Since the Portland Trail Blazers are kind of a big deal around these parts, I was excited to hear that they would be "the first team in the NBA to stream games online."  With Major League Baseball showing excellent results from its online streaming (in both the quality and business sense), it's good to see the NBA working to polish their online solution.  After my first experience, though, while it's clear the potential is there, it definitely needs work.  Click through for the full post.

Image courtesy of Mike Rogoway, The Oregonian

First, there are caveats to the Blazers' streaming.  Some of the big ones include:

• It costs money:  either $3.99 per game or $39.99 for all 15.
• Second, the 15 games being streamed are the same 15 that are being broadcast on KGW Channel 8 (Portland's local NBC affiliate).  None of the games broadcast on cable are being streamed online.  Third, because of NBA broadcast requirements, the team is only allowed to stream games within their broadcast territory, which is about a 150-mile radius.  Those outside the radius must purchase NBA League Pass Broadband, which costs between $89.95 and $149.95 depending on the package. 
• NBA guidelines do not currently permit phone or mobile device streaming, which would be a handy feature.

So for usability's sake, there are some kinks to work out, but I guess you need to start somewhere.

Now for my experience.  On Tuesday night, I fired up my Lenovo ThinkPad notebook (2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, Vista 32, NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M), but made the mistake of purchasing right at game time since I was mainly curious about the stream instead of actually relying on it (I was also watching in HD on my 40-inch LCD).  The site was bogged down so it took quite awhile for anything to process.  I had to create an account, install the RayV player software, and launch the stream.  Finally, after about 10-15 minutes, it started "loading" and I thought I was up and running.  But then I never got a picture.  I tried the "Low" bandwidth instead of the "High," but in that case I didn't even get a "loading" message.  It wasn't until the second quarter that I was able to reboot my system and get a stream to come through.  Finally!

The stream, which was about 14 seconds behind KGW's broadcast, looked pretty sharp in the small window.  The stream's bitrate was generally around 1.2 Mbps and when I went fullscreen on my 14-inch laptop, I could see pixels, but it was generally smooth.  Overall, I was satisfied by the quality, even when I used a VGA cable for playback on my TV.  If it were my only viewing option, I certainly would not have complained.  It did need to buffer occasionally and the "Low" bandwidth option was still dead for me, but luckily my connection handled "High" just fine.  The audio also cut out for a good chunk of the third and fourth quarters, which was frustrating, and then when it came back it was out of sync, messing up Travis Outlaw's southern drawl in his postgame interview.  The RayV player is nice and clean, though.  It has DVR options (which I used for a Martell Webster dunk), tells you statistics about your stream, and even has widgets in case you want to plug into Facebook or Twitter.

The Oregonian's Mike Rogoway also documented his experience and gleaned a couple interesting facts from the Blazers' marketing department:  

1. About 500 users watched the game online.
2. There were two system-wide outages caused by a failure on the team's servers and then a failure at the NBA's servers in Atlanta.

Overall, even with my tempered expectations, I would give the experience a C grade.  It was frustrating not getting a stream up until the second quarter and being without audio late in the game.  As it stands right now, I would do anything I could to find another means of watching the next game before I would purchase the online streaming option again, instead waiting for others' feedback to see if there was improvement.  It will be very interesting to see what kind of strides are made as the season progresses—here at Elemental we'll be paying close attention!

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