I'm one of those people without cable or dish television service, so I get to miss all the good NBA games. Last year during playoff time, I purchased video of some of the games to download and watch on my PC from http://download.nba.com.
The interface was clunky, the shopping cart system broken at times, but I overlooked that as I was enjoying watching the exciting games like the double-overtime Lebron James extravaganza against the Pistons.
I was pretty certain the NBA would have come a long way with this technology over the last year, unfortunately it sucks just the same.
First of all, it's playoff time now, and I am ready to jump the gun and purchase the entire playoff series, including the finals. Unfortunately, even though ad banners on the NBA site mention that I can do this, when I go to the downloads site, there is no place for me to purchase rights to view any of the upcoming games. There is no mention of Playoffs 2008. I'm ready, they aren't.
Second, even just clicking through their site to look at previous regular season games throws "Object reference not set" errors. Sloppy.
Third, the interface hasn't changed one bit from what it was like last year (searching is difficult, navigation sucks, integration with the rest of the site nill, throws errors).
I find it pretty hypocritical that an asshole commissioner like David Stern who is so concerned about profit that he deems Key Arena in Seattle unacceptable, would completely ignore this revenue stream for an entire year, and make no improvements at all.
