First and foremost, let me state that I am in no way, shape or form being compensated for this post. I am offering up my opinion purely based on my experience. My experience with what you ask? My experience with DirecTV and how they made watching The Open Championship a better experience for me.
As I’ve stated before, I love to play golf, but I’m not a huge fan of watching it on TV. Truthfully, I find it a bit dull. So when I got a message on my TV from DirecTV regarding watching The Open Championship on multiple channels, I didn’t pay it much mind. I figured it’s just a couple more channels that I won’t be watching. But early on Saturday afternoon, something told me to take a look anyway…and I’m glad I did. When I tuned to the channel in the message and began to watch, I was presented with another menu option. When I hit the red button on my remote to bring up the additional options, the fun began.
Option #1 – “The Top 5 leaderboard” – A nice, quick reference when you just want to know who’s on top and what’s their score, without waiting for 156 names to scroll across the bottom of the screen. But, if you want to see the entire leaderboard while scrolling through it at your own pace, well that’s available at…
Option #2 – “Leaderboard” – You don’t have to watch the bottom of the screen for the leaderboard and worry about missing the name you may be looking for. Also, if it’s moving a little too quickly, you can use the menu to scroll at your own pace.
Option #3 – “Tune To” – This gave me five further options:
a. “The Open Mix” – This splits my TV to show four separate screens – ESPN, Holes 1 & 18, Holes 7/8/9 and the International View. More on this below.
b. “ESPN” – This channel would show an alternate feed from ESPN (which was showing the regular broadcast) even when they were on a commercial.
c. “Holes 1 and 18” – Just as it sounds. This channel would rotate between holes 1 and 18. So rather than bounce all around the course, you see every player that passes through both holes.
d. “Holes 7/8/9” – See above, but for holes 7/8/9 instead.
e. “International View” – Not exactly sure where this feed was from, but I’m going to make the pretty obvious guess that it would be Scotland. If not, then somewhere in the U.K. at least. Anyway, it was another alternate feed from the other two ESPN’s.
Option #4 – “Scoreguide” – This is an option that shows up on all of the sports channels on DirecTV, and it showed up here as well. This option gives you the scores from the rest of the sports world as well as the option to switch over to that channel if the game is on one of the channels you get. It’s a nice feature for keeping up on scores from other sports or other games when you don’t want to change the game you’re watching.
I’ve had three different TV providers, and so far I’m pretty high on DirecTV. It’s great if you’re a sports fan. For me, I’m a big football fan and love NFL Sunday Ticket. How can you beat having the option to see every game?! And being able to plug-in your fantasy league matchup is the cherry on-top! But this experience with golf as well has opened up a new option for me.
Now, when the PGA Championship rolls around in a few weeks, I’ll know that watching golf on TV will be that much better than it was before. However, this in no way trumps Sunday Ticket. Any final round still takes a backseat to the NFL. Sorry.
Swing ’til you’re happy!
