NHL.com is offering a free preview of GameCenter Live on January 26, 2010. That’s today! Check it out, it’s worth it.
Sorry, you missed it!

I got the chance to play around with NHL’s GameCenter Live over the last week and I have to admit that it’s quite impressive.

GameCenter Live expands on the NHL.com free GameCenter service which does not show any live games but does offer a limited number of in-game highlights, real-time stats, Ice Tracker (you can track shots, goals, hits, and penalties for one player or an entire team), in-game photos, and live chat. GameCenter Live, a pay service, allows you to watch up to 40 live games per week, adds DVR functionality, picture in picture, extended highlights (10-12 minute versions of the game the following morning), game archives starting from 2007 and including a growing number of classic games, and HD capability. Plus, everything offered with the free service remains but the modules containing home and away stats, chat, play-by-play, and Ice Tracker are widgets which can be dragged off the screen and placed wherever you want.

On Saturday, I sat down to watch Carolina at Philadelphia and Ottawa at Boston, neither of which I would have been able to watch otherwise. Aside from the obvious (watching tv, especially a fast sport with a tiny puck, on a laptop computer kind of sucks) I was really pleased with the quality. My only real complaint was that when switched to full screen, the live stream was a bit choppy. However, this is a bandwidth issue and likely has more to do with my computer and our DSL. I have a feeling that someone who would purchase a GameCenter subscription would make sure to have a computer with more than enough capability to handle the streams. There are also options which allow the user to adjust the bitrate themselves or enable adaptive streaming to watch in HD. For some reason, my computer wouldn’t let me watch with the adaptive selection enabled but as a “casual” user, I wasn’t too concerned.

I didn’t get a chance to try and watch four games at once, which the service is able to offer, but I did watch two games at once. There are two ways to do this: 1) use the picture-in-picture function to keep an eye on one game which watching the other at full size; 2) use the multi-game view and watch each game at an equal size. I liked the picture-in-picture (PIP) the best because it was set up nicely. It’s very easy to watch one game without being distracted by the insert. As well, you can swap the pictures with one click. My favorite thing, however, are the stats widgets. Like the free service, they update game stats in real time but are only available to watch one game at a time. With GameCenter Live, when I swapped to the second game, the stats widgets seamlessly switched from the first set of teams to the second without any work on my part. I’m a huge stats nerd–I love watching them update in real time. One complaint though is, as far as I can tell, the multi-game view is set up only to maximize the experience of watching four games at one. If you use it to watch 2 or 3 games, you are still looking at 1 or 2 empty boxes rather than having the viewing space divide equally between the amount of open games.

Right now, fans hard up to watch out of market games have few options. I’ve watched some games thanks to friends in those markets with Slingboxes. Services like ATDHE.net and Justin.tv offer free streaming games as well but the quality isn’t always great and there’s no guarantee that the game you want will be offered. If you’re serious about catching as many games as possible, travel a lot, or live where you just can’t catch your favorite team, GameCenter Live is the best possible option. However, I think you’ll need to ask yourself just how much hockey you’re going to actually watch. If you pick up the package at this point, it will run you $119 for the remainder of the season as well as select games from the Stanley Cup Playoffs. If you’re a big fan and have the money to spare, I think this is a great option to catch as much action as you can. But it is pricey and I think NHL.com would be smart to consider a “lite” version of GameCenter Live. There are probably a lot of people who would be willing to pay to watch the out of market games but might not need or want all the functionality, especially considering that blackout restrictions still apply so getting to see every single game is just not possible. The best features, in my opinion, are the ability to watch archived games and the Ice Tracker and live stats modules. I’m a pretty avid fan but I’m not sure that I will ever need to watch 4 games at once and probably will never pay to be able to do so but I would consider paying for a service with slightly less variety.

That said, I really like GameCenter Live and I’m psyched to have it for the rest of the season. Maybe by the time playoffs come around, I’ll be hopelessly addicted to getting to watch so much hockey at once that I’ll change my mind about whether the price is a deterrent for me.

So I’m gonna get back to the Calgary/St. Louis game now…or maybe Buffalo/Vancouver. Wait, I think I’ll watch them both. Just because I can.

Thanks to Michael DiLorenzo with the NHL for hooking me up with the subscription; the service is very cool and I’m excited to be trying it out.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Thoughts from the Beer Line. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.