This week I was fortunate enough to experience watching the tournament from various locations along the East Coast.  For the play-in games of the first two nights, I was in a business class hotel with Wi-Fi.  Ironically, the televisions in the hotel didn’t get TruTV, TBS, or TNT, so I was forced to watch the games via broadband.   I fire up the laptop, connect to the Wi-Fi, and point my browser to the March Madness on Demand website thinking I would be able to watch the games there.  As expected, I have access to games, but the Wi-Fi in the hotel is so slow that I can’t get any audio or video at all.    Next, I proceed to test watching the games on my handy iPhone4.  I had downloaded the app from iTunes earlier so I was good to go.   I was able to get four bars of ATT coverage and 3G coverage at the hotel.   To my surprise, the games started streaming and I now had live video of the basketball on my iPhone’s screen.  For the most part it was pretty good.  Occasionally it would pause or the screen would get blurry, but for the most part, I was able to watch the game.    

The next day, I was driving to my in-laws to watch the games.  Remember I had to do some research     Driving to Kentucky provided me an opportunity to test watching the games while traveling in the car.  I was in full compliance of the law as I was totally hands-free and I was not texting or talking on my phone.  To get to my in-laws I had to travel across West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky to get to Louisville Kentucky (Go Wildcats!).  As I traveled, the ATT coverage was switching between EDGE and 3G.   When game time approached I launched the app on my iPhone4.   When I had only EDGE coverage the app informed me that the broadcast was not available.  That was a bummer – not even audio.  When I had 3G coverage, the app would first try and stream the audio and then try the video intermittently and it really struggled as I traveled along at 65 MPH. Finally after about 30 minutes my wife commented: “Can’t we just get this on the radio?”    Needless to say, my experience of trying to watch the games while traveling in rural America at 65 MPH was less than successful.

At our destination in Kentucky I had access to high speed internet from the local cable company.    This was when my real “research” began, as now there were three or four games on simultaneously.  We had one game on the big screen via classic cable TV (HD), a game streaming to my iPhone4, and another game streaming to my laptop.   To my delight, all the games came in quite well.  The games on the TV were in sync with the games via broadband and all the video was crystal clear.  Throughout the afternoon I don’t recall having experienced any issues.  I actually think the broadband worked better than the TV.

I believe my experience gives us a pretty good idea of things to come.  The transition to “TV Everywhere” is happening quite fast.  Just last week, Time-Warner Cable released its TWCable TV iPad app and the demand has been overwhelming.    We are also expecting similar applications to start popping up from other media companies.    As these applications continue to become more mainstream, service providers will continually be challenged to make all these applications work over the shared network.  These problems aren’t insurmountable if ISPs continue to innovate and keep up with network trends.  I’m sure one day we’ll remember these early days of real-time mobile entertainment as fondly as I remember the early days of NCAA tournament broadcasts!