After my great experience with streaming audio in Major League Baseball’s AtBat 2012, I started venturing out to see what the other pro sports made available. The National Hockey League has nuked itself with it’s lockout, but that still leaves the National Football League and National Basketball Association.
On both fronts the news has turned out well. The NFL charged me $24.99 for a full season of access to streaming audio for every game through their NFL 2012 iPad app. Probably a tad overpriced, but NFL Audio Pass is still worth it to me. The crappy thing is that the iPhone version of the app can’t do streaming audio. WTF NFL?! MLB has this down cold, so there can’t really be any technical challenges.
The NBA experience started out poorly, but so for looks promising. If you go to their site, the most obvious product is NBA Audio League Pass. This is Flash based streaming audio, which is free, but basically only works on desktops and Android devices. Not helpful to me.
However, the NBA Game Time 2012 iOS App has an in-app purchase of streaming audio for $9.99. The NBA site doesn’t exactly do a great job of publicizing this, but if it works well it’s a pretty good product. Essentially the same price as AtBat 2012 with just a smidge less polish on the app. I’ve got it running on my Jesusphone 5 streaming the Lakers at the moment.
Sigh. So now it turns out that the NBA audio only works on phones, contra the NFL. What gives guys? It’s the same damn OS and streaming audio is pretty mature.