If there is one thing Pat Kraft has learned in his time at Indiana University, it’s that Hoosiers fans have an insatiable desire to watch, read or hear anything and everything about their athletic teams, particularly basketball. A new emphasis on video via athletic department Web sites is helping fill that void.

“Our fans want to know what’s going on,” said Kraft, who played linebacker on the IU football team in the late 1990s and is two months into his role as senior assistant athletic director for marketing on the Bloomington campus. “So anything we can do to educate them and bring them a little closer to the action is very important to us.”

The evolution of athletic department Web sites allows fans that access. Once just a dumping ground for rosters, scores and team photos, some universities have found another revenue stream with subscription-based video.

Kraft said that from a 90-day period from April to July, IU’s video-on-demand content had 16,190 hits. Exactly what those traffic numbers mean is still an unknown, although the more eyeballs on the site, the better.

“There’s no question that the Web site can be a money-maker,” said Joe Hernandez, associate athletic director for media and alumni relations at Ball State, which has seen a hefty uptick in merchandise sales on its site and offers a combination of free and subscription video. “We really made it a priority about three years ago and it’s started to reap benefits.”

With video and souvenirs leading the way, some schools are making as much as $1 million a year from their Web sites, according to Street&Smith’s Sports Business Journal.

Kraft said IU is in negotiations with Learfield, its multimedia rights partner, and CBS College Sports, its Web host, to give the site “a face-lift.” One of the issues still to be worked out is how much video content offered online will be free.

Some schools, such as USC and Nebraska, offer a yearly video pass for $99.95 that includes coaches shows, player features, live events and replays. At Notre Dame’s site, all of the video is free. IU video is currently free and Purdue offers some video free and some by subscription.

Purdue has frequent video updates — similar to local television news clips — to keep fans in the loop. One recent story was on the turf installation at the new outdoor football practice fields.

“A vast majority of our content is for free,” said Cory Palm, Purdue’s Web media specialist. “We’ve taken the idea that the most important thing is to get the information to our fan base and kind of run with that. We’ve seen huge implementation and focus on video the last couple years. The competition was doing it, so it wasn’t hard to see that’s where we wanted to go.”

Butler’s basketball fans are able to watch all of the Bulldogs’ non-televised Horizon League games for free on webcasts. Last season, the 15 highest-rated webcasts were for games involving Butler.

Butler’s consistent Associated Press Top 25 ranking has also given the sports information department the incentive to post stories and photo galleries on its site as soon as games conclude.

“That’s been huge for us,” said Joe Gentry, director of sports marketing at Butler. “There are definitely some added benefits to being ranked in the Top 25.”

Palm’s job didn’t exist at Purdue five years ago. But the idea that the athletic Web site is the window into the university — along with the added bonus of producing revenue in a time when universities are counting every penny — has forced schools to re-evaluate how and where they spend money.

Some schools, including Arizona State, Boston College and Ohio State, are finding a unique use for video as a marketing tool to recruit season ticket holders.

“The static (advertising) media buy of the past isn’t as successful anymore,” Kraft said. “We have to be smart with our dollars, and using the Internet allows us to speak directly with our audience. We know that they are interested.”