Room for improvements

I like ESPN's tennis coverage. You can see that they throw the money at tournaments that they cover.

I do not like Tennis Channel's coverage. One the reasons was mentined in my previous post - they are stingy! No early round coverages.

Another reason is that they are inflexible. You can see the dullness last weekend. Tennis Channel was lucky enough to broadcast the first couple of rounds at Indian Wells. And they showed one match at a time, and never cut to another match even though the latter was at a tie-break stage. They even showed the 10 minute warm up for the next match on the main court, instead of cutting to an on-going match that was near the climax. The only reason I can think of is that Tennis Channel is underfunded.

And who wants to listen to the same old commentators talking about the players during the 10 minute warm up? Spare me the boredom! You can talk about the stats like two minutes before the game actually begins, but don't waste the time - show me other actions!

FSN is more like ESPN. The producer would cut to other matches during change over. But this does not make FSN a better network because I HATE FSN!!!!

And Tennis Channel has more to learn. They can the improvement by showing the early rounds for the regular tournaments for which they got the broadcasting rights!

Please give me a weekend rate

I do not know why I have not cancelled my Tennis Channel subsription. When Tennis Channel was available, I wrote numerous requests to DISH Network asking them to add that channel. So they did that eventually, two years after Tennis Channel started their broadcast. And I was over the moon.

Then I realized that, wait, why do I bother to have that channel? It never broadcast the week-to-week tournaments, and even if they did, most of the coverages start on Friday matches only.

This means, if the top seeds were upset prior to the quarter finals, you will never get to see them. Is it too much to pay for the first few days?

My local newspaper allow me to subscibe the paper on Friday to Sunday at a discounted subscription rate. Would Tennis Channel do same?

FSN failed again

It was a torture last year when ATP and WTA went to bed with Fox Sport Network. The coverage was horrible, and one would think that the tennis governing bodies would listen to the fans and not let FSN ruin the coverages again this year. Well, FSN picked up the options for to cover the events and again, I was terribly disappointed by FSN, despite the promises that FSN made after having received numerous complaints.

I live in Dallas, you see, and we have a basketball team called Maverick (mediocre at best). FSN's primary responsibility is to broadcast all the Maverick games, followed by post match analysis. I ended up did not get to see most of the live coverages during the second week of the Indian Wells tournament. Actually, I got to see some of the WTA matches live, but because of the weird scheduling, I did not get to see most of the ATP matches. By who wants to watch women tennis while men are playing at the same tournament?

On the days when the men's semifinals were played, FSN chose to broadcast tape-delayed. I got to see it at 1 am in the morning. Yipee! How lucky. Roger Federer and Andy Murray were playing!!! Then after showign the fist two games, they went to commercials. When they came back, the coverage jumped to 3-2, of course Federer were just broken. They chose not to show us how Roger's serve got broken.

I turned off the TV, fuming.

And they did not broadcast the finals live. Tape-delayed again. Wow, show some respects to Rafa, would you?

Why why why???? Why would ATP and WTA allow FSN to screw us tennis fans by allowing FSN to cover their the two most pretigeous events? No wonder tennis is no longer a popular TV sport. With this kind of effort from FSN, it sure is not going to gain more fans.

And I have to suffer FSN's 2009 broadcast of the Miami tournament.

ESPN, please step up!