The Watchman: NBA All-Star Game Was Nothing Special Online

Thirdly, it wasn’t until later on I realized he could vote on which players these cameras followed. But beyond the fact this option wasn’t clear, it also didn’t work. It garnered less than 2000 votes, the vast majority of which went to the two most popular players, regardless of what was happening in the game and how that affected who would be most interesting to watch at any given time. What this all made me yearn for is the ability to access all the cameras in the arena. There had to have been at least ten cameras in the building; I wanted to be able to watch all of them.

But I also had issues with the other two cameras: Arena and Host.

The content of Arena was a real hodgepodge as I came to realize it was showing whichever camera feeds were being shown on the Jumbotron in the arena. So this meant a lot of jumping between game footage and crowd coverage. And there must’ve been a low celebrity turnout at the game as I was treated to multiple shots of Harold Raimis, whose work I respects tremendously, but who doesn’t rank that high on the celebrity scale.

The Host camera seemed almost like what was on TV, but it was missing a few key things. A big one was on-screen graphics. I understand that the quality of video they were streaming doesn’t lend itself well to displaying small text, and he acknowledges that they did take the step of building in a scoreboard above the video window, but you know what they missed? A play clock! For the most part I had no idea how much time was left or even what quarter they were in.

Another really strange thing about this camera is that it didn’t cut to commercials when the TV did. Instead the cameras just kept rolling, or rather they lingered, showing players milling around and occasionally even cameramen goofing off. It all got very amateurish, which was weird given how professional sports tend to have the highest production value. And I couldn’t understand for the life of me why TNT was throwing away opportunities to monetize this online video, or at least attempt to fill airtime with supplemental content like interviews with people in the crowd or players.

But the most annoying thing that happened was a period when the Arena and Host video windows swapped feeds. I was watching the game and the camera would switch to a crowd shot right in the middle of a play, so I got a clear shot of the crowd cheering on an amazing play I just missed. Using the four-square resolved which feed was going to which window, but this was still a real nuisance.

And regarding that four-square, while useful in this situation, in general I didn’t find it compelling. There was too much going on with four separate videos to follow anything, and the video quality in each quarter got really low, making it hard to distinguish players on wide shots.

The final piece of this experience was the creepy integration with Facebook. I found it creepy as right next to video window was a Facebook window where I was encouraged to enter in what I was watching in his status bar and where I could read what others who were watching the All-Star game were saying. What made it creepy is that I was logged in automatically without agreeing to that or giving TNT any permission to do so. It felt like a violation of privacy, and made me upset with both TNT and Facebook for not at least asking if this was OK to do.

Even worse was that the experience was not compelling in the slightest. Very few people had entered status updates relevant to the game, and those that did left only the briefest of messages. A simple chatroom would’ve been better and a whole lot less intrusive.

It would have been even better had this entire monstrosity been replaced with something actually relevant to the game, like stats! I was flabbergasted that I couldn’t see how many points Kobe had scored without going to NBA.com. These issues were compounded by the lack of on-screen graphics.

All in all, I dub this a watchable experience, one that hints at the Internet’s potential for revolutionizing video distribution, but also one that falls far short of what’s possible. While the core of delivering quality video was there, the overall experience still felt amateurish.