=| Haggan.net |=

So i’m at work on Sunday nights, as I usually am, but this week is the AFC and NFC Championship playoff games and I found myself compelled to watch them even though I don’t follow any team in them. My Titans are out, so normally I wouldn’t care, but dammit, I want some football. And here is where my delimma starts.

At work, we have two big screen TV’s, but we cannot change the channel on them. I mean, we CAN, but we could get written up and/or fired if we do. So me and my co-workers can’t watch some football today. So I go on a hunt for streaming it on my work computer (which they don’t care about for some reason).

So first off, I go to the usual sites, CBS.com (for the Colts/Jets), Fox (for the Saints/Vikings ), NFL.com, Direct TV (i’m a subscriber).. but no go. I go to the ESPN site, but no go either because i’m not paying for it. I then go some other sites i’ve heard about before Justin.tv and Ustream. Ustream turned me off at first because the first ones I went to didn’t work. Then I went to the Justin.tv site and found a couple of streams, and picked on that looked promising. I was enjoying watching the Colts manhandle the Jets, ignoring the insipid banter in the chat room that you cannot turn off, and then suddenly, the stream stops and goes to a page saying that the stream has been taken offline because of a DMCA takedown. And all the others are like that too. Even the crappy quality ones.

And this goes on for the entire Colts/Jets games, and then into the Saints/Vikings games. In fact, it seems that the DMCA notices came at extremely inoppurtune times, such as at the 2 minute warning in the Saints/Vikings game (I couldn’t find another one working until OT had started).

So here is my plea to the NFL… give us some streaming options, for free. Add in some commercials like the TV shows do. People will watch them.