This is my first season with the NFL Sunday Ticket. I love it!
I have 2 games recording and I’m watching the RedZone real-time highlight channel on my iPhone. RedZone is great!
Maybe I’ll stop complaining about how much this costs.
Archive for the ‘video’ Category
I’m Lovin’ the NFL Sunday Ticket and the SuperFan Upgrade!
Sunday, September 13th, 2009Are You Ready for Some Football ?!
Saturday, August 8th, 2009Football season is fast approaching. My first football season in SF was TERRIBLE. 6 out of 17 weeks during the NFL season saw only 2 games aired Sunday afternoon, robbing me of the 3rd game that the rest of the country typically gets to see. But worse, those 2 games were the 49ers and the Raiders. So not only was I getting robbed of a game. The games I was left with were crap. And don’t get me started about not being able to see hardly any Cowboy games.
The college season was even worse for me. I ended up having to listen to most of the early season Longhorn games on Yahoo Sports Radio at a ridiculous price. And I did say listen, no picture. It took me 2 months to try to figure out how to cancel the service once the season was over. When I did figure it out, it was on the phone. Listening to all the things that Yahoo has subscriptions for was incredible. That company is solid, though perhaps a bit unfocused. But I digress.
So I swore this season will be different. I ordered DirecTV last night with a Wednesday install. No more drama about whether or not the NFL Network will be part of my cable package on Comcast. The NFL Sunday Ticket will insure that I can see my Cowboys play. And ESPN College Game Plan should at least help to alleviate missed Longhorn games. At least Texas has a great pre-season ranking, so they should be a national game most weeks they play.
Back to satellite TV. I’m nervous about this. Besides the crazy price and long commitment for all of this, I found cable to be pretty reliable. More reliable than most of my friends’ satellite services. I’ll let you know how it goes.
But check this out. With the NFL Sunday Ticket SuperFan package you can watch games on your iPhone! How cool is that?
All-in-all, I’m expecting an improved, if not more expensive, football experience this season.
Apple TV, part 3 (Boxee)
Sunday, February 1st, 2009I hooked up the Apple TV, accessed iTunes on my Mac mini, and synced my music from my mini to the Apple TV.
Next up was installing Boxee. Not quite as easy as the instructions made it out to be, but I still got it installed and working. There was some overscan on the video but the software has a really easy way to adjust the overscan, so no problem.
Hulu worked, though it listed videos that weren’t available anymore. That was annoying. ABC.com didn’t work, nor did Fox. That’s makes Boxee a lot less useful. Didn’t try You Tube.
I like the Apple TV’s implementation of Front Row for music much better than I like Boxee. I see Boxee as my avenue to Internet video. For that it works well. I had an episode of 24 running from Hulu. It looked great.
The Apple TV and Boxee are definitely worth it.
Apple TV, part 2
Friday, January 30th, 2009As I said earlier, the Apple TV is a breeze to setup. I’ve since loaded all of my music onto it. It took forever to load 65GB of tunes via Wi-Fi. But it’s done and it looks and sounds great. It operates pretty much just like Front Row on my Mac mini. So it’s a keeper. I’ve disconnected my mini from the TV and taken it downstairs to the office where it will replace my ancient mini-ITX project PC. My next step is to load my photos onto the Apple TV. Then I’m going to try out Boxee.
Apple TV
Sunday, January 25th, 2009
Customer Service Excellence
Saturday, January 17th, 2009It’s OK to make mistakes as long as you admit it, apologize for it, and fix it. This is a great example from Hulu on doing just that found at 37signals:
This note, however, is not about the fact that episodes of ’’It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’’ were taken down. Rather, this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to how we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. We gave effectively no notice to our users that these ’’Sunny’’ episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. We believe that our users deserve the decency of a reasonable warning before content is taken down from the Hulu service. Please accept our apologies.
Given the very reasonable user feedback that we have received on this topic (we read every twitter, email and post), we have just re-posted all of the episodes that we had previously removed. I’d like to point out to our users that the content owner in this case – FX Networks – was very quick to say yes to our request to give users reasonable advance notice here, despite the fact that it was the Hulu team that dropped the ball…
Well done.
TiVo Partners for New Functionality
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008According to the Wall Street Journal, TiVo is now offering a great new product feature done in partnership with Entertainment Weekly. TiVo users can now record shows recommended by Entertainment Weekly. It appears that TiVo looks to do more partnerships like this. Anything that makes it easier to find and record the best shows is great in my book. I love it.
Now if I could easily share my recordings list with my friends, I’d be even happier.
TiVo and Amazon Team Up – NYTimes.com
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008Back in December 2006 I wrote about TiVo not keeping up in the quest to be the provider of the “sofa web.”
Om Malik at GigaOM discusses the new game consoles and the contribution they might make to Internet browsing. He refers to it as the “sofa web.”
It was announced that TiVo and Amazon Team Up – NYTimes.com. This is a positive step towards TiVo becoming part of the sofa web. I can’t wait to see more deals.
YouTube on TiVo Launches, Does This Really Matter?
Thursday, July 17th, 2008Zatz Not Funny! says YouTube on TiVo Launches. I know how crappy YouTube videos look on my iPhone. How bad do you think they’ll look on your big screen TV, especially HDTV? I could see people using this a few times and then dumping it. I say no big deal.
Way To Go Netflix!
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008Looks like Netflix has done some thinking. Profiles feature NOT going away. Nice to see that companies can get it right sometimes.
