GAA Go unfit for purpose?

APM

Hi all,

For the first time I've been abroad for the entire duration of the championship season and was delighted when GAA announced GAA go this year.

I signed up for a season pass and for the most part the picture/stream works perfectly. The problem comes when the big games are on, at least one game per weekend becomes unwatchable, from what appears to be the demand on the servers.

This Sunday I watched the Connaught final stream for almost 2hrs and the picture was perfect. The Munster Hurling final straight after was absolutely terrible. The same happened the weekend of the Dublin V Wexford game, yet the Kildare V Meath game before worked perfectly.

I appreciate most of the people in the GAA forum are living in Ireland and will have no opinion on it, but has anybody here been away during the Championship so far and experienced a bad picture?

Please share your experiences here so we can see how widespread the problem is. This product is not cheap at €110/€10 per game so I think we deserve better than the service we've had so far. A quick search for GAAGO in twitter reveals many people with issues last week and in the previous weeks.

Orizio

Its worthless. No picture either for replays or live games. And yes, I have excellent internet.

At the same time, I shouldn't have expected anything decent from RTE.

munchkin_utd

Orizio wrote: »

Its worthless. No picture either for replays or live games. And yes, I have excellent internet.

At the same time, I shouldn't have expected anything decent from RTE.

but youre in Ireland and it is not supposed to work there, so its actually working perfectly.

(and if youre not, then fix your boards location to somewhere relevant and correct)

munchkin_utd

to answer the question, I saw the munster final on GAA go and it was grand
now, there was some problems with it skipping back a couple of seconds now and again, but whether that was the fault of GAA go or a fairly low spec windows xp laptop its hard to know!

RTE digital seem to have supplied 160,000 streams for the world cup final so it does seem as if they have the capacity to deal with the pressure.
The problem might simply be that theres pinch points to more far flung areas of the world. Although if thats the case the RTE digital needs to make their worldwide service properly distributed worldwide with servers located in west coast USA and Asia to supply streams to that side of the planet more reliably.

BTW, how are GAA go supposed to fix the problem if folks make no description of what their system is, i.e. device/ OS/ location in the world/ stream quality setting/ internet speed, quality

Orizio

munchkin_utd wrote: »

but youre in Ireland and it is not supposed to work there, so its actually working perfectly.

(and if youre not, then fix your boards location to somewhere relevant and correct)

I'm in Singapore. I'll do what I like with my location. Obviously I wouldn't even be here talking about GAAGO if I was actually in Ireland.

bruschi

on a somewhat related note, the RTE player app on android for live GAA games is terrible. Constantly crashing or not connecting. Yet the other programs on the player (ie RTE1 or news etc) work absolutely fine. Could be connected to the GAA Go problems or not, but its really annoying, especially when their signature is "see what you're missing"

wirehairmax

I thought Sky Sports were going to be the saviours of the "diaspora"?????
Can all our emigrants not acsess GAA games from foreign lands thanks to the good people of Sky who paid over all that money just so they could provide such a service?
Or was that just a cock and bull story?

munchkin_utd

Orizio wrote: »

I'm in Singapore. I'll do what I like with my location. Obviously I wouldn't even be here talking about GAAGO if I was actually in Ireland.

well, it is kindof pointless complaining about GAAGO if you dont mention your location seeing as the location seems to be a central key to peoples problems.

now that youve mentioned singapore, i just did a traceroute for the website of the singapore government from Continental Europe.
To make a connection you go through 15 servers and it takes a third of a second. The first 5servers are in Germany and then you go on a spin across the atlantic, the width of the USA and then the pacific to Singapore !

To make a connection from Europe to RTE, it takes 0.02 of a second and 9 servers, of which the first 6 are in germany, then direct to intel (IRL?) and then RTE.

So either youre getting a problem somewhere in the crossing of 2 oceans and a continent, or RTE is one step ahead of us and has a server in Asia and its cr@p.

nice_guy80

Hopefully it will improve.

Definitely the GAA should take it away from RTE.

The streaming service that baseball, american football are examples of the quality that can be achieved

munchkin_utd

nice_guy80 wrote: »

Hopefully it will improve.

Definitely the GAA should take it away from RTE.

