FanSection Blog

Well as a Cowboys fan, I’m not terribly thrilled to be writing this post right now.  The Cowboys closed Texas Stadium after a 37 year run by giving up two 70+ yard touchdown runs within minutes of each other to go down to the Baltimore Ravens by a score of 33-24.  Of course, had the offense shown up prior to the beginning of the fourth quarter it may have been a different story.

However, the real story of the night, at least for me, was the quality experience I had with NFL.com’s live streaming of the game.  When I first saw this afternoon that the game was being carried on the NFL Network, I was initially very annoyed because I’m not one of the 37% of US households that currently subscribe to or receive the NFL network as part of my cable package.  But then while kicking off GameCast on ESPN.com to keep track of the game, I noticed the “Watch NFL Live” link next to the score.  I clicked and was pleasantly surprised to be taken to the live stream of the game courtesy of NFL.com.  I had missed the early news reports that NFL.com was planning on streaming several NFL Network games this season.  You can see a screenshot below, but the quality was top notch and the feed didn’t drop once.  Conversely, when I’m watching ESPN360, which I’m a huge fan of by the way since it saved me many times this college football season, the picture generally drops or freezes several times during the game.  The NFL.com video was as close to flawless as I’ve seen for live sports online and I highly recommend it for others that don’t have the luxury of flipping to the NFL Network for those games.  Going forward, I’ll see if I can dig up some stats to see how this game did compared to other NFL Network broadcasts, but more importantly for this blog, I’ll see if I can find some numbers of how the live streaming event performed.

UPDATE 12/21 - For a great review of the NFL Network’s live mobile stream for Sprint customers, check out this post from NewTeeVee.