Here\u2019s a list<\/a> of this year\u2019s tournaments.) No longer will I have to stay up until 2am watching camel racing in Dubai so I can track down an illegal feed of the Barclays Dubai Tennis Championships and then, when I find it, strain my aging eyes looking at a grainy postage stamp-sized screen trying to figure out if the ball was in or out since, for some reason or other, I never found time to learn Arabic and thus do not understand a word the commentators say.<\/p>\nNo, I can just pay $129.95 for a year\u2019s subscription and watch the ATP Masters 1000 events, both the women\u2019s and men\u2019s year-end championships, and a number of other events in between. Or I can pay $84.95 to watch just the men\u2019s events or $69.95 to watch just the women\u2019s events. There are lots of issues to look at here and in this day and age, first and foremost is economics.<\/p>\n
I already pay a premium to get the Tennis Channel from my satellite provider and now I’ll have to pay more. Then there\u2019s the technology. If I watch a match on my satellite TV feed, I can record it on my digital video recorder. I can\u2019t do that on the web. Yet. There are a number of programs that will record directly off a computer screen but they frequently freeze up and, in any case, you\u2019d have to get up in the middle of the night and start the recording mechanically because their scheduling features don\u2019t work yet.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know about TennisTV yet because its season doesn\u2019t start until early February with the WTA event in Paris and the ATP event in Rotterdam, but the ATP Masters Series TV website charged an extra fee to watch past events when it was broadcasting the Masters events online.<\/p>\n
Having said that, I sometimes pay a fee to watch a web feed for one of the many, many events I can\u2019t find on TV and those events are more likely to turn up on TennisTV. And that\u2019s how I think this will all work out.<\/p>\n
Sooner rather than later, we\u2019ll be watching every tennis match online. Sporting events, and broadcasting in general, are migrating to the internet. If you missed an episode of the Simpsons you can point your computer at Hulu.com and catch up. Or you can take your iPod out of your pocket and indulge in Entourage on Itunes. Rather than having to pay for hunting shows on the Versus channel so you can get the sports package which has the Tennis Channel, you\u2019ll be able to pay for tennis matches only online.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s a good thing because, currently, satellite and cable providers have too much power. I recently had to sign up for a new two year contract just because I upgraded to HD. I liked watching the summer Olympics online at my leisure and I\u2019m going to enjoy watching tennis online.<\/p>\n
Oh yeah, and speaking of the Aussie Open, rather than switching back and forth and picking up points here and there in matches featuring, mostly, US tennis players on ESPN2 and the Tennis Channel, I can sit down with my computer and pick a match and watch every point from beginning to end. How cool is that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Having trouble finding a broadcast feed of your favorite tournament? Take heart, maybe it\u2019s one of the many events TennisTV.com will broadcast online this year. There\u2019s so much going on at the moment that I can barely figure out where to direct my attention. Tomorrow the US will swear in its first black president. My […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}