Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Thoughts on NHL Center Ice

This NHL season I purchased the Center Ice package, which lets me watch most NHL games live.  As with all of these kinds of packages, I don't get live games being shown on a national network (usually the NBC Sports Network), and I am not supposed to get games from my local team, the St. Louis Blues.  I usually watch the games through the Center Ice app on my Playstation 3, and for the most part it works quite well.  Like with the MLB package, a lousy internet feed will result in choppy or grainy video, but for the most part my internet service from U-verse is sufficient to the task.  Video quality actually appears to be getting better as the season goes, but whether that is something that the NHL is improving, or just random luck, I can not tell.

So, some thoughts.
1.  When the season started, I found myself watching a lot of Montreal games, and I have now moved to watching a lot of Detroit games.  What's up with that?
2.  I really like watching Canadian broadcasts.  Part of this is the fun of seeing Canadian commercials.  Sometimes the NHL feeds cut out commercials and intermission discussions, but more often than not I get to see those.  I have no idea how or why the NHL decides whether to show commercials or not, but for whatever reason I like seeing commercials for businesses that have nothing to do with me.
3.  I would deeply like to have Chris Osgood's hair.
4.  I can watch St. Louis Blues games live!!!  I'm not supposed to, but about 20 games into the season the NHL Center Ice app had a really weird error where it basically dumped all its data and I had to re-initialize it on my Playstation 3.  After doing so, though, I am not blacked out from my local team's games, so I'm not complaining.
5.  $150 is kind of a lot to pay just to watch hockey games, but it's worth it.

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