ALBION WORLD - the premium services on the west bromwich albion website, through which one accesses full, live match commentaries, as well as highlight and video news clips - has been discontinued in favour of a service now called ALBION PLAYER. they have changed the necessary access software from Windows Media Player in conjunction with Internet Explorer to a regular embedded ADOBE flashplayer which (like YouTube or any other video hosting site) runs in any browser that has the flashplayer plugin installed. also, they have made it easy enough to check out and reasonably sample the product, as international users can now use credit/debit cards to pay for a simple 1 month (recurring, i believe) membership at the reasonable price of £3.99. i am now able to access the full services of the west brom website, and i will look forward to using it and taking out a longer subscription - providing that it proves a worthwhile service in a GNU-Linux environment.
i have been complaining so long and hard about DRM - and how it has been a major point of alienation and frustration in the relationship between myself and my beloved baggies - as well my relationship with the BBC and both the premier and football leagues, in general. last season was the first time in my life that i was able to see more than 90% of the baggies' league matches. this was due to two significant factors: 1) for the last 2 years i have been subscribing to SETANTA SPORTS CANADA, GOLTV, and FOX SPORTSWORLD CANADA; which - along with the one-off broadcasts carried by TSN, and SPORTSNET - gives me TV access to over 95% of the matches played in the premier league; and 2) the baggies were promoted to the premiership - returning them to this particular TV forum. in fact, the only albion matches that i didn't see last season were home to blackburn, away to wigan, and home to middlesbrough.
i was aware from postings on the albion website that they were preparing their ALBION WORLD services to become available to mac users for the first time - but there was (as usual) no mention of any necessary compatibility with GNU-Linux or Unix software. luckily - and when i got a chance to look around at the new setup - the demo clips seemed to work fine, and they were now offering monthly membership to international users; who were previously limited to full year subscriptions. so i took out my credit card and subscribed for a month at £3.99... and so far, so good. while the system is still a little glitchy (and that might be its reaction to FREE software), and i need to refresh the page to remind it that i am signed in and have full access rights; i have ultimately been able to access everything that is currently posted, and i will find out next week as to the live audio commentary (my main point of interest) when newcastle united come to the hawthorns for the season opener.
there is still some employment of DRM technology present; as the video streams leave no temporary file in the /tmp folder that is copyable, and the browsers native downloading tool does not react to the embedded files as it would if it were simple and unrestricted flash video file. however, my biggest concern, the incompatibility of their old system with anything but Microsoft, has definitely taken a marked change for the better - and i think - a fairly significant one.
i don't know why they did this - perhaps flashplayer technology has advanced sufficiently in terms of security features that it would allow the governing bodies to move away from the Windows specific technology? however, BBC has been using this kind of setup for content protection of audio/video for a long time now, so i doubt this was a consideration. what i'd like to think is that enough of us spoke out and either emailed or phoned our respective clubs complaining that not being Microsoft users, we were excluded from being able to subscribe to services that - for the most part - we'd be happy to pay for as long as we could access them.
similar to the BBC, while the video and audio files are freely viewable - i've never been able to figure out how to copy or download the content from this type of setup. YouTube's content, for example, is downloadable. the firefox downloader software can be used for direct download (and i assume IE has a similar plugin or function); or, you can wait until the video has fully buffered in the browser, then copy the temporary file (it will have a name like FLASHXox0xX, and can be found in your system's temporary files folder as long as the browser stays open) to your hard-drive and rename it to include the flash video extension (i.e. filename.flv). despite the fact that this is a freedom i would certainly like to have - i am pleased enough that i can now subscribe in good faith (although, and with my criticisms of DRM still intact) to my club's premium online services confident now that i can access the media content.
while i still believe that online audio commentary - like radio - should be free; i'm having fun reading the news articles and flipping through the news clip videos and photography looking forward to the first live match. for the time being, though, this feels like a real victory, and (for the moment) is a reasonable compromise to what has long been an unacceptable situation.
C"MON YOU BAGGIES!!!
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