The biggest college football game of the year, #1 ranked Ohio State versus #2 ranked Michigan, began this morning at about 4:30am Beijing time. Unfortunately, for Dave and I, the horribly inconvenient start time ended up being far less of an issue than finding a place to watch the game.
For those of us living in Beijing, options for watching live telecasts of our favorite sports teams from the US and from Europe can be quite limited:
- Local television may play up to a few European football matches and NBA games a week, but mostly show large market teams (like Manchester United) or teams with Chinese players (like the Houston Rockets). American football, baseball, rugby, and all other major foreign sports are rarely, if ever, televised on local stations in China.
- Satellite TV is available in many international, high-end apartment complexes in Beijing, and mini portable satellite dishes (that illegally tap into various satellite networks around Asia) are widely available for purchase, but they cost more than many are willing to pay. Many foreign-run sports bars around Beijing do, however, rely on satellite for their games and they have become popular destinations for foreigners to catch the big games.
This particular game, however, was not broadcast on a channel available over satellite, and that became a big problem for Dave, me and a hundred or so other fans sitting at our local sports bar this morning.
At the bar, we were told by one of our friends that the game was available over pay-per-view via the Internet on ESPN GamePlan, so Dave biked (yes, we are in China) home to see if he could order the game and watch it from his apartment. For an unspecified reason, the website had trouble billing Dave’s US credit card so that promptly ended that attempt. (According to MZone, a University of Michigan college football forum, ESPN GamePlan still has “some major flaws”, so perhaps billing is one of them. Once ESPN works out the kinks, however, this would be an ideal alternative to paying for satellite.)
In the end, we found another sports bar in town that was showing the game via Slingbox and we made our way there for the second half. This was, perhaps, a slight infraction on the user agreement with Sling Media, but for one night, the Slingbox offered Dave, me, and 150 other fans a priceless opportunity to watch the big game. (For Sling Media, it certainly didn’t hurt the company’s branding with 150+ fans staring at a screen with its logo on it for four hours.) The picture wasn’t the clearest, but the streamed video never got cut off, the sound was loud and clear, the 81 total points scored made for a very exciting game to watch.
Before this year, satellite TV was pretty much the only choice we had to watch live foreign television in Beijing, but newly popularized place-shifting technologies like the SlingBox (and TVU, which enables P2P streaming of live television) offer a an alternative option for foreigners to get their fix of television back home.
I have since purchased a Slingbox, which is installed at my home in the US, and will from now on be Slinging in Beijing!
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