Review: English Premier League Soccer on NBC Sports

... it's about as bad as I'd anticipated. It's a huge step down from Foxsoccer.tv.

NBC has paid $250M for the rights to the English Premier League. They carry all of the games on NBC sports and NBC Sports Live Extra on line. That means that if you have the right cable or satellite package, you can watch any game you want on TV if it's the premium match of the week or online if it's a second-tier game.

Note how I did not say you can watch every game you want. There is no on-demand feature like there was with foxsoccer. Since most of the games go on at the same time, you have to choose which one you're going to watch. Yesterday, I watched the Fulham - Sunderland game, hoping to see the Mackems (Sunderland) lose. They obliged, falling 1-0 to Fulham, but I missed the best game of the day, Arsenal vs. Aston Villa. The Arsenal game was total chaos in the second half with red cards, penalty kicks, a big upset and booing, unhappy Arsenal fans stalking out of the stadium before the game was over. It would have been awesome to see. Here's a sample.

αρσεναλαστον ourmatch.net by ourmatch

Last year, I would have clicked over to foxsoccer and watched the second half of the Arsenal game at my leisure. This year, thanks to the troglodytes at NBC, I have to track down Russian video servers to watch the highlights. It's like the people at NBC never watched foxsoccer and are only vaguely familiar with the concept of digital media servers. Pathetic.

There are some solutions. The companies that own the EPL rights in both New Zealand and Australia offer all of the games on demand for up to a week after they've been played. unfortunately, you have to come at them from an Australian IP address which means finding a proxy server with reliable throughput.

Sigh. Why can't NBC just do it the right way?