Viewing Duke basketball overseas

[mike88]

I am going to be on sabbatical from Jan-June in Sydney and wanted to get advice from the board about the best options for seeing Duke games in as close to real-time as possible. Should I plan to get cable TV with ESPN? Use Slingbox? Other Internet TV sites? Plan on hitting the Sydney pubs???

Any advice is much appreciated.

-mike

[balkan boy]

Last season, I had a lot of success with Justin TV:

http://www.justin.tv/cbb2k8

Not sure whether it will be the same this year or not (cbb2k9?).

Balkan Boy

[Deslok]

College basketball will probably not be on any form of TV even in bars in Sydney(I don't know specifically, but its a pretty safe bet). Slingbox is my preferred option, though it is also possible to find alternate streams online of... erm... very questionable legality. And the streams aren't nearly as good as you can get with a well connected slingbox.

[moonpie23]

connection is indeed the key.....upload from the source needs to be at LEAST 500kbs.......anything under that will be splotchy, jerky and fuzzy..


download on your end should be at least 3mbs to assure that you're not just sitting there "missing" the game and hatin' life in general.


slingbox's are awesome....but you gotta have the pipe.....

[Bob Green]

I recommend you contact devildownunder (http://www.dukebasketballreport.com/forums/member.php?u=567) as he can provide you accurate info on Sydney.

[dukeinseville]

I am in Seville, Spain and have been keeping up with the games in various ways. I have a slingbox and the max download speed I can get is not reaching close to 1mbs. It's about about 366k because of my source in N.C. It is hard to watch but you can keep up with the game pretty well.

Last year I bought the ESPN college game plan for about 70 Euros and got maybe 75% of the games. The quality is very good, much better than the slingbox with my terrible connection speed. This year the package was only 99 Euros for the entire season of college football and basketball. The best part is being able to watch the games the following day, especially good for 9pm start times which are 3am in Spain. Plus you get a lot of other games from the ACC, etc.

I wish we had the option of ESPN America, which seems to be available in almost every other country in Europe except Spain. The broadcast rights for the NFL and NHL are held by a Spanish channel which also provides the entire sat. platform and they don't like the idea of ESPN America competing with them. Otherwise I could catch a few more games there...

[flyingdutchdevil]

Agreed. I currently live in London and the best way to watch the games are through ESPN 360. Provides a good feed and you can rewatch the games. The only downside is that if you want to watch a game live, you will probably miss the first 5-8 minutes because the international set-up is much slower than the US one.

[Deslok]

Just an aside from the main topic, but this year a group of us at our school in Seoul picked up the NFL gamepass, and it is fantastic. Pricey - $240 for the season(but we split it between 8 people so ended up being quite reasonable) - and you get hi def streaming of all the games, archived all season long. Has made for a fun Monday every week for us, getting together to watch football. Makes things just a little nicer being out of the country.