Football afloat

In general, I don't miss TV very much now that we are without one. I canceled our cable even at home a few months ago, and sold the TV itself earlier this month, and hardly noticed it was gone with so much else going on. We never considered replacing it when moving aboard, although many people do have TVs aboard these days. Dedicated marine satellite TV receivers are one option, and if you spend most of your time at the dock, Comcast is available at every slip here at Shilshole. Dish antennas abound, clamped to rails or in makeshift mounts on the floats themselves.

We don't really have the room or the desire for a dedicated TV, and with options like BitTorrent and Hulu we can pretty much keep up with any of those shows that we do deem as "must see" TV.

But fall is upon us, and with it football season, and this is where my plan is failing me, because football is an event best viewed live, and the NFL and NCAA are both extraordinarily protective of their respective properties and considerably behind the times in their adoption of web-based technologies.

I can almost always find Seahawks game audio streamed from the various radio stations that follow them, but I like to watch, too. NFL's GameCenter web tracker isn't terrible for a visual representation, but it doesn't sync with the audio and it's a little dry and statistical. Here, atdhe.net is my friend. The site is an aggregator of sports video streams, originating from individuals who are generous enough to put up streams direct from their own TV receivers by a variety of means. Most NFL games can be found there, although bandwidth can be a problem. I'm not sure if it's primarily at our end (I suspect this is the case; the marina wireless is not overly robust here) or elsewhere, but it's generally a serviceable quality. I'd like to find out more about the whole operation, which is apparently run out of France, but they are understandably reticent to put up much information about how it all works.

Husky games are more difficult. They have a service similar to NFL's GameTracker, run by CBS Sports, but it's much harder to watch as they have sauced it up and made it 3D, which only muddies what is actually going on. Sometimes more popular college match-ups can be found on atdhe but not, for example, yesterday's game against Stanford (although considering the outcome, perhaps it was a blessing I couldn't find it). To make matters worse, however, the NCAA has a web blackout it imposes against streaming radio stations, so I couldn't even listen (we don't have a standard radio receiver aboard for similar reasons as the TV).

I have found a number of somewhat shady looking services online that claim to stream web video of just about any game but until I can dig up more about them, I am hesitant to offer up my credit card number. Anyway, it's an interesting challenge to figure out what I need to do to get these things for free; they are, after all, broadcast openly over the air, so there isn't any inherent reason they shouldn't be equally available online.

Anyway, the 'hawks and Bears are neck and neck right now with six minutes left, so pardon me while I return my attention to that side of my screen.