The Watchman: March Madness Online Is Both Mad Cool and Just Plain Maddening
The Watchman has been a big fan of watching March Madness online ever since CBS first started streaming it two years ago. In fact, it was probably the first live sporting event I actually enjoyed watching on the internet, a feat made more impressive by the huge audiences it attracts. So this year I went into opening weekend filled with excitement at being able to log and write about my experiences watching the madness that is March online.
To prepare I pre-registered for a VIP pass, which meant after I first logged in I could launch the player with a single click from the homepage. While it takes another click to select and start watching a video, too often video gets buried on sites, so it was nice to see it so easily accessible here.
I was happy to see the Boss button back. It’s still there and it still makes me smile. Click on it and the video window switches to an innocuous looking spreadsheet, until you look closer and realize it’s charting snack food consumption. It’s great to see a major media company having some fun.
As I clicked on my first live video Thursday afternoon, I was met with a stuttering pre-roll featuring Greg Gumbel pitching some NCAA-related contest. Oddly enough, the live video of the game was far superior to the pre-roll, which is kind mind boggling given that one’s being encoded and delivered live and the other on-demand.
That live video was pretty good. Compared to last year, the video window seemed a bit bigger and the video quality a bit fuzzier, though that may just be my having watched last time on a bigger monitor and gotten use to watching higher quality video online since then, skewing my perception.
Still it was certainly good enough. I could follow the ball and identify the players. While it did drop some frames, it was never so bad as to interrupt the viewing experience. And interestingly, the players were roughly the same size visually on my laptop on my lap vs. on the TV screen across the room.
The audio was reasonably steady, though it did suffer from an intermittent metallic echo that occasionally flared up when the crowd got loud. More of a nuisance than reason not to watch.
Player Problems
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for some of the other experiences I endured.
First and foremost I had a heckuva time with the player. Whether I was scrolling up and down, switching between windows, or selecting one video and then another quickly, I consistently had problems with the player going, for lack of a better word, wonky.