A review of Wimbledon Live

Wimbledon Live, as far as I know, was a new streaming video service this year - allowing live and on demand viewing of all of the Wimbledon courts in play. I received an e-mail about it from the USTA and immediately signed up for what they call an All-Access Pass. This cost me US19.95, as I signed up early in the tournament. Prices did vary throughout the two weeks of Wimby, but I believe the lowest "all-access" price was $19.95.

As far as the live portion of the viewing went, I was really impressed. I'm not in a time zone friendly to staying at home and watching tennis all day, so this was a major advantage to have. My employer did provide streaming feeds to ESPN and ESPN2, so I did have some other access, but the quality of the feed provided by WL was superior and streamed nearly perfectly. I used only the highest quality stream available since I do have a good internet connection. There was one lower quality stream option (about 500k instead of 1MB). The audio feed was from the British announcers, so that even gave a different spin on things than ESPN2.

So, live was a great deal. I was disappointed in On Demand though - I thought it would allow me to start a match that I had missed the beginning of whenever, even if the match was still going on. It turned out this wasn't true - no matches were posted for On Demand until the day had been long over. (I believe the posting time was around midnight, London time). I'm the type of person who sees the scores and no longer feels the need to watch the match, unless it was players I really like or a surprising result. I did use it for background noise while I worked, though. The biggest improvement that could be made here for next year would be "true" on demand access - if I missed the first 15 minutes of a match, I want to start from the beginning whenever.

I'm hugely in favor of streaming as much tennis as possible, especially since there is such horrible TV coverage (speaking for the US). I'm not in an area that gets the Tennis Channel, I hate the cost of my cable TV subscription, and I will continue to pay for streaming access when available. I wish they had more of it for the US Open series!