Mixed bag then. Some happy with the quality others (myself included) found it rubbish, juttery and just painful to watch. While the on-demand games are flawed.
Sounds like a lot of kinks to work out, beginning with upping the bitrate to 4500 for those that can take advantage of that.
SwansNZ: Ok, so normally, ALL games are available on-demand for 24 hours, and 6 or 7 of these for the week.
I guess that is ok.
I wonder how they will present a live game that you join after the start - there should be an option to play from the start or join the game live. I hope they don't muck this up, I plan to ge up about 5:30 Sunday to watch Swansea v Man Utd - I want to start from the beginning, not join live to see the Swans are 3 up already :)
Says they will be available for on-demand from kick off. I read that to mean that if you set your alarm and wake up after a short snooze but miss the beginning of the game you will be able to start from the beginning - if you so wish.
And all games will be available for on-demand up until the next round (not just 24 hours). So typically that will be a week or so, 2 weeks if there is an international weekend intervening and 2 or 3 days at Christmas and Easter.
As to those only being able to watch a game once, PLP have stated they will not enforce this. But I gotta ask who out there watches a game more than once. Thinking back over the years with SKY and always recording the live games I can't ever recall an instance where I re-watched a game. So who does?
Well, I was disappointed on both counts – logged on at 05:30, and the only option for the Swans v Man Utd game, was LIVE – selected that in the hope it would give me some sort of option to play the live game at the beginning or join it live – damn thing went straight to live, 50 minute mark and Swans 0-2 down – double :(
Quality was ok, not the usual Sky quality of course, but did not freeze at all.
The buttons to skip forward or back 10 seconds – would be better if they were 1 minute maybe. Skipping half time was a pain, I might as well have waited!
Exactly the same happened to me. Had to click "Watch Live" and straight away it was 42 minutes into the game and 0-2. So annoying!
The biggest issue is and was always going to be picture quality. Picture quality is so dependent on factors that the provider can and can't control.
My residence is almost in the middle between 2 cabinets so the quality I get can vary markedly. Doesn't help that there are a lot of flats too with multiple users.
Until everyone has UFB then the differences will affect the perception of the product
StarBlazer: Do we know if anyone from PLP is watching this forum? If not that's a missed opportunity.
There is no forum on their site and I couldn't find a Facebook page!
Personally, I'd like to question where they got the average 1.1GB from!
It would probably be from Neulion's experience on NFL gamepass etc.
QUite likley it would be a combination of people watching at full res on the big screen, and the much lower res on their phones or tablets where the bitrate is sub 500kbps
I made use of the ‘free’ 24 hour ‘Tiger’ passcode to check out the quality of the PLP service on the weekend, with a view to understanding if the service was good enough to fork out $149 for a season pass. I had previously checked out the quality of the sample stream on my computer monitor, which I didn’t think was representative of what the service would be, so I watched the Spurs v South China on Saturday on my computer and it didn’t look too bad on the 23”screen.
So I rigged up my spare laptop with an HDMI cable to my 55” Samsung LED and fired up the PLP service, and watched the Swansea v Man U game start to finish on Sunday morning, and was generally pleased with the picture quality on such a large screen. Having been a Sky HDi subscriber in the past, the quality was much poorer than what I was previously used to, but it was watchable, even if it did look slightly out-of-focus & washed out at times, (the rain in Wales did not help).
If I am honest, the service was better than I expected, given the lack of a real ‘try-before-you-buy’ samples, and the fact that it was ‘watchable’ on my 55” TV. Once the stream settled down, there was limited blockiness/pixilation, but the judder remained noticeable throughout, which I have become used to when watching poorly streamed content. I also ran a sample of the NFL content at 4500kbps on the 55” TV and as expected, the quality was much improved and the judder less noticeable. IF PLP move to the higher streaming speed, I believe that the quality question will be less of a concern.
So, I gave in a subscribed to PLP….., what choice did I have…?
Being an ardent Spurs supporter I was not prepared to wait 34 hours (!!) for ‘delayed’ coverage on Sky TV, as I much prefer watching ‘pseudo-live’ in the morning a few hours later, so I got up at 5am this morning and watched the VOD Spurs game before work. My experience was similar to the Man U game on Sunday, but my eyes did start to hurt a little during the second half.
Overall, the service is good enough to watch a game or two on the big TV when SkyTV’s coverage is delayed beyond a few hours or days (!), but I don’t think I’ll be using it to watch too many other games until the quality is improved. However, watching on my computer or laptop screen is acceptable for the time being. Given that I paid $127, (with Telecom discount), and that I will probably watch at least 1 game a week, I would say that the PLP service is acceptable at less than $4 per game…..
TL:DR The ‘quality & convenience’ of the PLP is a significant step backwards for watching the English Premier League in New Zealand, and only when PLP acknowledge this fact and start taking positive steps to improve this, will their reputation for only being interested in the $$$ start to improve.
Well I didn't purchase a PLP subscription so I'm going to stick with MUTV on Sky. Delayed doesn't worry me. The quality of the game yesterday was average at best so that is a little disappointing.
Also, I'm a Man Utd supporter through and through but I tell ya what, the commentary is worse than listening to those one sided wallaby commentators. It was shocking!
SwansNZ: Ok, so normally, ALL games are available on-demand for 24 hours, and 6 or 7 of these for the week.
I guess that is ok.
I wonder how they will present a live game that you join after the start - there should be an option to play from the start or join the game live. I hope they don't muck this up, I plan to ge up about 5:30 Sunday to watch Swansea v Man Utd - I want to start from the beginning, not join live to see the Swans are 3 up already :)
Says they will be available for on-demand from kick off. I read that to mean that if you set your alarm and wake up after a short snooze but miss the beginning of the game you will be able to start from the beginning - if you so wish.
And all games will be available for on-demand up until the next round (not just 24 hours). So typically that will be a week or so, 2 weeks if there is an international weekend intervening and 2 or 3 days at Christmas and Easter.
As to those only being able to watch a game once, PLP have stated they will not enforce this. But I gotta ask who out there watches a game more than once. Thinking back over the years with SKY and always recording the live games I can't ever recall an instance where I re-watched a game. So who does?
Well, I was disappointed on both counts – logged on at 05:30, and the only option for the Swans v Man Utd game, was LIVE – selected that in the hope it would give me some sort of option to play the live game at the beginning or join it live – damn thing went straight to live, 50 minute mark and Swans 0-2 down – double :(
Quality was ok, not the usual Sky quality of course, but did not freeze at all.
The buttons to skip forward or back 10 seconds – would be better if they were 1 minute maybe. Skipping half time was a pain, I might as well have waited!
Exactly the same happened to me. Had to click "Watch Live" and straight away it was 42 minutes into the game and 0-2. So annoying!
Yes I was caught out by this too. I stayed up all night as usual and fell asleep during the Arsenal game and woke about half way through the first half of the Man Utd game. I wanted to watch it from the beginning but there seems there isn't an option to do so until the game is finished. I'll feed this back to PLP. Can't be that hard to create a watch from the start link alongside the watch live one can it?
Dororke: Yes I was caught out by this too. I stayed up all night as usual and fell asleep during the Arsenal game and woke about half way through the first half of the Man Utd game. I wanted to watch it from the beginning but there seems there isn't an option to do so until the game is finished. I'll feed this back to PLP. Can't be that hard to create a watch from the start link alongside the watch live one can it?
I've sent an email to PLP for this issue also as well as questions on the judder, bandwidth and where the popup window refused to go to full screen mode without restarting my laptop. I suggested that they should have someone join Geekzone or at least read this thread (perhaps not all of it)!
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