Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Crappy Canadian TV Feed Du Jour

It has been hard to follow the ESPN broadcasts of this summer's World Series of Poker because they are not broadcast by TSN (the Canadian equivalent/brother of ESPN) at the same time as ESPN's. So, I was pretty happy to see that there would be two hours of the WSOP tonight--covering the Main Event. After an enjoyable first hour, the second hour is .... the first hour again!??? Huh?? I didn't stick around to see if they fixed it, but having a Canadian satellite dish has been a mixed blessing.
  • We get the lousy Canadian commercials (smaller market, fewer companies paying for ads) repeated endlessly it seems (including back to back to back), and this is particularly annoying during the Super Bowl.
  • We get the US shows on "US" channels but they often mess up the feed so that the show starts twice--first for 30 seconds to two minutes and then starts again or ends like that.
  • We often do not get the tease for next week (which is so frustrating when it comes to Lost).
The only bright side is that we have Canadian channels for the stations in most of the time zones, which has two positive side effects--we can often watch shows that would compete with each other in the US in the same time period at different times; and we tend to get a better selection of NFL games as each Canadian station across the country tends to get the US games closest to them, so we get NE, Buffalo, Chicago, Green Bay, Minnesota, Seattle, in addition to the main games that each American network broadcasts.

So, it could be a wash, except that much of the Canadian minuses are so very annoying, like the messed up feed tonight.

1 comment:

Steve Greene said...

Don't you have a DVR to make the competing times issue moot? You without a DVR strikes me as Col Sanders without chicken