Watching SuperBowl XLVII Online
This past Sunday was of course the Superbowl and even non-football-fans like me had to watch. An amazing game! It looked like a shut-out, then there was a black-out, then a nail-biter right to the end.
The Ravens win is, of course, a celebration for most of the Washington area! After our experience with the Ravens fans at the corporate party in January, I can only imagine what this win means to the die-hard fans!
Last year was the first year you could watch the SuperBowl live online, essential for folks like us who don’t own a television. I reviewed the online experience then and gave it an A for football coverage, a C for commercials and an F for the halftime show. How did this year’s online coverage do?
This year the game switched networks from NBC to CBS. CBS also allowed the game to be streamed live online. When I first signed on to stream the game it looked like there were connection and bandwidth problems with too many people trying to stream the game at once. I missed the first few minutes of the game but the connection finally came through.
On the upside, I don’t recall a single interruption in the transmission once the stream came through! On the downside, the picture size of the game was pretty small compared to last year. It took up just about 25% of my laptop screen and could not be adjusted to a bigger size.
There was also some issue with the aspect ratio of the viewer where it seemed to cut off the right half of the picture and some of the lower parts of the image as well. It was not as noticeable to me during the game (but then I am not the best judge of this) but it interfered with enjoyment of the commercials and the halftime show. For example, sometimes the key joke of the commercial was occurring in the right pane.
In other technical issues, my husband attempted to stream the game on his computer running Linux and the transmission kept crashing on him.
Like last year, there was a Twitter conversation going on right beside the game viewer. The default setting was to see a Twitter stream from various official sports reporting organizations like CBS Sports, AP NFL and local newspapers for the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers. You could also select “Q&A” where CBS Eye on Football would answer questions from fans on everything from football to technical issues with the web transmission. The third choice was to select “Celeb Chat” where you could see tweets from a random mixture of sports professionals and entertainment celebrities like Mindy Kaling, Samuel Jackson and Khloe Kardashian.
Unfortunately, once you clicked “Q&A” or “Celeb Chat” it was impossible to get back to the window where the news-related football tweets were because my computer kept putting the “Commercials” button right over where the news Twitter button was. If I tried to click on the news Tweets, I just kept getting the commercial list. So, I was stuck between choosing “Q&A” or “Celeb Chat” for the rest of the game.
I like the Twitter stream concept for online viewing. It does make it seem like you are watching the game with a bunch of friends. However, I think the best enhancement to this feature would be to allow the user to custom select who on Twitter they want to allow to tweet at them during the game.
The online viewing of commercials was a disappointment this year as it was last year. Part of the whole SuperBowl experience is viewing the silly commercials. I am not sure why they make the online commercials different from the TV ones. Online, you see a lot of the same commercials over and over. If you want to see all of the commercials, you have to click in a separate window to view them but who wants to do that when you might end up missing the game to do so? I wasn’t the only fan who complained about this.
Numerous people complained that this year’s batch of commercials weren’t as entertaining as in years past. I have to agree. The car commercials seemed to be the most original. I am not such a big fan of the Twitter-enabled or vote-online commercials. Perhaps I am just lazy but the fun of watching a commercial is just sitting back and being entertained by someone’s novel idea. If I have to go online and vote, it feels kind of like work. If the idea came from some random person on Twitter, it doesn’t seem as original as when it magically appears a la Don Draper from an ad agency. But maybe this is a generational thing.
But a huge kudos to CBS for getting the halftime show right! Beyonce’s fabulous performance was there in full from the first moment to the last. Beyonce looked gorgeous as usual and the Destiny’s Child ladies have never looked better! It was great to see them all together.
In the end, how did the online coverage do?
Football coverage: A (the game was there in full, along with camera angles, Twitter experts, etc.)
Commercials: C (same as last year, you could see them all but it was inconvenient)
Halftime show: A (a huge improvement from last year’s F!)
So, overall, the online show is getting better! Last year’s overall grade was a C and this year a B+. Not bad.
We are on the cutting edge of technology here. For a big event that demands a huge amount of bandwidth and the ability to serve up content to millions of users simultaneously, a very good effort and a very good result!
Did you watch the Super Bowl online this year? Have a favorite commercial? Please share in the comments.
P.S. I have no affiliation with the Super Bowl, the NFL or CBS.