Trying to Deal With ESPN360

Wow, what an annoying experience. I’m not a big sports person, but I do like my soccer once in a while (mostly once every four years for the World Cup.)

This month I’m watching Euro 2008, though, and occasionally manage to sneak in watching a game at work using ESPN360. ESPN360 is a nice idea, it gives you live streaming sports events with the ability to pause and rewind what you’re watching. It’s like setting your DVR to record all the events, and you can pop in whenever you want to watch them as convenient.

Perfect for watching football (err, soccer) at work. Except for when it’s annoying and impossible to deal with.

Let’s see what we have today in Euro 2008. Croatia played Germany earlier, and then Austria played Poland. Easy enough. Let’s see what ESPN360 will let me watch.

Well, there’s a long list of events in the replay section. Good thing they have some pull-down menus to filter it. I’ll set the date filter to 6/12 to only get today’s events. There’s two US Open events, one rugy, and four Euro events. In the order listed, we have Austria vs Poland (in Spanish), Croatia vs Germany (in English), Croatia vs Germany (in Spanish), and the Euro 2008 Studio Update, which is a show in between the two matches of the day where they talk about what’s been going on.

No Austria vs Poland in English, though. You can pull up the game in Spanish, but if you wanted the English version, well, that’s too bad.

But maybe we missed it with all the rugby and golf on the list. Let’s use the “sports” pull-down to select “soccer” to clear things up, leaving the 6/12 filter enabled. Well, all you have there is Austria vs Poland in Spanish, and the studio update. Still no Austria vs Poland in English, and suddenly we’ve lost both Croatia vs Germany replays. Sure enough, they’re not filed under soccer.

I tried flipping through the sports list to see if they were filed somewhere else, but they’re not; they’re just not a sport at all. That might have made sense for the half-soccer, half-water polo of yesterday’s Switzerland vs Turkey, but doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for a real soccer (err, football) game.

I won’t even go into the so-so video quality, since it’s hard to have high expectations for streaming video. The 4:3/16:9 toggle button is kind of useless, though. If you’re showing 4:3 content, why would I want to click the button and stretch it out to a 16:9 shape, leaving everything distorted? Is there really any point to that button?

I feel bad for people who really like their sports and have to deal with this kind of junk all the time. Not to mention the people who can’t even use ESPN360 because their ISP hasn’t given in to ESPN’s demands for payment to access the service. My ISP hasn’t either, I just watch using a free public WiFi hotspot across the street which luckily uses Verizon (an ESPN360 subscriber) for Internet access.

Ok, enough random rambling. On with not being able to watching Austria vs Poland!