Coliseum Sports - EPL Overlords

Yeah that was me who had a better experience on IE, very interesting that it wasn't just me. Would be keen to hear from any others who have tried different browsers and seen a noticable difference.

Are you selecting a fixed bandwidth or the variable one - i.e, i select 3000 and leave it that way.

Everything is via Flash though, not html5, so it is one big <embed>.

just spoke to someone who watched the Liverpool game live through the TV, and they said it was terrible.  With high picture quality it lagged and the commentary was terrible, and with low picture quality, well the picture quality was terrible (as well as the commentary).  Seems like it might be ok when watching the non-live (cached) games, but there are still issues with the live ones.  Anyone else watched a game live and had/not had problems?

No problems live at all for me - and hard to complain about commentary when its straight from the EPL. 

i had a free day pass and watched some of the liverpool game live, it was fine. not 100% crystal, but watchable.

true test as lonegunman pointed out will be a 5 or 6am game with a top 4 clash eg man utd v arsenal. everyone hitting the pipe at the same time will be interesting.

watched the Chelsea v Hull game this morning on demand at about 5:00am via a Tiger 24 hour pass, had a couple hiccups and sometime the sound would go a bit muffled but overall happy with the service.

I was using Chrome and Wifi, my internet connection isn't all that flash, I get decent speeds but it drops out every second week (probably dodgy internal wiring than anything else).

Watched the highlights show and the quality was perfect.

Nah no issues live whatsoever. I was worried there would be so pretty happy. 

I watched Liverpool live at best available quality and it was almost perfect - it paused for a few seconds once in the 2nd half. But when I watched games delayed last night starting at 8 pm it was pretty terrible, frequently pausing and dropping in quality. It got better the later it got so it may have been peak internet use affecting me. I'm on Telecom ADSL.

I was pleasantly surprised with how good it was to be honest.  I was watching on wireless - with a router about 5 years old and only had a couple of problems.  Watched all the Liverpool game with no pauses.  The Norwich vs Everton game didn't load up for some reason, but the support service guy on the Live Chat told me to change browser (went from Firefox to IE) and had no problems again (think it may have paused once actually).

Have now dropped SKY Sports (with one months notice unfortunately).  I guess the only thing I'll miss is the Arsenal commentators getting to talk about their own teams failings on Arsenal TV.

Might be offset by the amount of people who will be able to watch these games through Sky, TV1 and Sommet.

You can get it all online for free now anyway... http://player.arsenal.com/

For the people who it buffers for constantly, so they pause it for a bit and then play it. I'm not sure if that helps. cause for all the on-demand stuff, when i pause it it gets another couple of seconds worth of footage then stops loading, so pausing it doesn't really do anything cause it stops loading. (I have no problems with buffering by the way, just wanted to have a little test). I haven't tested it for any live coverage, so might be different for live stuff, but on-demand stuff seems to stop loading when you pause it. 

Alot of bad feedback on radio sport today... Hope they increase the servers for the weekend.

I wonder how many day passes they ended up giving away and how that may have affected performance at certain times. It could have been like when your gym gives away free trials and suddenly you have to wait for machines at peak times. 

My major improvement was plugging the ethernet cable directly from the router into my laptop. My download speed (check yours here speedtest.net ) went from 1.9mbps (wireless) to 6.4mbps.

I watched the Spurs game live last night (1230am to about 230am) and had no buffering, flickering, drop in sound or anything. I set the bitrate on the PLP site to 3000kbps and it went very smoothly, but my biggest issue (as I mentioned a few posts ago) is that the picture is just 'good'. It's not HD quality (obviously), so if, like me you;ve spent the last 2-3 years watching SKY with the HD ticket, then that's where you'll feel a bit disillusioned.

Someone mentioned that it took sky years before they introduced HD (or similar). Coliseum have said that it is something they're looking into in the future. I suggest they were a bit nervous about introducing it straight away. 

Interesting about the ethernet cable, by modem is right by my telly so that could be perfect. Thanks for the tip.

Reading through a lot of the discussion on here since the launch, it seems that one of the fears has probably been realised. When this thing was first discussed all of the IT literate people were talking about how easy it was to connect an HDMI cable. It probably was but it was all the stuff that came after it and all the talks of bit rates and download speeds etc etc that were going to be the killer.

I'm not an IT geek but know my way around a computer and I have absolutely no idea what you lot are talking about. If you're a serious technophobe and you've made the plunge and got a shite connection, I very much doubt you have the nous to do all the things you guys have discussed as ways to get around the problems.

As for the point re it took Sky years to get HD, that is hardly the point at all. Now, Sky has HD, everyone has HD. Launching without it was a risk and it seems strange they didn't go with it from the start. 

  Glad I got the PLP in a way. had a look at MUTV and Arse TV over the weekend. Pic quality better on TV, but listening to the completely one sided biased commentary of them both I would go mental over the course of the season. I don't support any of the 6 teams being shown on 'normal' TV, so quite frankly hope all 6 lose each and every weekend. 

  For me, on a shitty old laptop, pic wasn't fantastic. However I am not the most fussy person in the world. I just love watching the games so was always going to get the pass regardless of free pass, or TAB discount

This comes back to the point I made a few pages back, if you're able to trouble shoot this thing then you're probably going to be able to make this work reasonably well.  Plenty on here don't seem to mind having to do that.  

The ones complaining to radio sport are most likely those who just want to turn the thing on and have it work perfectly without having to fiddle with the settings - I have plenty of sympathy for that view.

Exactly, because it's what they had previously.

Same way I did, "this picture is a bit off, I'll click this button"

Or their FAQs actually give this instruction. 

You can't tell me that clicking a button is too technical for people. Even if they don't figure it out, the FAQs are there, then if they don't figure that out there is the live chat, where the help people would tell them to do it. etc etc. 

Perhaps they could put "Image quality:" next to the button in the player to make it clearer.

It shouldn't put people off, and I don't actually think it is. The biggest issue I've seen that has made people think twice about purchasing is the possibility of the game freezing. They have given some people tips on avoiding it, but they're not always particularly effective or ideal. 

Seems they at least have a sense of humour - this is the message when you try and go to their website from outside NZ:

"If you ever do happen to be in New Zealand, this is the place you'll be able to watch the Premier League. Also, if you are going to be here, the Ministry of Tourism would like us to mention that it'd be great if you could pay for a visit to the Hobbit set in Hamilton as it was really expensive and they're trying to recoup costs. "

Has RYOS got a store in Hamiltron now?