"The 33"-Road Bike Racing - cycling.tv is planning improvements

There have been several threads that mentioned cycling.tv. I have been watching cycling on there for a while, and even have it hooked up to my plasma tv and my vcr. I see that they have the a message posted on thier website that says in the near future they will be "bigger and better" with more than 60 days of live racing. It should be interesting to see what they come up with. By the way, I would say that sometimes the video quality is great and sometimes not very good. Not sure if it is their source or their feed to consumers.

It would be nice if they could get the tour of california, even though it will be after the race just to have would be awesome.

That would be great. I think Anthony McCrossan (sp?) is a good commentator.

Yay!

Looks like the improvements are up, and it looks cool. I just bought the premium subscription (only $35 a year). They don't have much on the premium channel yet, but for as much as I've watched the regular channel I don't feel like this is paying too much.

Did they say what they'd be providing for the 35 bucks a year? The Classics? Grand Tour races? Live coverage? What?

Koffee

Unfortunately they don't say what they will be providing, but, considering the amount I have used their site for free (at probably spectacular bandwidth costs), I very happily paid my $35 as well. After all, I don't know of another site that provides such a large amount of video coverage. I fully support them.

From what I gather, it doesnt sound like there will be tons of extra premium content...but rather, its a good way to support them to be able to continue their coverage. I like watching the stuff when I'm on my trainer...so I don't have an excuse to slow down.

The new features of the site look great.

I have a fast connection at home so I hog a good chunk of bandwidth. They provide a spectacular service. I'm going to stump up my $35 for the same reasons as iansir ... I must have watched a good few dozen hours for free as it is. $35 for one year - hell my stupid dish costs more than that for a single month :(

Watching the live feed this morning and it went dead. Still can get the telemetry FWTW. The announcer did say that they had been swamped with emails and I'll bet they had so many subscribers that their system crashed. :(

Edit. They emailed me and I retested my connection and with the intervention of the internet gods, it came back on.

+1

A few hickups today on the live feed. but got to see most of it. I would interested if anyone out there can explain to me why their feed is sometimes not optimal. Somethimes their signal is at 781kbps (as noted in the display bar below the picture) and some times it is less than 400. Wonder why. When I run their settings program it always signs me up for the 800kbps (even though my download speeds average 1.2 megs when I run other tests) link so that should not be the reason why it falls to the 400kbps feed. There are also some other strange things that happen (more so now that they have changed the site). For example, right now I have the Tour de Nez selected and it is playing in slow motion (but the picture is very clear and at 781kbps). Switching over to the Haribo, everything is fine. Maybe just growing pains.

RockyMtnMerlin, I run into the same stuff you do, at least it's not just my computer!!:)...But overall I think it's good, I like it that I can get the race there with pictures, and if it goes down, then I can switch over to cyclingnews.com for "live coverage" in words only (that's the downside to cyclingnews, they don't have the pics, but at least they have the word coverage) if it's a big enough race, and most of the races covered by the TV are on cyclingnews also, so that's cool..

Thanks to those also who posted the cost of the premium channel costs, I was wondering how much it was..

Benjamin

I can never access the feed. As soon as I log on to the site, I get a message saying the site is optimized for I.E. and I'm using Netscape :(

Looks like they are adding highlights from today's coverage of onloop het volk to the premium channel already. I didn't get up early enough so my subscription will already pay off!

it would be nice if it played in linux with firefox.......

== ANGRY.

Dosent work well on my mac with safari.Pic always goes dead...something is better than nothing but its frustrating just as they are hitting a climb or sometning it goes dead...urrgh !

Quality of feed today is poor. Streaming at 245kbps. At times the riders look like little colored blobs riding along the road. Freezes at vairus time. They kinda claim that if you can accept it, they will feed you 800kbps. If they did that it certainly would be more viewable. They say today's race is on premium channel live. Is the quality over there any better?

edit: announcer just said that the feed on the premiumchanel is better than on free channel. Guess that makes sense, but if I were them, I would offer a one day free preview of the premium content so a viewer could litterally see if it is worth the money. Today's race on the free channel in really not worth watching.

