This Green One

Since I leave for London indefinitely quite soon now, I was anxious to try out Big Pond TV. This free service allows anyone to stream replays of AFL games, which in London might be the only real way I’m going to get to see any of Hawthorn’s games.

So I logged on and was immediately disappointed. First of all, I work on a Mac and Big Pond TV simply does not work in Safari at all. At least for me it doesn’t. After some futile attempts to get the damn thing working in Safari, I switched to Firefox.

Firefox is now a very popular browser and any idiot web developer should build their stuff to support it. I was able to at least get some video in Firefox, but as you can see from the screenshot below, it’s pretty sub-par.

This is how Big Pond TV looks in Firefox

Notice first how the video pushes off the right hand side of the page. Notice also how I wanted to watch the Collingwood vs. Hawthorn game but it inexplicably starts streaming the Melbourne vs. Geelong game. Also, the video screen comes over the top of the control buttons at the bottom of it, which don’t even work by the way. Pretty poor. The resolution of the footage is also very blurry and shiser.

Aside from what you see on the screenshot, it is riddled with other problems. At first they stream an advertisement before you get to see the game, which is understandable and fine but sometimes the ad will just endlessly cycle. I had to refresh the page a couple of times because instead of football I kept getting the same Commonwealth Bank ad over and over again. When the thing finally came on it was the wrong game!

Having said that I do think this is a good idea. I’d love to watch the Hawks through this thing over in London so I really do hope they get it fixed soon in case the Hawks actually make the finals.