Since I don’t have cable/satellite, I’ve been subscribing to CBS ULive. To say that I have been disappointed would be an understatement. It’s not that I am not getting enough for my money. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. The first problem is that I don’t really know one way or the other. I have no idea what games this service provides me access to (if any). I was hoping it was a “catch-all” for the various games that CBS’s online presence broadcasts. For instance, you can get a particular team’s games for $x/mo, and a particular conference’s for $y/mo. The subscription I got was for $x/mo, so I hoped that it covered all of them. That sounds like expecting a lot, but I did know going in that some games are hooked up and some aren’t.

(By “hooked up” I mean hooked up to the jumbotron. That’s how these games work. They’re hooked up to the internal feed and usually a radio broadcast. Which means that you get to see the plays, though you don’t get to see the graphics like the score, down, etc. In between plays, you see the sorts of ads that you would see on a jumbo tron: free carwash with an oil change and such. Or you’ll see cheerleading graphics like “GO MINERS!”)

Now, the fact that some games are hooked up and some aren’t, and CBS doesn’t have a clear idea of which, exacerbates the problems. They’ll list a video feed for a game and it won’t actually occur. Which is annoying. Made more annoying by the fact that there is no central index so that I can check the games and surf through them until I find which one works. Instead, I seem to have to go through the individual teams’ websites. Or use the site’s search function, which is less than stellar.

With access to ESPN3, this isn’t as important as it might have been. I’d like to get Conference USA games and Mountain West Conference games, which are not on ESPN3 because they have no contract with ESPN. So maybe I’ll step back and get the C*USA or the MWC package even if that means I can’t get some of the other conferences I care about (and I’d only be able to subscribe to one. The other conferences are more likely to appear on ESPN3 than either C*USA or the MWC, though there might be some games on ULive that aren’t on those services.

Which, of course, I don’t know, because they apparently want to make it as hard as possible to find out what, if anything, I am actually subscribing to.

I did get the Tulane game against South Alabama. Tulane games are the only reliable ones that are really good about making themselves available. Anyway, I watched it for a while, but then some sort of audio malfunction made that feedback screech. So off went that game.