It is better. Its not great...not TV quality (I could only get 658kbps...so only 400 using their settings for DSL) but they were not blobs, I could recognize them (but I also watch full screen). Once again, for as much as I watch and for the quote today of 70+ days of LIVE racing, it is still worth supporting them (and cycling) with the 35 dollars. Thats half the price of a Jersey!

Once again, for as much as I watch and for the quote today of 70+ days of LIVE racing, it is still worth supporting them (and cycling) with the 35 dollars. Thats half the price of a Jersey!

Yep. I coughed up the money this morning to take advantage of the better feed and support the cause. They don't give you a red star though... :p

Speaking of stars, how about Boonen unselfishly controlling the break and allowing Nuyens to escape and win uncontested? One more reason to love the guy. I suppose he expects some solid super-domestique work from the boys come 'major' classic time...

Gosh darn it! :mad:

You all convinced me to pay the 35 bucks today when I get off bikeforums. But I want to see the classics! :)

Koffee

starclimber, you hit the nail right on the head about Boonen, he really is a true world champion and one to really respect and look up to...I was really impressed with his unselfish riding today at the end of KBK, that's impressive!...And yes, you can bet that he'll be expecting it back from his teamates come "major" classics time!!

Benjamin

Speaking of stars, how about Boonen unselfishly controlling the break and allowing Nuyens to escape and win uncontested? One more reason to love the guy.
I thought it was great when he threw his World Champ over-jersey into the crowd near the end today.
Even the announcer said, "that's sure to be worth a lot of money..."

The throw was great! And yes it was great that he controlled the group. But lets be honest. I think he may be he best classics rider out there and today was just a matter of perfect teamwork. QS could just send one of their two riders to break away and a) wear down the lead group chasers so that Boonen would have an easy sprint victory, or b) win solo. As it was, boonen still got third place for 2 QS mates on the podium and there was nothing anyone could have done about it. So it wasn't Tom being so much a domestique as there were really only two options available and both of them led to QS wins.

I thought Tom was far more the benevolent Godfather than the hard working domestique at KBK. He coulda crushed any of those guys. Utterly amazing talent.

So I paid the modest fee to get the "premium" feed. Today I wanted to watch the end of the world TT championships. So I go over to the premium archive and start it up. It is totally broken up and the sound track is in slow motion (again I have DSL that consistently tests at 1.2 megs download). SO I say heck with that and go over to the WC RR. Not broken up but about every five minutes they interrupt the coverage for an advertisement. And the "picture" is no better than it was on the free channel. At this point I would say that I am disappointed with the "new" cycling.tv

Ok, it should be clarified, part II of the championship time trial is a mess (the audio), but it is and has been the same for that same segment on the free channel. It is just the way they have that feed set up. Turn the volume down on that one or you will want to cry. All of the segments will likely have the advertisements, but, frankly, I get great deals on accelerade and endurox through those ads. And both of these races were from last year and were found on th efree channel last year (I don't think these are necessarily part of the upgrade).

Right now, the premium sucks. BUT, they are just a bit behind schedule getting the necessary items over there (such as A Sunday in Hell). The live race on Sunday was a better quality feed than the free one, and I have no doubt that things will get better as they catch up with the premium stuff.

And as I had said before, I have use so much of their bandwidth, I think it is certainly worth supporting them as they may be the last bastion of ANY good cycling coverage in the English language left on earth. (Sorry if I was Dramatic there).

Points well presented and well taken.

And as I had said before, I have use so much of their bandwidth, I think it is certainly worth supporting them as they may be the last bastion of ANY good cycling coverage in the English language left on earth. (Sorry if I was Dramatic there).

Not dramatic at all. It's true.

it would be nice if it played in linux with firefox.......

== ANGRY.

Hmmm... I run it in Firefox 1.5.0.1 with Suse 10.0