World Cup: How I Managed To Bypass ABC/ESPN’s Lame Commentary

The objective was simple: to be able to watch the World Cup football games on ESPN and ABC in HD, while somehow being able to bypass the lamest “soccer commentary” team in the history of the game. (It wasn’t just me…just search for “Marcelo Balboa” on Technorati or scan the comments on U.S. football blogs…and oh, even WSJ weighed in on this).
So my quest for this “lameness bypass” started after the first match, when I realized something had to be done. That meant British (or any other English) commentary with clear ABC/ESPN pictures on TV.
The answer lied with the Internet
, I figured, but it took me the full month to make this happen, more due to laziness than anything else. The full journey recounted below:
— I too tried watching it on Univision, in Spanish, where the picture quality was surprisingly better than ESPN (mainly because ESPN had tons of graphics on screen, while Univision only has one small one). But since I don’t understand Spanish beyond a few stock words which help me navigate life in LA, that didn’t help much.
— BBC was one answer, I realized early on. Online, they were transmitting the live games in broadband, and on Radio Five Live. Video was geo-blocked to UK-only.
— I tried tuning into the Five Live radio commentary, but like the video, that too was off limits during the actual game, even though the commentary prior to and after was excellent, so I tuned into that, at least.
— Then thanks to some posts on Engadget and other blog sites, I figured out how bypass geo-blocking using free UK proxy IPs. That meant that my browser was going through UK IPs addresses (slow as hell, but worked most of the time after a few tries)…anyway, video on BBC was still off limits because that was only available on approved UK ISPs (and the free proxies were not among them). But radio: I could theoritically tune it, mute my TV commentary, and try listening to the radio team, but the lag time was horrible. Also, since the radio commentators were watching it differently than the TV camera man/commentators, they were firstly describing stuff which wasn’t even on camera, and secondly, there was a such a big lag that I couldn’t sync the two different mediums of my TV and BBC radio.
— I was resigned to this fate for most of the World Cup. Five Live’s pre and post game coverage was the only respite from Balboa’s blubbering idiocies.
— Then late into last week, I remembered something: WSJ wrote a story last year about streaming P2P TV piracy in China, and I blogged that story. I also remembered that at that time, I downloaded the Coolstream client mentioned as a test and was able to tune into half-grainy live feeds from ESPN-Star Sports and HBO in Hong Kong.
— So I went back, search for the story, and tried downloading Coolstream, but that seems to have been shut down. Another site/service was up and running, so I downloaded the P2P client, installed their own media player plugin, and started it…and after interminable buffering, it worked! It was a British-sounding TV feed (I couldn’t really figure out which country/broadcaster because of the graininess of the video, but I’m guessing it was Hong Kong…no ad breaks so might have been a public broadcaster somewhere).
— The TV feed was the same (there is one TV feed being produced out of the World Cup, and every nation/broadcaster with the rights gets that )…there was at least a 30 second lag between the online feed and the one on ABC on TV, but I have Adelphia digital cable with DVR, so I could pause live coverage..anyway, I tuned the TV such that the picture was in sync with the one online (the audio quality was fine, even though video wasn’t)…and yes, finally, I got what I wanted. British commentators in background, while I watched the final on ABC HD. And yes, I even watch the online feed video during the lame halftime show on ABC. Not once did the streaming P2P service buffer/stall, so once I synced the P2P feed and TV feed, it stay put for the rest of the final.
— I only managed to do this for the final game, but what a victory over lameness in the end, even if I had to endure it for most of the World Cup.
P.S.: There’s another sub-plot in this too detailed to go into, but suffice to say I managed to listened to the Radio Five Live streaming feed on my Nokia N91 Wi-Fi enabled phone. It worked in throughout my home and served as my World Cup radio during the month.

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