Broadband TV - the way to watch the Premiership

[rangers00]

Last night, it was the first time I got the NFL Sunday Ticket experience of watching the Premiership.

And it's not on cable, not on satellite. It's on an IPTV platform. It's called NowTV in Hong Kong. It's not like Setanta broadband or ITVN. It's a platform from the telco that targets to grab a large chunk of the cable market. It's TV thru' DSL. In other words, you don't go thru' the Internet. And you get guaranteed bandwidth to get the video. In the U.S., a comparable service would be FiOS.

It's broadband TV into your home with a settop box. Of course, you can feed the video out to a VCR, PVR or a graphics capture card to a PC (I have all 3 options installed). The same DSL gives me the broadband TV feed as well as my Internet access.

I get all 10 games of the first weekend, LIVE. As a matter of fact, for the whole season, I'll get all 380 games live.

So while there is no Blackburn X Boro video available in the U.S., not even a torrent, the replay of this game is just starting on my TV while I am typing this message.

So while some people complain about having to watch Internet TV on a monitor, broadband TV doesn't have to go to a monitor.

Of course, you may ask "we have one channel on FSC, one on Setanta Sports USA, one on Setanta Extra, how can you have 5 games (of Saturday 10:00 EDT) live?"

NowTV has 10 channels dedicated to the Premiership. It's like Sunday Ticket/NBA League Pass. That's what a U.S.$67M/year rights fee get you, a completely professional distribution. And this is only for a city of 7M people. Compared to the U.S., where the rights fee for a country of almost 300M is only $20M per.

There are two reasons why NowTV's Premiership is much superior to Sunday Ticket:

1) Sunday Ticket's blackout rules prevent you watching the game. And you'll have lots of problem if the first game overrunning that prevents you from watching the 2nd game. For example, if your local channels shows Raiders X Jets at 10:00 and Chargers X Broncos at 13:15, DirecTV has been mandated to use the local CBS feeds instead of the national feed FOR BOTH GAMES. Since the Chargers/Broncos game on Sunday Ticket is forced to use the local CBS feed, if the Raiders/Jets game run beyond 13:15, you won't be able to watch the beginning of the Chargers/Broncos game. It's blacked out on the DirecTV NFL-specific channel that televises CHargers/Broncos. I've heard of cases that you can miss up to 1 quarter of the 2nd game.

2) NowTV has the interactive TV features that Sunday Ticket can definitely copy. You can have up to 4 games all available on 1 screen. Among the 4 games, you'll have the audio only for the 1 game you highlight. If your TV is big enough (the 50" species), you thus can watch all 4 games at the same time.


<<< MOD NOTE: References to previous pissing match edited >>>

[geordienation]

1) Sunday Ticket's blackout rules prevent you watching the game. And you'll have lots of problem if the first game overrunning that prevents you from watching the 2nd game. For example, if your local channels shows Raiders X Jets at 10:00 and Chargers X Broncos at 13:15, DirecTV has been mandated to use the local CBS feeds instead of the national feed FOR BOTH GAMES. Since the Chargers/Broncos game on Sunday Ticket is forced to use the local CBS feed, if the Raiders/Jets game run beyond 13:15, you won't be able to watch the beginning of the Chargers/Broncos game. It's blacked out on the DirecTV NFL-specific channel that televises CHargers/Broncos. I've heard of cases that you can miss up to 1 quarter of the 2nd game.



I believe that's only true if you're in that NFL market.

So, if you're in the Bay Area and Raiders/Jets goes long, Chargers/Broncos is still blacked out. But if you're in LA, it gets freed up.


And it's easy for Now TV to do that because they don't have any home market broadcasters they have to worry about. (They also have a product that fits neatly within a 2 hour window, so it's a little bit of an apples/oranges comparison in terms of runover).

How do you have it set up and how is it available in the US?

[rangers00]

How do you have it set up and how is it available in the US?

It's not available in the U.S. I don't live in the U.S. I live in a place where the Premiership is mainstream, much like the NFL in the U.S.

[HDSports]

It's not available in the U.S. I don't live in the U.S. I live in a place where the Premiership is mainstream, much like the NFL in the U.S.

I'm confused, since when is the Bay Area of the west coast not in the US?

My situation is different. Living on the west coast, there aren't too many satellites that I can access that carry foreign soccer (besides 97W and 101W). I don't have a BUD, but if I lived on the east coast, I would definitely get one. There would be an abundance of games transmitted from Europe to South America over the Atlantic satellites (mainly raw feeds), as well as games on South American channels themselves. Unfortunately, these Atlantic satellites are either below the horizon or need very low elevations from where I live (the Bay Area), so they are out of question for me..

[rangers00]

I'm confused, since when is the Bay Area of the west coast not in the US?
Nothing to be confused. The "live (the Bay Area)" should be past tense, not present tense. I tend not to worry about grammar in this forum, or you wouldn't see something like

"if your local channels shows Raiders X Jets..."

[geordienation]

It's not available in the U.S. I don't live in the U.S. I live in a place where the Premiership is mainstream, much like the NFL in the U.S.


Then you also live in a place (Brisbane?) where blackout rules don't apply because you're not in a home market.

[rangers00]

Then you also live in a place (Brisbane?) where blackout rules don't apply because you're not in a home market.

I don't think the blackout rule only applies to the home market. As far as I remember, the NFL mandates DirecTV to use the local feed for the Sunday Ticket package. Suppose you live in L.A. (without a local team), KCBS this week broadcast Raiders X Jets (10:00) and Chargers X Broncos (13:15). Suppose Raiders X Jets is on DirecTV channel 702, while Chargers X Broncos is on channel 708. OK, so on 702, you'll see Raiders X Jets. But by 13:15, if Raiders X Jets overruns, you don't see the kick-off of Chargers X Broncos on 708, you'll see the end of Raiders X Jets, which with OT, may not end until 13:50. So you'll miss the first 35 minutes of Chargers X Broncos on 708, the channel designated for that game.

The fact is, you can only watch the game that the local channel allows you to watch, because the local channel needs your eye-balls for advertising $$$. That's my recollection on the complaints on Sunday ticket using the local feed.

True, the blackout rule doesn't apply in foreign country (with one exception), but most of the time, you don't get the goodies in a foreign country either.

There are very few places in the world that would televise the complete schedule of the league games of another country, at least for the sports that we are familiar with in America (thus I am excluding rugby, cricket, handball, etc. in this context). As far as I remember, these are the places that have complete access of another country's full schedule:

1) NFL in Canada/Latin America, thru' the Sunday ticket package. However, there is a catch. Toronto is considered Buffalo's home market, so the blackout rule applies.

2) la Liga in Latin America - 6-7 years ago, DirecTV Latin America had the complete schedule of la Liga for the games not carried by ESPN Latin America. Thus with ESPN Latin America, ESPN Dos, and DirecTV's own package, you can catch every la Liga game.

3) Premiership - I've heard of every game of the Premiership being available in Holland. Now I know it's available in Hong Kong.