Cold Hard Code

More on expectations...

Those who know me know that I'm a big fan of (fútbol|football|soccer).  It's really the only sport I follow, in spite of my passion for cars.  I don't, however, have a lot of free time to schedule to watch matches, so when I saw FoxSoccer.TV I was immediately intrigued and whipped out my credit card.  I wasn't blown away, but I certainly wasn't disappointed.  On demand matches, as I had time to watch.  For all but the most important matches, this was ideal.  On the important matches, I have to just catch a cold.

The most popular league is the English Premier League, and that's what FoxSoccer covers the most thoroughly.  It starts on August 16th, but there are lead-in friendlies and other matches, most notably the FA Community Shield.

This year (like so many previous years), it was between Manchester United and Chelsea and also bound to be a good game to watch.  I was, unfortunately, only able to catch the first half of it live.  That's ok, because I have FoxSoccer.TV!  I can watch it on demand!

Except, now, just click over to FoxSoccer.TV, and you get this:


So, they're rolling out a new version of their site.  That's good.

They've disconnected my access, so I can't watch the second half of the Community Shield.  That's bad.

They have no blog, or anything else to follow for updates.  I don't really care about updates, but I do want to know why it takes 4 days to launch a new website.

That is a really terrible expectation to set.  I can only hope that come August 15th, 2009, the transition experience makes it worth the time.  I'm not hopeful, and I'm thinking that it's entirely possible that on August 16th, the first day of Premiership games is going to go by with a lot of miscellaneous bugs.

And also, beach soccer!?  That is really the best thing that you can show?  You could show the segment of Ballack's elbow into Nani and the subsequent goal.  The quality is terrible, the game is silly.  Come on Fox, get with the program.

Setup a blog.  Don't take 4 days to release a new system and cut out viewers from a great game.