Digerati Boombati

As many sports fans have, I’ve seen countless commercials for ESPN360.com over the past few months, but, partially due to the inexplicit nature of the commercials and partially due to my inattentiveness when commercials come on, I’ve had no idea exactly what the site does.  Until today.  I was just browsing through the list of today’s NBA games on ESPN.com in order to find out which games will be televised, when I noticed that there was an additional game, the Nuggets/Mavs game, which was tagged with ESPN360.com.  So, I finally gave in and brought up the 360 site to see what was going on.  Turns out, 360 is live sports in on-demand webcast form.  You can pause, rewind, fast-forward and watch certain events for up to 24 hours.  Pretty awesome, huh?

Unfortunately, there’s a catch:  Your internet service provider has to carry the service in order for you to be able to use it.  It appears that Verizon Online customers can access the service no matter where they live and even away from home.  But, Time Warner Cable, which I’m at the mercy of here in Endicott and back in Rochester, doesn’t carry the ESPN360 service yet.  The reason:  ESPN is charging ISP’s, rather than consumers, for the use of their service, just like they do with their cable channels.  At ESPN360.com, they have a ready-to-go request form that you can send to your ISP to get them to carry the 360 service, but, I’m not getting my hopes up.  Road Runner is expensive enough already, and if Time Warner takes on more costs like 360 subscriptions, the expense will be passed on to consumers.  Also, broadband ISP’s have been increasingly fond of bandwidth throttling and setting upload and download caps, so, who knows what effect more streaming television will have.

Personally, I don’t want to foot the bill for ESPN360.com, but, it would be a nice perk, though I won’t be switching to Verizon DSL anytime soon in order to get it.  If I’m going to subscribe to anything, it’s going to be NBA League Pass, which I might actually do next year.  I don’t get to watch nearly enough Suns, Nuggets, Blazers, or Hornets games.