May 5, 2007

USL Live: A first-hand experience

So a bout of me being anti-social, not feeling well and feeling all around shitty about life made me stay in and skip the Silverbacks game tonight.

But fear not! Text messaging and getting calls from the game are a thing of the past! NOW, FOR THE OVERLY-INFLATED PRICE OF JUST $50 YOU CAN WATCH USL LIVE!

I broke down and bought it. I know, I can watch all the matches, including the Silverbacks away games. Seems like a pretty good deal, right?

Not really, considering my problems and complaints.

I swear, if this continues, I'm going to break my damn screen and then kick those announcers' asses.

First of all, why does this thing cost $50? MLSnet charges only $19.95. I know it takes some money to get this thing off the ground, but $50 is a little too much for having shitty quality, no running clock on the screen, and a flip of the coin as to whether you're going to have announcers. Hell, the Miami-Montreal game announcer was the PA guy at Tropical Field.

Onto the quality. I don't know if it's just Remax Greater Atlanta Stadium, but for long portions of the game, the feed went out. I must say that the Miami-Montreal game was pretty dead on, and I've had no problems with the Seattle-Portland game so far. But when you have someone at the game talking to you on the phone while kicking the wires going into the TV booth trying to fix the feed, you know something's wrong.

And I almost had to turn the game on mute because the announcers were so bad. The play-by-play guy didn't even understand the meaning of "stoppage time" in the first half. He then said Ryan McIntosh (Silverbacks backup goalkeeper and Soccer Locker's #1 customer) was coming on for Rodrigo Rios (midfielder and team captain.) He then proceeded to say that John Queeley came on and repeated his name at least 5 times in the last few minutes, despite the fact that he was released before the season even started.

Add to that the fact that they didn't even know the Railhawks' season results and record so far, and this was a disaster. I was secretly hoping they'd fall off the scaffolding so they'd be rendered unable to continue.

Come on USL. I know many people have paid for this, we deserve better, especially for the price.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

QUEELEY WAS RE-INSTATED. HE IS ON THE TEAM.

Anonymous said...

Queeley is on the team.

El Güero said...

Nice of the Silverbacks to send out a press release or let someone know.

Anonymous said...

I agree that the quality is lacking, but I still find that it is a bargain for $50. Considering the fact that the Silverbacks didn't even have radio broadcasts last season, the ability to watch almost every game in the league greatly increseas my enjoyment of USL. The announcers do vary widely from the lousy dude doing the Backs game last night to the crew in Vancouver who are better than anyone in MLS. My only complaint is that sometimes the streams get stuck on my computer and I miss a few minutes of the games. Other than that I am happy with it.