to what fans want most on the GoHeels.com homepage, including video, social media, featured writers, shopping, score updates and more.
GoHeels TV will replace Carolina All-Access and offer an enhanced video destination and more ways to watch Tar Heel sports than ever before. During the 2012-13 season, GoHeels TV will have select live events in high definition available to watch on your computer and the soon-to-be-released iPad application.
Also, launching this August, GoHeels mobile & tablet apps will be available for download on your iPhone, Android and iPad. Carolina fans can stay up to date on all Tar Heel news, scores, schedules, photos, rosters, live audio, and video on demand on the go.
T.H. at Carolina March has a full history of UNC's athletic department presence on the web including how GoHeels.com came to be owned by UNC. T.H. also points out that Duke has created a website for accessing its statistical databases. I totally agree with him that UNC needs to replicate this as soon as humanly possible. One change I am hoping for on UNC's new site is video which can be embedded. It is much easier to do it that way than write a post with a link in it. The downside to embedding is you lose traffic since viewers can go to other sites to see the video. There also might be various limitations when it comes to video of games but the ability to embed press conference video and such would be nice.
The shift to a new web host could be significant since NeuLion markets a particular focus on online video, something that UNC does quite a bit of from press conferences to broadcasting non-revenue sports. One change I am hoping for, in this regard is video that I can embed here on the blog. As it stands now none of the video on UNC's official site can be embedded on other sites unless they post it to YouTube as has been the case with the new football videos.
Speaking from the perspective of this blog, UNC's move away from Tar Heel Blue means the acronym THB will ultimately fall out of use for the official UNC site and we can essentially adopt it for our own use both here and on Twitter.