On April 3rd 2013 Major Nelson announced a surprise partnership with the WWE to bring Wrestlemania 29 Live via PPV to Xbox 360’s in the United States. This should seem news worthy and that’s about it but there’s much more here and it goes beyond wrestling. This collaboration between the WWE and Microsoft shows there is hope of cutting that cable cord and still watching live sports and other events and be able to have just as good an experience if not better. Don’t believe me, read on as I was just as skeptical as you are right now and read how I’ve since changed my tune.
First lets not deny the fact that the WWE and other outlets have been legally broadcasting live and pre-recorded events via the web for some time. Even this years Wrestlemania 29 pre-show was shown exclusive on YouTube, Facebook and WWE.com for free to entice fans to pony up $59.99. I don’t have cable so I usually end up having to go to a bar or friends house should I feel the need to watch a wrestling PPV. I was already making plans when I heard this interesting tag team of Microsoft and the WWE so I figured what the hell, let’s do this.
I was hosting this event and having friends come over so I had to be ready. I had a PC and Xbox 360 hooked up and tested so I could easily switch back to my PC and bring up the PPV stream on the WWE website should there be issues with the WWE Xbox 360 app. A word to the wise, anything streaming live over the web almost always has issues. These issues range from dropouts, audio/video sync issues, low resolution, crazy pixelation, interruptions to full on server meltdowns that prevent you, the customer from watching an event. On top of all that wrestling and rock concerts are the hardest things to make look good at lower bit-rates because of all the flashing lights and smoke.
So I was ready, I flipped on the PC and fired up the pre-show on YouTube live, you can see it here. Now if you’ve watched anything on YouTube that’s either live or a pre-recorded live event, even in 1080p you know how it looks. It can look good, but there’s some pixelation, anything that moves fast is soft, sometimes the stream stutters and sometimes the action isn’t as smooth as we would like. All these things were apparent on the Wrestlemania 29 PPV pre-show. On top of that it looked like the video was over sharpened and the contrast seemed cranked very high as well.
All things considered the pre-show looked about like I expected anything stream on the web to look. Yeah it was in 1080p but no one was going to mistake this for blu-ray. Everyone had arrived, food was here and we were all settled in for four hours of action, we’ll make the best of this. The pre-show ends after an hour and I flip to my Xbox 360 fire up the WWE app and “We’re sorry, this content is not available”.
I’m glad I have my pc ready but the countdown on the page still has thirty seconds and so we wait. It reaches zero and I try again, “We’re sorry, this content is not available”. Well this is turning into a cluster, but I figure give it a few minutes. We try, again, again and again, maybe something is wrong or maybe we should have went to the bar. I start to get worried this is going to turn into a bust but I figure there’s always the PC backup solution.
I try again, this time the app signs in, accepts my WWE.com credentials, verifies I’ve paid Vincent Kennedy McMahon my $59.99 and we get the verification swirl that something is happening. When the show starts it’s clear, there’s no weird sharpening, no weird contrast, just a clear shot of the MetLife Stadium filled with thousands of people. It’s an overhead shot and not much is going on but it looks good for what it is. They switch to the announcers, Jerry “The King” Lawler, Michael Cole and John “Bradshaw” Layfield and it’s still clear, I’m amazed. This isn’t going to fool anyone that it’s a blu-ray but this is better than I’ve seen, hopefully this can hold up.
Wrestlemania 29 lasted over three hours and then went into a post-show segment. During that time we only had a few hiccups of which I don’t think there’s anything that can be one hundred percent avoided when streaming video over the internet. The first issue was had about an hour in was the video sped up for maybe a second and a half. The audio/video never went our of sync, which is one of the worst things to happen when watching anything digitally. The second issue about two hours in was that the video paused, we’re not sure why but it resumed as soon as I hit play so I’m at a loss on if it was on my end or theirs. Finally at one point a match paused for about two to three seconds, we had the dreaded swirl on-screen and then everything continued without a hitch.
I’m absolutely impressed by what the WWE and Micosoft was able to accomplish by broadcasting Wrestlemania 29 directly to the Xbox 360. It’s a game changer in my book and I hope there is more of this to come. The fact that you can get clear reception of a live event in something that looks 720p or better and not need cable is absolutely game changing. I’m not sure the kind of money it took to pull this off but I would guess a lot of testing went into this. Considering what I said before about smoke and flashing lights, of which there were a lot of I don’t remember seeing any pixelation.
Granted I didn’t stick my eyeball to the screen, I sat at a normal distance just as I would when watch HD movies and it was as good as seeing it in person at a bar in HD. That’s the best recommendation I can give, it’s no different and might be better than you can get elsewhere. Believe me, I’ve seen worse at times depending where I am so if this can be consistent that’s just another reason to use it. I wouldn’t be surprised to see UFC, NASCAR and other sports start to just charge you a flat fee to watch all you can live streamed. Hopefully they’ll also being given access to the secret sauce that allowed the WWE to pull this off.
If you’re skeptical I say give it a try, hell invite friends over, everyone pitch in a few bucks and try it if you don’t feel like shelling out the money. So you have a frame of reference Comcast rolled out a free upgraded to my Internet boosting it to 60Mbps, I did have 35Mbps, about a week prior to the event. I’m not sure how much bandwidth the app was taking up but there were other internet activities going on at my house during the whole event as well. No one was streaming netflix but general web browsing, tweeting, etc did not seem to affect the stream at all. Judging by the tweets the event streamed couldn’t have been more than a minutes or two of the regular broadcast as nothing was spoiled for us at all. Hopefully Microsoft hears the positives from this and does bring us more media choices on the Xbox 360. It would be even better if they could bundle them all up and can keep up this level of quality I would gladly pay $15 to watch nice select of live high definition content at my leisure.
Source Link: WWE.com | WWE Launches on Xbox Today – Major Nelson
