BBC let-down

posted on 12th June 2006 by Jon

Working in a male dominated office has obvious implications at this time of year. Firstly, boys tend to complain more than girls about heat and what temperature the air conditioning should be set at. Secondly, and more importantly, the World Cup is here and we all want to watch as much football as possible. As the person with ultimate responsibility for the company’s bottom line it should fall to me to tell everyone that they can’t watch the footie during working hours. For those that have met me, however, it is quite clear that this would never happen. The way I see it, so long as everyone gets their job done and deadlines are hit, I’m happy for the footie to be on. In most cases, matches are played in the late afternoon / evening so there is little impact on working time and for the few games that do kick off at 2pm I have no issue with the match being part of the office background soundtrack.

This leads me onto the main issue - how to watch the World Cup when you’re in the office. The BBC have been promising us a live stream of “at least 256kbps” for every World Cup Match they are showing online but on Friday (Germany v Costa Rica) we couldn’t see a thing. We tried to get this going several times but failed miserably. For the “lucky” few that did manage to get through the 20 minute “buffering” zone the footage didn’t exceed 225kbps (which is pretty poor at the best of times).

On Sunday I read an interesting article in the Sunday Times explaining the issues in more detail: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2220041,00.html.

The good news for the Score Comms office is that we have a TV. This doesn’t however do anything to help the poor buggers out there that are trying desperately to stay under the radar and catch the game on their PC without the boss finding out. Perhaps by the next World Cup in 2010, the BBC will have worked out a way to deliver what they promise…