Today marks the first day that I am watching Wimbledon LIVE online through the MediaZone service. The service lets you watch live streams online of the Wimbledon matches, and control which ones you want to watch.
I’m going to write some initial impressions and then update them as the tournament continues:
Positive points:
Video quality is good, no delay or flicker in video
Love the ability to switch between current matches with the links on the left
Negatives:
Video is not DVD or HD resolution. Video can be made full screen, but it’s just stretching default video size (which is around 385 X 286, a 4:3 aspect ratio)
Background audio is “tinny” (such as the clapping of the crowd), although the commentator voices come in very clearly
Suggestions:
Put the current scores in a single line under each of the matches on the left side (so I know if I want to click over because the set / match might be ending, or the match is very close)
Hopefully they’ll develop or license a video codec to produce an HD stream in the future (see ABC.com streaming, it’s amazing)
Firefox is a much better browser than Internet Explorer, it would nice if it worked with Firefox.
Make the Help link be a popup like all the other links! On top of that, there’s no way to get back to the video after click the Help link unless you use the keyboard command “Alt + Left”
New Suggestion: See if it’s possible to keep the volume level the same when switching between the different live match streams. I realize this can be a limitation of using Windows Media Player, but if it were possible, that’d be nice. UPDATE: I just noticed that if a match ends, the stream automatically closes and switches to another one. The volume did not change in this case though, which makes me believe that my suggestion about the volume is technically possible.
Summary:
So far, quite a good experience for watching Tennis online, definitely worth it if you don’t get it on local TV, or just want the convenience, control and all access viewing of live broadcasts.
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on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 12:57 pm and is filed under General.
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June 23rd, 2008 at 1:42 pm
I work for MediaZone and we really appreciate your feedback and insight. I know we work hard to provide the best product possible. I will definitely bring up this feedback to the Wimbledon LIVE folk. Thanks for your help.
June 23rd, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Thanks Nathan. Glad to see you all are staying on top of things and taking your users feedback into account. Do leave comment and email me, chris @ the domain name of this site, if anything changes in the near future.
June 24th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Absolutely Chris. I’ll keep you updated.