tdgeek:

 

Im new to CC. Although it does work fine. Pause is easy, there is a timeline but no thumbnail. I use an iPad. Its not ideal like Sky or a remote, but its pretty close for me as regards convenience. So, from a beta POV, its fine.

 

Re paying for beta, yes I get that. The option is no beta, no pay, no service. Wait till its non beta halfway through F1 season. Had Spark decided to go for sport say mid last year, they would be beta then, but no sport to play, and no testing. Testing fake content would be easy. Lightbox works fine, but the issue is not Spark, its the provider, providing from a live sports feed, and you cant really test that unless you "test that" Had netflix bought the rights, the same would apply as they are not broadcasting from Netflix HQ, they need to broadcast from the race, which is the world feed or the Sky Sports F1 feed, which they cannot broadcast. So IMHO there is no shortcut. F1TV as has been stated by another here, had issues for a long while. Right now, it works. A few UI/UX issues to resolve, but for me, I can easily access a stable full HD feed, so thats close to a finished product. (For my chosen platform)

 

Yep, chromecast is easy but the lack of fine control over the slider is a real issue for it, this is made worse by long durations as the bar has to be moved in smaller increments to get the same skip time as a smaller programme.

Apart from the odd glitch with the actual stream, I don't think the content is in Beta, the F1 is pretty damn good in my opinion (although F2 seems a little blurry on fast panning right now), its the actual apps that are the issue for me and the real lack of rapid development is something I'm struggling with as they haven't added some of the more basic features such as predefined skip lengths, e.g. +30s, +3m, +10m etc. which become important in sports with long intro's.

Currently the lightbox app is only available on certain models and predominately Sony based TVs using Android TV; its not available for my Shields or the mibox at all which is a problem... Spark have had a tendency to favor Sony over other brands, similar to TVNZ and Samsung... Hopefully the Spark Sport app will be generic Android TV.

Bookmarks where something that I saw on Al Jazeera years ago; they're online system stored up to 24 hours of content and you could join the stream and choose a bookmark which took you to a predetermined part of the stream in time; for F1 you could use it for things like start of the qualifying sessions, the various pre-race segments etc. as these are already inserted in the streams and are well timed unless of big red flag issues... As a result they can be insrted in the live or VOD streams.

Finally, I want to add that we need notifications from the app.  I'd like to tag F1/F2 for when either the live or VOD is due to come up (or perhaps both) so that I know when I should flick the TV over; Sky had reminders, TVNZ has notifications, neon has notifications(!) and spark sport would be better for them!

Anyone watching the f2?  The stream seems quite od, with lots of blocking flicking across the screen and the quality is not that good over all... Static image is HD but moving image is not so nice...