Sport TV Golfe

Its nice of the Sport TV guys to dedicate a whole channel to the golfing nuts among us. When they presented the channel on Friday, they said that it would be free to Sport TV subscribers until the end of February. I wait to see what will happen then.

They were a little unlucky in their first day, with the Bob Hope Classic, bought from the Golf Channel, unplayable due to heavy rain in the American desert. American golf broadcasting is frustrating at the best of times, with an excruciating ratio of adverts to live action, so watching repeats of the little golf that had been possible was awful. On the other hand, the Abu Dhabi tournament made good watching, despite having to view it live and the highlights only a few hours later.

As it happens, I am quite happy to pay for 12 months of Sport TV subscription just to watch the four Major tournaments. They added to that last year with the FedEx Cup playoffs. I watch virtually no football, except sometimes the Champions' League matches and gave up on Formula 1 long ago. So we'll see if they expect me to pay more to watch non-stop golf, because that would be a little optimistic. If I can subscribe to only the golf, that will be the way to go.

Out of the Box

After years of resistance, I finally gave in to temptation and joined the "more money than sense" community of TV Cabo powerbox users this weekend. The girl in the TV Cabo shop was very efficient, but I was appalled to see her copying personal data off a computer screen onto a pre-printed triplicate form so that physically sign it and then take away the duplicate copy. The form would then have to be input to the system, so why not let her do that part up front and then just print one off for me to sign? PT Group, don't you just love it!

I rushed the box home and set it up in time to see England beat the Welsh at rugby (hurrah), but from there onwards it's not been a good weekend. Porto's feeble effort in losing to SCP, failure to stay awake to watch the Grand Prix and then a dismal match between Aston Villa and Liverpool left me wondering if the 24 euros per month for the next 12 months will be a good investment. At least the Ferrari that won the GP was not driven by Schumacher. Looks like it will be a good season there at least.