Cord Cutter's Diary
Posts tagged sports
Monday night
I caught up on the new episode of Breaking Bad by purchasing it for $2.99 from Amazon and watching it on my television through my Roku box. On my iPad, I kept an eye on the Olympics by streaming NBC live with Aereo, which is still in a free trial but will eventually cost $12 a month. When the swimming was on, I switched it over to my big screen. I followed Twitter on my iPhone, and when someone mentioned that the Yankee game was close in the bottom of the ninth, I flipped on the local radio broadcast on MLB.tv, which cost me $14.99 for the season. The Yankees lost, but it was good night — better than usual, I’ll admit — for getting by without cable.
If you thought cord cutting in the U.S. was complicated, try watching soccer in Europe:
The Portsmouth pub landlady who went to the European Court of Justice for the right to show Premier League football using a cheap Greek decoder had her criminal conviction overturned on Friday.
In previous years, cord cutters could still enjoy much of Wimbledon as NBC aired the tournament on free network TV. No longer: ESPN owns the right to broadcast Wimbledon for the next 12 years. Subscribers will be able to watch every match live online on ESPN3, but folks like me won’t be able any of the live action — not even the traditional Breakfast at Wimbledon final matches, which ABC will only air on tape delay.
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@pkafka On the other hand, the 1st Annual Hanco’s Classic Eating Contest is a Hulu Original, I’m told
— Dan Frommer (@fromedome) May 25, 2012
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NBCU on authenticating your cable subscription in order to live stream the Olympics: “It’s painful”
NBCUniversal today detailed its extensive plans for broadcasting the London Olympics, which begin on July 25. Here’s the bottom line for me and anyone else without a cable TV subscription:
- I can watch 272.5 hours of coverage that will air on NBC over 17 days, using either a tuner or Aereo. The latter would also allow me to record events that air while I’m at work. Not bad!
- However, that’s just a fraction of the 5,535 hours of Olympics coverage that will air across the various networks of NBCUniversal like Bravo, MSNBC, and CNBC. All but NBC are out of my reach, but I assume NBC will air the most popular events.
- Pretty much everything will be live streamed on NBCOlympics.com and on mobile and tablet apps, but not for me: ”Access to certain live events requires verification that you have an active subscription with your TV provider.” This is what’s known in the business as “authentication,” a concept that most Americans have never heard of but will need to become familiar with this summer. Or as NBCU puts it in a chattily written FAQ:
Please contact your TV provider to learn more or select your provider from the drop down above and follow the instructions provided. It’s painful, we know, but it’ll be worth it … trust us.
Wow. I expect they’ll edit that “It’s painful” line after an angry call or two from executives who are banking their futures on the success of authenticated TV over the Web. But NBCU is totally right: signing up for a username with your cable company is generally a painful process. You should get a gold medal for successfully navigating Time Warner Cable’s website (MyServices, PayXpress, huh?), and, in a sense, you will: I’m sure live streaming the Olympics will be an awesome experience.
For posterity, here’s a screenshot of the relevant portion of that FAQ…
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I’m pretty much out of luck when it comes to watching my beloved Yankees. Though the spectacular MLB.tv costs just $115 to watch every game for the entire season on my Roku XD, iPad, and iPhone, it blacks out games in my local market. So no Yankees or Mets games for me. (This wouldn’t be a problem if I were still a Yankees fan surviving in Boston.)
But while I’m trying out Aereo, I can take advantage of watching the roughly 20% of Yankees games that are carried on network TV. In the photo above, I’m watching My9’s broadcast of tonight’s Yankees game live on my iPad at work. I can put it on my TV when I get home. Aereo should let me set text-message reminders so I don’t forget to take advantage of this.
WatchESPN is the network’s version of HBO Go: extended programming available only to authenticated cable subscribers. Time Warner seems to be spreading HBO to as many devices as possible, and Disney may be attempting the same, though ESPN denies the Bloomberg report. Alas, it hardly matters to me if the content is only available to paying customers.