The streaming service that baseball, american football are examples of the quality that can be achieved

true, the NFL etc have good services, but I'd say that they have multiple servers spread across the globe local to the actual users to avoid the type of outages that GAA go seems to experience, whereas the RTE effort seems like RTE trying to serve everyone from their Irish base.
(EDIT: we dont currently know anything about their backend so can only speculate, unlike BBC digital who are very forthcoming on what systems they have serving content)

so I'm tending to agree that as it stands GAA Go is unfit for purpose, because its supposed to bring the games to the most far flung places, but they seem to be the ones that are having problems with the service.

heres a cool map of the various submarine cables across the globe just to get an idea of how many (or actually relatively few) ways your data can get from Ireland to the other end of the world.
http://www.submarinecablemap.com/
BTW, when you make a connection your computer does not look for the fastest most high capacity networks on its way across the globe. It just looks for the next server/ connection down the line, which may be good or useless, or even vectored to prevent folks streaming large amounts of streaming content.

nice_guy80

munchkin_utd wrote: »

true, the NFL etc have good services, but I'd say that they have multiple servers spread across the globe local to the actual users to avoid the type of outages that GAA go seems to experience, whereas the RTE effort seems like RTE trying to serve everyone from their Irish base.
(EDIT: we dont currently know anything about their backend so can only speculate, unlike BBC digital who are very forthcoming on what systems they have serving content)

so I'm tending to agree that as it stands GAA Go is unfit for purpose, because its supposed to bring the games to the most far flung places, but they seem to be the ones that are having problems with the service.

heres a cool map of the various submarine cables across the globe just to get an idea of how many (or actually relatively few) ways your data can get from Ireland to the other end of the world.
http://www.submarinecablemap.com/
BTW, when you make a connection your computer does not look for the fastest most high capacity networks on its way across the globe. It just looks for the next server/ connection down the line, which may be good or useless, or even vectored to prevent folks streaming large amounts of streaming content.

Now I know why my video calls from NZ were always so bad!
thanks for that map.

munchkin_utd

nice_guy80 wrote: »

Now I know why my video calls from NZ were always so bad!
thanks for that map.

indeed, was just thinking about nz there too.
I was working for a now defunkt company in Monaghan which was making stuff for new zealand rail and I remember years ago it being nigh impossible to get access to their website, but looking at how many intermediate possible sources of problems there are from europe to the other side of the world, its a wonder that the internet works as good as it does!

Hibbeler

I've been using GAAGO in the UK and while for the most part it has been fine. I watched Meath v Kildare, Wexford v Clare and Galway v Mayo without any hitch. However I was having problems with the munster hurling final at the weekend with the picture freezing and reverting back a couple of seconds far too often. I think somebody else on this thread mentioned the same problem. My laptop is up to date and my internet is good so the problem is not on my end

Other than that my main issue with the service is that the best picture available is only 720p, really if I am going to be spending £60 for a streaming service I would want them to have the best picture quality available and to have no issues with the stream freezing, going backwards etc. It feels like they definitely could have done better

blinding

Can you get (in England) the Sunday game on GAAGO.
I have only watched the Connacht Final so far and it was ok,

munchkin_utd

blinding wrote: »

Can you get (in England) the Sunday game on GAAGO.
I have only watched the Connacht Final so far and it was ok,

The Sunday game is only available abroad from the Wednesday after the matches directly on the rte player.

The "Sunday game live" will be on GAA go though.

blinding

munchkin_utd wrote: »

The Sunday game is only available abroad from the Wednesday after the matches directly on the rte player.

The "Sunday game live" will be on GAA go though.

The sunday game (evening highlights edition) is not available in London (or england probably) this year so far anyway.

Maybe they are trying to "encourage" people to subscribe to GAAGO.

Hibbeler

It should also be noted that the SKY Sports matches are unavailable in the UK on GAAGO, due to SKY's exclusive rights.

But having said that there are other ways to get those matches, sometimes those ways would be of better quality than the Munster final was on GAAGO thats for sure

blinding

I think that it would be a good idea if they put Sunday/saturday game on GAAGO even if it was later in the week ; Wednesday or thursday would even be okay.

keeponhurling

Occasionally it has issues for me too , such as skipping or picture and sound out of sync.

For the first year they should have had an introductory price to get people into it, and that way people would be more accepting if they are still ironing out flaws

munchkin_utd

keeponhurling wrote: »

Occasionally it has issues for me too , such as skipping or picture and sound out of sync.

For the first year they should have had an introductory price to get people into it, and that way people would be more accepting if they are still ironing out flaws

nope, its unfortunately 180 degrees the opposite how they are working the pricing.

they are (seemingly) looking to cover the entire development costs in the first year of operation and "break even", which indicates that next year they'll have more wiggle room on pricing.
Theres a facility for discount codes but I didnt hear of any being released yet.

regarding quality, its still patchy, some games miserable and others spot on.

blinding wrote: »

The sunday game (evening highlights edition) is not available in London (or england probably) this year so far anyway.

Maybe they are trying to "encourage" people to subscribe to GAAGO.

seems that its blocked all right, possibly more to do with sky having a highlights programme than sky go

it works in Germany at the moment (and a cross check via VPN shows its blocked in the UK), so its not a universal blocking to all viewers abroad, only those in the UK.