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1 year ago
NHL GameCenter Live
I have been using and playing with NHL GameCenter Live for about a month now and just wanted to throw down a quick post on my thoughts towards the service.
There are some areas on North America that lack decent NHL coverage and I feel for those people. My dad is a great example. He lives a few hours south of Chicago and lives 15 minutes outside of a city that is home to an AHL team. You would think that the coverage would be pretty decent considering his location and close proximity to an AHL team. Just the opposite. He is constantly struggling to find a game to catch on nights, usually he is stuck watching paintball tournaments or repeats of NCAA football games from 10 years ago. I think GameCenter is made for these types of fans.
On top of all my dad’s struggles with his local coverage he travels all around the States as well. This leads to even more issues especially if he is interesting in what Chicago is doing that night. Don’t get excited he loves his Leafs and will bleed blue and white till he kicks the can. GameCenter would be a life saver for him for that reason alone. The chances of him catching a Leaf game on a Tuesday night is going to be damn near nill. The service would be awesome for this type of hockey fan, the guy that is on the road but doesn’t want to miss a beatdown or goal.
Now I consider myself to be pretty lucky when it comes to the amount of NHL hockey I get to watch. Between TSN, TSN2, SportsNet, LeafsTV and CBC pretty much every night I can catch a live game. But being a Leafs fan I run into the problem of not always getting to watch “the best” hockey. That’s why I have been loving GameCenter for this month. There have been many nights were the Leafs are down 3 (after 10 mins) and I find myself looking for something better. Any game that is on that night I can watch. The quality is excellent and the added PVR features makes the experience awesome.
A great aspect of GameCenter is that all the games are archived, so say you are a Vancouver fan living in Florida (I dunno why, but you are) Not only can you watch all of your beloved Canuck games but say you don’t feel like staying up all night to watch you can catch it the next morning while eating your grapefruit. Or say you pass out drunk with 5 minutes left and wake up the next morning you can load up the game and skip right to the part where everything started to get fuzzy. Maybe you heard that there was the hit/goal/fight of the year and rather than hunting down shitty clips on YouTube you can load up GameCenter and see just how it went down.
When you take the archiving to the major level that the NHL has done you have a massive library (or Vault) of games to pick through. Dating back to the 60’s and going all the way up to the late 90’s there are “Classic” games you can watch, and yes Leaf fans Game 6 of the 1993 playoffs is in there. More current games are in the “Archive” area and they date back 3 years.
As with everything there are flaws but really the only thing that really bugs me is that if there is a game being broadcasted on local TV (TSN, CBC, etc) then you can’t watch that game live and you have to wait a bit longer to watch it archived. I don’t really blame the NHL for this one as it makes sorta sense that you should just flip on the damn TV if there is a game on you want to watch. But when you wife wants to see who will get the final rose and you want to see who is going to break 50 first…well you see where I am going.
As I have gone on at length, the service is awesome and seems to be well worth the cost. Another nice thing is that the price drops as the season goes on since obviously you are getting less and less for your money as the games get ticked off the schedule. Check it out if you haven’t you wont regret it!
Cheers,
Justin
P.S - I didn’t even tell you about the ability to watch 4 games at once, it’s mind blowing.
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More thoughts, and words of wisdom (yes wisdom) from both Darrin and I can be found here.
Don't shoot the messenger.
Justin
