Numbed by TV: Your #1 Streaming Source for Pardon the Interruption and Around the Horn

Says who? Says google.com! Look up streaming pti or streaming around the horn on Google.

ESPN360.com, ESPN's own streaming broadband video service should be the #1 source I imagine except it's a product that's only available to a handful of people because apparently the only companies they could get to pay them were AT&T and Verizon's DSL broadband services. Unfortunately the difference between Comcast and Time Warner cable companies and these two telcos broadband offerings is probably as vast as the difference between the number of people who visit espn.com and the # of people who visit this humble web site.

ESPN360 isn't available to hardly ANYONE, and so it's a worthless product for almost everybody. I think the deal pretty much boiled down to Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, Charter, Cablevision laughing when ESPN held out it's hand for a few pennies for this service. The cable companies didn't want to pay extra. So that service is available to Fred and Jack on AT&T and Verizon DSL products, but that's it.

It is a problem because I am already paying more than $100/mo. for cable services (excluding my broadband internet connection) from Comcast. Here's the deal and folks have to get used to it. That's sort of a cap. My monthly cable bill which is now in the neighborhood of $170 – it's not going to go up from here. What's going to happen is I am going to keep getting more for the same amount of money.

It's going to take about 5 years, but by then Steve Jobs will have hopefully taken his little hobby mainstream. The Cable MSO, DirectTV etc are all going to face competition from "internet programming providers". Companies who launch to give you basically the same thing you're already getting only somehow better and less expensive (or realistically the exact same price). The effect of all this is that pricing is capped. If anything I expect what I am paying will be LESS in 5 years. So I don't blame Comcast. I do blame ESPN for being stupid and not going for the maximum distribution. They can figure out how to subsidize the site via advertising. ESPN knows how to sell advertising just fine.

My 5 year vision is a ways off and companies are trying to gouge every drop out of you. For example, Verizon's piece of crap Vcast service costs $14.95 a month. There's some content in VCast, but not nearly as much content as I have on my media center PC. I could switch to AT&T (and the iPhone is coming!) and for $0.00 extra a month have access to everything I can stream off my PC, including live television. I'd probably pay $14.95 a month for that right now.

Verizon must already realize they can't make a dime on VCast and especially as free wifi becomes ubiquitous in major markets, they won't be able to think about selling products like this.

Why on earth would I pay $15/mo to Verizon to stream PTI and ATH to my phone when I can stream it via wifi for free? I wouldn't.

So I'm # 1 on the Google search for Streaming PTI and ESPN itself isn't even in the top 10. I didn't see that coming. I had hoped to be number one with pacific catch iphone ,but I couldn't leapfrog some site called Gizmodo and now TUAW jumped ahead of me, but it's running news that I was not – that Pacific Catch is offering an iPhone calamari special .

If you're in the hood, I still say the chili encrusted calamari at Betelnut is the better way to go.

Bud Selig is Coming to Town

I saw Bill Plaschke acting like half genius, half total dope. That's the beauty of Around the Horn! The genius half was that he said Bud Selig ought not be so cowardly as to sneak into games without talking to the press about Bonds. Then he said he knows Bud is a good man who loves the game.



SHAME ON YOU BILL PLASCHKE! (I couldn't resist, sorry).

Did Bud love the game so much that he cared to do anything at all about steroids until the pressure from the US Government came at him? No, no he didn't. Where was all the stuff Bud was doing to save the game from the steroids era in 1998-2002?

Were there no steroids then? Bud wasn't yelling about Barry, Mark, Sammy, etc back then. He was saying, "Goodness gracious, we're making a lot of money here folks...let's ignore the problem until it goes away!"

That doesn't make Bud Selig the worst guy in the world, in fact as these things go, it makes him pretty human. But it does make him a lousy commissioner if saving the game from steroids is important.

I'm still not sure that it is. In fact, I'm much more sure they're using HGH and that Jason Giambi was cheating with greenies and getting caught just last summer. You want to impress us Bud? Don't make Giambi talk to Mitchell. Make Giambi give his blood to a lab so they can test for HGH.

I understand that's not going to happen. It isn't in anyone's best interest -- even Bud's. OK, so the test comes back and sure as heck, HGH -- then what the hell does Bud do? He can suspend Giambi I suppose, but without changing the collective bargaining agreement, he can't test anyone else and so the cloud will still hang over the game.

The All-Star game is here in San Francisco in a few weeks and I know for a fact Mr. Selig will be coming to that and I can make a fairly good guess at which hotel he's going to be staying at (I have it narrowed down to 5, but it's probably one of the top 3).

The question is this, what's going to win out: crazy or lazy? I'd bet on lazy, but I am tempted to stand out in front of his hotel all day with a sign saying "Bud Knew Barry Cheated, Why does Bud Get a Pass for not doing anything until the President said something about it? Bud Selig is every bit the cheating, liar Barry Bonds is, but not nearly as talented at what he does!"

Ok, I admit, that will need to be a pretty big sign.

Streaming Around the Horn and PTI

I'll keep a couple of days worth on this page and see what happens. Pardon my French (the English version of the ORB player defaults to streaming the 1st video in the list immediately, that's not optimal in any # of ways). Just bookmark this post. I'll update the playlist daily and the player will automatically update it here.

Update 7.11.07: I am no longer streaming these shows via this method. If you are still interested in receiving the streams send me an e-mail at robert.seidman@gmail.com and I'll send access instructions.