dupondt wrote:I'm pretty sure that some of the 11,000+ stations available on the SoundBridge will have live coverage of the Soccer World Cup.
Greetings
dupondt
But that is not video coverage.
All of the World Cup matches will be carried live on ESPN, ESPN2, or ABC. (Most will also be on the main Spanish language chs like Univision, Telemundo, and Galavision) Along with that ESPN3 (ESPN360) will have most of the matches available as live streams and ALL matches will be available as archive streams. But none of those are available on the Roku DVP.
It would be very good if one of these, in particular ESPN3, was available as a channel on the Roku.
As far as a special ch for the Roku, that would be next to impossible as someone would have to buy the streaming rights from either FIFA or ABC (I believe ABC owns exclusive USA rights) and that would be VERY expensive.
My ISP, and most others I believe, provides free access to ESPN3 as part of their service.
If there is a way, a private ch could be created for ESP3 without violating any copyright laws as it would be just another way to access already available content. But it may be too late. The WC starts in a short time and, unless someone is already working on it, there is little time to develop a ch.
PlayOn developers have had their SDK for a long time and they have only VERY limited ESPN support, basically just the NEWS feeds. There are 100s of chs available through PlayOn but no real support for the ESPN family of live or archived content. This implies that there is some technical reason for the content to not be accessible and, I would doubt that the ROKU SND provides more tools for accessing web content than PlayOn's.
From all this I believe that the only legal access to the WC online will be through an internet device that is like a PC to the internet.
For those of us with PCs that are dedicated to video service and hooked directly to my home video system this is not really an issue because I can watch any web content right on my main screen.
In fact I do not need either my ROKU or my VuNow (with PlatOn) to view any chs but they are both a more convenient and, mostly, a higher quality viewing experience.
I hope that, sometime before the opening of the matches, someone creates a ch for viewing the World Cup on either the Roku or through PlayOn but I do not expect that any such ch will become available.