Watch Tiger Woods, Live, For Free, Legally On The Web*
As we type this, we are watching Tiger Woods and his bum knee try to hold off Rocco Mediate in an 18-hole playoff at the U.S. Open. We're watching it live, on our MacBook, and it looks great. There are no commercials, and it's legal. It's available through the USGA's US Open site, and if we had to gin up complaints, we'd note that 1) we had to download Flash 9 to get it to work and 2) there seems to be about a 30-second gap between the TV broadcast and the the Web.
But like we said, it's pretty freakin great. And we don't even like golf that much.
How did this happen? We're not exactly sure, but Michael Learmonth will have a more detailed report later this afternoon. For now, our best guess is that it's a perfect storm of progressive thinking about the Web, rights issues, and the simple fact that NBC, which broadcast the tourney on Saturday and Sunday, doesn't have sponsors lined up for today. Meantime we're going to enjoy it, and try to get a tiny bit of work done this afternoon. too.
*Ah, there's the evil sports information rights ogre we know and love. We missed the 18th and 19th holes (we know!), but now we know the results, and the afternoon's coverage lulled us into thinking that we'd be able to see some video highlights on the Web right now. No such luck: ESPN.com is showing a compilation of today's first 8 holes, and the USGA site, which we'd formerly heaped praised on, won't give us any of the day's highlights. It does say we can watch a live press conference with Tiger and Rocco, but no such thing seems to exist.
Frustrating but oddly comforting: Being able to easily watch a great sporting event on the Web, without hassle, made us feel slightly squirmy. Now we're back to normal.
Back to work.
For the people who were having issues, I'm guessing it was not having enough bandwidth on your end that was causing problems. It was a lot of bandwidth to chew down (These are exactly the type of events that will put you over your future bandwidth caps ;)
All in all, though, this was a huge step in the right direction. Free high quality streaming video of a major sporting event for FREE. Good stuff.
Also, on Thurs and Fri, they had a high bandwidth option, that they billed as "near HD" that wasn't available on Monday. Also, Thurs and Friday they had several live choices, between a tv simulcast or watching the premier grouping in the morning or afternoon. You know, the Tiger/Phil/Adam Scott pairing or the Ernie, Justin, someone else pairing. I think you could also just watch one of the Par-3 holes, but I never looked at it. The all-Tiger, all the time pairing was fascinating, as they actually dedicated a couple announcers to it, separate of the broadcast.
The only other difference was that Monday had cutaways to the ocean view, when commercials were playing, which was funny, because a couple times you could here the announcers, when they were supposed to be "off-mike". Right when they switched broadcast coverage between ESPN and NBC, Bob Costas was supposed to do the NBC intro, and he was asking a ton of questions about what he should say to his producer. Funny look behind the scenes, really.
You get live feeds of "lesser" sports often now, such a the top European track meets.
WOw golD buy woW gOld,sell wOw Gold
Please look here WOw gold,Cheap wow gold,WOw GOld,
buy woW goLD,Cheap WoW gold Power Leveling, World of Warcraft
WOw gold.