So games on sundays (monday mornings) are delayed til tuesday at 11am, and games on monday nights (tueday mornings) are delayed til wednesday at 11am
edit: also MUTV isn't HD til early next year "Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal match coverage will be made available in HD (High Definition), with Manchester United’s coverage expected to be available in HD from early next year."
edit no.2: so not all sunday(monday morning) games are delayed till tuesday by the looks of it.
Right this has sealed it, not going to wait for that sort of delay and Man Utd games not in HD?! Online stream for me then, even if it's not easy to integrate with my media system. Question is Al Jazeera with a smart DNS or PLP. Have PLP indicated any early movement towards 4500kbps streaming or better yet?
Arsenal - Aston Villa at 1pm on Sunday. Happy enough with that as that's as soon as was possible. I'd usually record and get up and watch at 9 or 10 anyway so it's not much longer, I'll just do my Sunday errands before instead of after. It's a reasonable trade off to get the build up and post match stuff and interviews etc that we have never got before.
If you're an Arsenal supporter, you're in luck as you don't have any games on a monday night in the UK, for the fixtures confirmed(up til start of december). So all your games should be on sundays at 1pm or mondays 11am.
Benoire: Right this has sealed it, not going to wait for that sort of delay and Man Utd games not in HD?! Online stream for me then, even if it's not easy to integrate with my media system. Question is Al Jazeera with a smart DNS or PLP. Have PLP indicated any early movement towards 4500kbps streaming or better yet?
Tim Martin said something about that on the NZ Tech podcast this week, although I can't remember exactly what it was. I think he said he expected HD to be available this season and hoped it was fairly early on, but was pretty vague. To be fair though, after the comments he's made to date I wouldn't be surprised if his definition of HD was very different to ours!
Confirmation of the Ars at 1pm Sunday on Sky in HD seals it for me.
Tonight I also finally hooked up the laptop via HDMI to the TV (laptop was gigabit ethernet to my home network so no issues there, TV 37" plasma 720p). I watched the demo clip, Man City vs Sunderland. While the definition was possibly slightly better than I expected, it was clearly dropping frames. I can only describe the viewing experience as "tiring" on the eyes. Certainly no way I could sit and watch for 90 mins through that. And of course there is the ease of use issue. I have a toddler in the house and my laptop next to the TV is just an invitation for trouble.
I will revisit this again if PLP introduce higher bitrate streams, for now I am happy with delayed Ars on Sky and Monday night highlights on TV One.
walt12: Confirmation of the Ars at 1pm Sunday on Sky in HD seals it for me.
Tonight I also finally hooked up the laptop via HDMI to the TV (laptop was gigabit ethernet to my home network so no issues there, TV 37" plasma 720p). I watched the demo clip, Man City vs Sunderland. While the definition was possibly slightly better than I expected, it was clearly dropping frames. I can only describe the viewing experience as "tiring" on the eyes. Certainly no way I could sit and watch for 90 mins through that. And of course there is the ease of use issue. I have a toddler in the house and my laptop next to the TV is just an invitation for trouble.
I will revisit this again if PLP introduce higher bitrate streams, for now I am happy with delayed Ars on Sky and Monday night highlights on TV One.
Yeah, I got a headache from it. The second I heard of sky getting the EPL delayed coverage, I reconsidered PLP, having previously cancelled sky sport. With only a couple of days to go, I am 90% sure I will watch it delayed on sky instead of PLP. Being accustomed to HD, I don't know how anyone could consider that inferior PLP internet service. After watching it for 10 minutes I got a headache from the jittery picture a lag in stream.
I have been streaming it wirelessly to my tablet, the delay in stream was hopeless, they would be about to shoot, next thing you know its down the other end of the field. Some may say, well its the wireless, but I disagree, the stream I watch from Arsenal TV on the same tablet, doesn't lag like the PLP one. The two qualities are comparable.
I don't think PLP will last the season. Bring back HD.
But I do feel I owe PLP some gratitude, because now, for the first time we have some choice and more football than ever before, including a lot of cup games we never used to have. So thanks PLP (and Sommett). But HD is the decider for me.
walt12: Confirmation of the Ars at 1pm Sunday on Sky in HD seals it for me.
