The Watchman: March Madness Online Is Both Mad Cool and Just Plain Maddening

I figured it might be a Firefox issue, so I tried it in Safari with no luck. I was going to fire up my old PC to see if it was a Mac thing but ended up over at a friend’s house and tested it out using theirs.

When I tried watching on a newish laptop loaded with Vista and plenty of bandwidth (23Mbps when I checked before watching), I thought I’d have no problems. Instead, I got no video. Just a screen saying that I needed Internet Explorer 6+ and Windows Media Player 9+. This annoyed me on many levels.

First off, the laptop had Vista, so everything was already up to date. Secondly, the page said I only needed more recent versions for an optimal viewing experience, when in actuality it wasn’t playing any video at all. And thirdly, the screen didn’t provide any links or instructions for resolving the problem. While I knew how to check versions and download updates, the average viewer might not.

Some might write off these escapades as machine-specific problems, but they were far from the last issues I encountered.

On-Demand Issues
After having a generally positive experience watching live video, I decided to watch some on-demand. Only one problem: Gumbel wouldn’t have it.

Sometimes, it’d just play Gumbel’s pre-roll and then hang. Other times, it would start playing the video without a pre-roll, but then a few seconds in it’d awkwardly cut away, play Gumbel, and then go back to the start of the video, creating a loop. Different browsers returned the same results.

And even when I was ultimately able to watch video on-demand later in the weekend, I found myself flabbergasted at the fact that quality of the on-demand video was no better than that of the live. It was as if they had just recorded the experience of watching a live stream so you could watch it on-demand.

I can’t help but wonder, why wouldn’t you encode the on-demand video at a higher bitrate so you can deliver a higher quality experience? Fear of server overload? Too much cost?

Whatever the reason, I think it would’ve been wise to at least re-encode at the same bitrate so that they could’ve avoided the embarrassing pixelations that were recorded from the live stream and then served up again on-demand.

I did appreciate some of their efforts to expand the availability of content on-demand by including a Buzzer Beater button that would take you to the best part of any March Madness game. But at the same time, I found it curious that they included clips of historical highlights that were so short as to be abrupt and didn’t include any narration to set their historical context or name the players being highlighted.