Thursday,
March 11th
"It's tourney time"
Here's
where I whine a bit about being in Spain. Every year at this time - the
start of the ACC tournament and hence the beginning of March Madness -
it's hard to be away from the action. For those of you wishing to catch
some of the action on television or in some bar you'll just have to be
disappointed for the most part. In posting and emailing to some of my
favorite sites I can just tell you the options right now: Spain you'll
get the Final Four (maybe) and then the Championship. Canal Plus or one
of it's sports channels will carry that. Sportmania, another sports channel,
will televise the game on tape delay by one day, which you can watch at
the Tex Mex bar on Calle Placentines or in your house if you're lucky
enough to have cable or sat. tv. Another warning that they show the result
of the game on Sportmania right before the broadcast - they ain't to smart
over there. If you have a US billing address and high speed internet access
Yahoo Platinum offers live video feeds of the entire tournament up until
the Final Eight. They say it's for U.S. residents but you can watch from
anywhere in the world if you have a credit card from the U.S. On my Telefonica
ADSL I get pixelated video but it's clear enough. If I had 512K service
I could get very clear video and a little larger screen. The service is,
I think $11.95 for one month this year. I
have just learned the service was switched to CBSsportsline.com and NCAAsports.com.
It should be about the same, maybe with a few improvements over Yahoo.
You can find more information on the service here.
Through my posting and replies I did find that NASN, or the
North American Sports Network, in the UK is closer to God for bringing
those lucky few a lot of college basketball games, the entire ACC and
NCAA tournament. You can get it on the Sky Network which some people do
receive in Spain, but you must have a UK billing address to subscribe
to NASN.com. If anyone wants to join
me in a fruitless letter writing campaign to these people and Digital
Plus to somehow migrate this channel to Spain please drop me an email!
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