I have cancelled my cable TV. Man did it feel good to tell Comcast to go **** it. Net gain $840/yr. Well, minus whatever it will cost to buy episodes of Top Chef for my wife (ok I admit it, she’s got me hooked too).
Rabid sports fan that I am, I did not take the plunge until I discovered www.myp2p.eu and the wonders of p2p live streaming sports. So far this has turned out to be a mixed bag. When it’s good, it’s mid-to-low-res but you can follow the action. Veetle is pretty cool. When it’s bad it really stinks. The players and plays are fuzzy. The score is rarely legible. The keyframes drop out and for several seconds at a time blotchy pieces of the previous shot carry over for that “they’re playing in a vat of pea soup” effect. The best is when the feed stops for buffering just when Ray Allen has released the shot that will send the game into triple overtime.
But hey, the Bruins are in the playoffs (well, until they choked in OT last night), the Celtics are in the playoffs, and I have found that I will endure quite a lot of low quality picture to be connected to the hunt for a championship.
Some nights the only available feed is from Taiwan, with audio in Taiwanese Chinese (although I have to say, I don’t speak a word and the Taiwan commercials are still hilarious).
I find it ironic that in this age of higher and higher def, my own TV viewing quality experience is moving in the opposite direction. It’s consoling to think that a generation earlier I might be slapping the side of the TV fonzie-style before a big play to try to reduce the static from a bad over-the-air signal. Now I move around the room and adjust the angle of my laptop in the hopes that our wifi is the bottleneck.
However fuzzy the broadcast, last night proved to me that they can still break your heart, and that stings in hi-def. Bruins out of the hunt. Magic force game 7 on the Celts. Sox fall in the 12th. To cap it all off, the Yanks win. I guess we had it coming?