Cycling.TV Beta: Check It ASAP

I was checking the other day to see if they were in fact actually showing San Sebastian, and on the (stupid IMO) new site I couldn’t easily find any information. I had to open the media player window in the end to be able to get a list of “live races”, which at that time was entirely empty …

Yes, we all complained about c.tv’s old site, but for me I thought it was a matter of some fine-tuning and tweaking (ie. fix the streaming problems, not make me open 2 windows to run it, things like that) – I didn’t particularly think they needed to revamp the entire site again for the 2nd time (or more) in just a year or so… unless this was a switch to harmonize with the rest of JumpTV perhaps?

My understanding is that they sent out emails with passwords to all subscribers – but obviously many didn’t receive them. I’d realized I hadn’t had any email for a long time from c.tv just a week or 2 before the switch – so I changed my email in case hotmail was somehow blocking them as spam (even though they were in my contacts list). In any case, I was one of the lucky ones who got the email, logged in with my new password and promptly changed it back to the one I’d remember – but that doesn’t mean that I’m lucky in figuring out the new site!

I tried to get a neww password for several days now unsuccessfully. I finally got in when I directly emailed them (as oppoised to using their customer contasct sheet) AND I used my work email. For some reason my home email never worked even though a) they had that on file and B) I manually whitelisted it. Weird. I have a Mac and am using Firefox.

But now I am in, There is not yet a listing for San Sebastian but I am hopeful.

The word is:

According to the latest information provided by the unnamed, impossibly debonair-sounding European man who is now answering all of her calls, your ex-girlfriend, Rebecca Norsten, “don’t want to speak to you no more.”

The new policy of non-communication, not elaborated upon by Norsten herself, was announced during a phone call to her apartment early Monday morning in the suave, confident tones of an Italian or possibly Portuguese individual of indeterminate height and muscle tone. Phone records indicate the statement was made at 9:35 a.m.—approximately one hour and 25 minutes too early for the speaker to have been a platonic visitor who did not spend all last night giving the love of your life everything you never could.

More details here. Sorry, Dan.

to my hotmail account, but the live tab is empty and the on demand listing only shows a few of the Tour de France stage highlights (stage 17 and onwards) and none of the previous races that I paid for with my numerous packages….

from bad to worse

tomorrow morning will see us all in a fetal position warbling “Kum-ba-ya” before screaming.

I was able to log in with the password they sent but….no live races listed and why can’t I access the packages I paid for…..ugh!....this sucks!

the live box is empty. Is that maybe empty until they are ready to go in the AM? I hope so. I do see it on the list for 8/2, just not in the live window. I so hope there are few issues in the morning.

although cyclingfans says live coverage of the race starts at 9:45am EDT. I emailed them three times today, and received only one reply, telling me to find the live races in the Live Race section. Gee, thanks for that.

Belgien

15 45 Één = sporza.be mit belgischer ip läuft unter www.sporza.be ein stream

Dänemark

15 45 TV2sport.dk (stream: link )

Niederlande

15 45 Ned1 = www.nos.nl – stream nur mit holländischer ip

Spanien

15 45 Etb1 – das rennen wird von etbsat, der ja gestreamt wird, aber nicht übertragen.

U.K.

15 45 Cycling.tv – natürlich nur im premiumchannel

here’s the url, tho takes to the radsport home page (and i can’t just show the text for the url):
:

STREAM.html

Carlstrom ,Camano,Docxk, Verdugo,Pauriol en Moinard in the attack with 6,50 advantage

a massive break of 46 riders, peloton 4+mins behind.
Riders in the break are:
Kreuziger, Miholjevic, Nibali, Noe, Pellizotti y Stangelj (Liquigas), Contador y Noval (astaná), Valverde, Karpets, Joaquín Rodríguez, Arroyo, Lastras, Losada, Pasamontes y Zandio (Caisse d’Epargne), Andy Schleck y Kolobnev (CSC), De la Fuente (Scott-American Beef), Popovich (Silence-Lotto), Menchov (Rabobank), Rebellin (Gerolsteiner), Samuel Sánchez, Zubeldia, Rubén Pérez y Verdugo (Euskaltel), Talabardon (Credit Agricole), Possoni y Barry (Columbia), Arrieta y Goubert (AG2R), Voeckler (Bouygues), Bettini, Garate, Barredo, Carrara, Tonti y Van de Walle (Quick Step), Sylvain Chavanel y Moncoutie (Cofidis), Velits (Milram), Cunego, Tiralongo y Bruseghin (Lampre), y David García y Vorganov (Karpin-Galicia).

