The American Saddlebred Horse Association (ASHA) has announced plans for its upcoming live video streaming Internet webcasts for August and September, following its very well-received Lexington Junior League webcast in early July.

According to Will Wood, Technology Manager, the ASHA will again offer live Internet coverage of all events at the Kentucky State Fair’s World’s Championship Horse Show from Freedom Hall in Louisville, KY, from Sunday evening, August 17, through World’s Grand Championship Night, Saturday, August 23. This will be the fourth year of the coverage pioneered for the breed by ASHA, each of which has drawn larger and larger viewership.

In addition, Wood said that an exciting new addition to the ASHA schedule had been made, for the All American Horse Classic from the Indiana State Fairgrounds, September 2-6, 2008. Included at that competition are the rich American Saddlebred Registry Sweepstakes classes, as well as Grand National, Hackney futurities, important United Professional Horsemen's Association events, the Indiana Futurity, and the All American Cup weanling and three-year-old classes.

Pricing and sign-up information will be announced shortly. Any pay-per-day revenue above expenses goes toward Saddlebred promotion and investments in new technology and enhancements to the Association’s website at www.saddlebred.com.

Wood added, “Thanks to the success of our previous video streaming efforts, we’ve been able to adopt some new technology that will enable us to add selected new events in the future, and cover them better than ever. We are emphasizing ease to the viewer, and availability to more viewers than ever before, since now Macintosh users and those with Internet browsers other than Internet Explorer can receive the programming without most of the problems that have been apparent for them in the past. We have also taken steps to enhance picture quality, which depends a great deal on the transmission line capacity we can arrange at the originating site. For the Lexington show, we were very pleased with having had only a very few trouble spots, and almost all our viewers were extremely pleased with the innovations.”