Thursday, September 3, 2009

One of the Downfalls

Peter King, the current editor of the NFL section of Sports Illustrated and SI.com, has picked the Bears to win the NFC this year and fall to the Patriots in Superbowl XLIV. I tend to agree that they might go all the way (or close) this year, which pains me because I know I can't watch any of it.

Unless, of course, I bite the bullet and pay out the nose to the money-grubbing NFL.

Consider this: before I left for Korea I paid $119.99 to watch any MLB game I want, live or archived, for the entire year. For those who don't want to do the math, that's 2,430 games that I can watch this year for 120 bucks.

The NFL, on the other hand, wants to charge me $209.99 JUST to watch Bears games. That's almost twice the price for 16 games of football. Of course, I could pay the $30 more and catch all 288 NFL games. But when you break it down, I find it hard to stomach the price disparity (appr. $0.05 per MLB game and $0.83 per NFL game or $13 per game if I just get the Bears option).

Now, I know football is an expensive sport, what with the grossly over-paid athletes and exorbitant, multi-million dollar stadiums. But come on. $210 bucks to watch something online that I could watch at home for free with a hanger sticking out the back of my TV? Sounds a little stupid to me.

The worst part of all of it, of course, is that I'm considering buying it.

Please, oh please, somebody in the Chicago area buy a Slingbox and give me access to it!

6 comments:

  1. "$210 bucks to watch something online that I could watch at home for free with a hanger sticking out the back of my TV?"

    You said it perfectly there. It seems like the more popular something is, the more money they charge for it. And being popular means they're making more money anyway. It's more than a little greedy, especially since putting them online costs them almost nothing.

    I'm not sure what to tell you. I'd love for you to be able to watch Bears games :/

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  2. Ok, so here's the plan.... we Skype during the Bears games and rather than looking at us, well, you know :-)

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  3. Oh No! You are sounding a little like UJ

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  4. Direct TV lets you watch games over IP if you have the NFL Sunday Ticket. It's like $60 a month I think. (sorry, I should eliminate the word like from my vocabulary)

    The issues that pop into my head immediately with slingbox is that you're going to have to go through a LOT of gateways to get from Crete to Andong, and you don't know the network speed of each. Given our parent's internet connection and the reality that you would be accessing it via wifi, there's a lot of things standing between you and a live stream of your game.

    You also have to consider what comcast will do when they see the strain on the Crete network quadruple in one night. It's not uncommon for them to call the customer (Dad) and ask them if they have any devices hooked up to their network. Speaking of networked devices, who do you think is going to hook this thing up and configure the ports?

    I'm not saying it's not a worthwhile device and a cool product, but if all you want to do is watch a season of football, there's bound to be easier options. Have you tried bit torrent downloads of the games (which would only be available after they were finished) or doing DirecTV's $60 NFL sunday ticket, which I believe lets you watch the games on a laptop as well as a TV? Or any other piggyback sites like watch-nfl-live.com? I don't know if it's any good, since I don't really watch football, but there has to be a hardware free solution to your problem. Keep searching!

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  5. Holy cow...I can't see myself spending that much on food!

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