Cycling.tv informed us yesterday that they do not have the rights to this race.

“Udsendelsen er ikke startet endnu.”

Mornin’ folks!

Do I take it that CTV is NOT broadcasting San Seb?

That Danish TV will eventually?

So 6:45am Pacific it is.

Just looking at the various CTV packages I see the following end of the year races listed:

Under the Gold North America Package:
Vuelta
Eneco
Missouri

In the Giro package:
Lombardy

That’s it. No Deutchland, Emillia, Gp Ouest France-Plouay, Paris-Tours, Vattenfalls, Olympics, or Worlds.

Versus has Paris-Tours on same day coverage and Lombardy on next day but their one day coverage is pants.

Rik Verbrugghe (Cofidis) crashed earlier in the race, broken collarbone suspected

http://www.biciciclismo.com/cas/site/noticias-ficha.asp?id=2498

I just managed to crawl out of bed in time to remember my duties….

I will remember to print out the list of races they will supposedly be covering, so that if they then change their website and make it incredibly difficult to find information I’d at least have some idea about what they’d been promising … (as in, I thought the list of races towards the end of the year was longer than it seems to be now). I’m wondering if financial difficulties at JumpTV are making it difficult for them to pay for rights – also I imagine that initially when c.tv started, the race organizers were probably charging a lot less for internet rights than they are now.

Love the Dutch and Belguim tv :D

Still waiting….............................

... so, now that I’ve passed through that bed of coals allow me to provide critique. First, I’m using Windows XP and, only for C.TV, IE v7 (yes, the entire rest of the world runs just fine in Firefox).

The site, is awful. Plainly awful. At least there was some sort of cohesion to the last iteration, but this makes no sense to me. The animation and sliding menu items are time consuming and pointless. The site should focus 100% on doing nothing other than getting your paid subscribers directly to the content they want to see. When you’ve done that right, then go ahead and add the visual zazz.

Why am i forced, AGAIN, to use pop up windows? And why are those popup windows constrained in aspect ration? I can’t maximize the screen? Why?

Why am I presented with some sort of billing page from “https://www.nmnathletics.com/club/Club.dbml” ? Why does that company have my billing information? Who have you partnered with? And why, at the bottom of that billing page, is there an inexplicably long list of “Video on Demand” that overruns the confines of the hardcoded graphics that you’ve placed it in?

None of your screen layout works, things overrun lines and graphics everywhere. Everywhere.

I have tried to view the only videos that are, apparently, available to a fully paid subscriber: TdF highlights… but I can’t read the title of those items because the constrained aspect ratio and incorrect font usage result in 75% of the title of the video clip being lost behind the words “Free2View”.

Why, as someone that has paid a lot of money for the site, am I still required to watch advertising?

How is anyone going to figure out that to get to the search and menu area with all the tabs (the thing that sort of looks like the original web page from earlier this year), that you have to click on the C.TV logo in the billing page. Did you actually design that workflow?

As a test, I wanted to see if I could pull up a video on demand replay of the Ronde, but I can’t find it anywhere in the listing of stuff. I thought I had paid for it?

Perhaps my greatest, most fundamental beef with this new site is that IT IS NOT A BETA SITE!!!!!! In no way are you allowing me to “TEST” your new beta site, you are forcing it down my and every other subscriber’s throats. That means that it is, in fact, a production site. A beta site means that it is up for testing purposes only and that bugs can be worked out there with beta testers, while the people that paid money for your services, are still, ostensibly, using the production site that still works as expected. Unfortunately, the previous site is no longer accessible and we are forced to use this half developed product as developed and it is, really, really, poorly executed.

I understand from the legalese quoted above that the site is provided on an “As-Is” basis, so although you have taken my money, you have no requirement to actually perform anything more than a “best effort” to deliver the product as advertised. If I were to sell, for $100 a pop to US subscribers, a site that advertised that those subscribers would be able to watch many of the top pro races and see video on demand of the race after the event but only delivered a poorly executed, visual-interface-train-wreck of a website, that only featured choppy video clips and still frames with a voice over from 6 of the previous stages of the Tour de France, I would expect a fraud indictment in short order.

I’m really shocked that you have a market here of people that reeeeaaallly, I mean REALLY want to like you and you are unable to deliver for us. The only answer is a thorough and total lack of legal competition. If we were able to go somewhere else for 5% better service, you would lose all subscribers, period, guaranteed. And those of us who left, would probably be leaving notes for Rebecca and Harold about how nice it is over at the other site and suggesting that they send their resumes/CVs over.