TOFFEWEB VIEWPOINT

Setanta Sports via Broadband (North America)

For those of you in North America (and perhaps other parts of the world...???) who do not have access to Setanta Sports, this looks like a very workable solution:

I took the plunge with ITVN — Interactive Television Networks Inc. They deliver TV over the internet direct to a blackbox via an ethernet cable (from cable modem or DSL). I subscribed to Setanta Sports for $14.95 per month. They will show the derby LIVE (and repeated a couple of times) on Saturday, as wells three or four of the Prem games each weekend.

Quality: If you get it set up right, the quality is far better than I anticipated. Not HD by any means, and not as good as basic cable, but it is certainly very watchable. There is a little ghosting/highlight/shadow (whatever) and some minor pixelation of the digital image, which are compression artifacts more than anything else. But there is no stuttering of the image and no buffering to speak of (after it has been running).

Setup: I needed to go through a router, which was a new challenge. But I got a reconned Lynksys 8-port for $20 bucks and finally twigged to the Linksys.com website, where they have a very neat application that will automatically configure the router for you. Plain sailing after that. My Comcast cable broadband connection is giving ~1.5Mbps and I'm getting ~1Mbps on the video, which the tecky says is as good as it gets (for the moment).

So, I'm a happy camper... just need to rewire the VCR so I can record stuff, which is a step back after buying in to the Comcast DVR (Tivo by any other name).