Tonight I also finally hooked up the laptop via HDMI to the TV (laptop was gigabit ethernet to my home network so no issues there, TV 37" plasma 720p). I watched the demo clip, Man City vs Sunderland. While the definition was possibly slightly better than I expected, it was clearly dropping frames. I can only describe the viewing experience as "tiring" on the eyes. Certainly no way I could sit and watch for 90 mins through that. And of course there is the ease of use issue. I have a toddler in the house and my laptop next to the TV is just an invitation for trouble.
I will revisit this again if PLP introduce higher bitrate streams, for now I am happy with delayed Ars on Sky and Monday night highlights on TV One.
Yeah, I got a headache from it. The second I heard of sky getting the EPL delayed coverage, I reconsidered PLP, having previously cancelled sky sport. With only a couple of days to go, I am 90% sure I will watch it delayed on sky instead of PLP. Being accustomed to HD, I don't know how anyone could consider that inferior PLP internet service. After watching it for 10 minutes I got a headache from the jittery picture a lag in stream.
I have been streaming it wirelessly to my tablet, the delay in stream was hopeless, they would be about to shoot, next thing you know its down the other end of the field. Some may say, well its the wireless, but I disagree, the stream I watch from Arsenal TV on the same tablet, doesn't lag like the PLP one. The two qualities are comparable.
I don't think PLP will last the season. Bring back HD.
But I do feel I owe PLP some gratitude, because now, for the first time we have some choice and more football than ever before, including a lot of cup games we never used to have. So thanks PLP (and Sommett). But HD is the decider for me.
Also to Note, I would have got PLP if they could provide HD. No doubt about it.
gunnerpc: I have been streaming it wirelessly to my tablet, the delay in stream was hopeless, they would be about to shoot, next thing you know its down the other end of the field. Some may say, well its the wireless, but I disagree, the stream I watch from Arsenal TV on the same tablet, doesn't lag like the PLP one. The two qualities are comparable.
The lack of effective frame rate sounds excessive if it literally misses that much ball travel. Once home networks, especially wireless, are added there can also be variations over time with other users (or even device by themselves) using the bandwidth for other content. If the comparison has been shown multiple times to be worse for one provider and better on the other that would seem fair but watch out for quick assessments. If assessing on a tablet, there might also be trade offs of resolution vs. motion in the encoding which may be more obvious on a larger screen (assuming the stream rates were the same).
gunnerpc: Also to Note, I would have got PLP if they could provide HD. No doubt about it.
HD means many things. For NeuLion most likely might be considered higher stream rate at 4.5 Mbps with the same 720p resolution as the 3 Mbps stream. The motion problems above should be improved with more bandwidth provided there aren't local delivery issues and the rate is sustained to the device. Comparisons with Sky HD can be trickier as bandwidth alone (which Sky seems to have more) are part of the story but we also get back to encoding performance.
TV broadcasting has had a long time to develop and is also subject to source content quality limitations. Sky mostly have the quality issues sorted with their HD offering but not the scheduling. OTT (Over The Top seems to be the name for this on-line alternative) here has the content but needs both sustained high bandwidth and high quality encoding. If a provider claims "HD" it might satisfy HD expectations or may not. Hopefully demo streams are available so prospective customers can be comfortable that over their own service and home network, at different times of day with other home users around, they will see the ball repeated enough times as it shoots down the field. Low effective frame rates are hard to watch.
Sommet have confirmed Liverpool as their 2nd team which confirms what we all suspected that it was a bidding war for Man United. Really surprised Sky didn't go for Liverpool over Man City. Surely they have the largest fan base in NZ alongside Man United, much larger than Man City. I know they said once Sommet got Chelsea they wanted to go for the other top 5 clubs, but I would have thought Liverpool would have drawn in or kept many more customers who have now switched to either PLP or Freeview.
The delay on the Spurs games seems extreme (overnight Sunday games our time not shown until Tuesday morning instead of Monday) so I wonder whether Spurs TV don't make the games available until much later than other clubs as I see Arsenal-Spurs from Arsenal TV is shown reasonably quickly. Anyone know much about Spurs TV?
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