May

17

All Alone In The Middle Of The Ocean

May 17, 2007 | by Keith | Categories Internet, Newspapers, Television |

It’s been some time since I’ve written a sports media-related post.  And it’s with good reason as last week I was on a well deserved vacation with my family.

My wife, daughter, and I love to cruise, so we spent last week touring the Eastern Carribean on the Carribean Princess.  The vacation was fantastic…the weather was perfect, the food was delectable (I can say that after gaining 8 pounds!), there was plenty to do on board…it was a wonderful experience that we will always cherish.  Yet something was missing.

Even though we’ve been on many cruises, it wasn’t until this last adventure that I really noticed what I was missing.  What was it?  My daily inundation of sports news!  The ship had resources to get sports news and scores, but not to the level we are used to on land. 

The closest to getting all the information I crave came through the ship’s Internet Cafe.   There were ample opportunities to surf the net (pardon the ocean reference) all be it with limitations.  First of all, gaining access to the Internet was not cheap.  At 75 cents a minute, one could rack up quite the bill getting their sports fix.  This led to a less than leisurely experience rushing through websites to avoid the extra charge to your stateroom account.  Even if you wanted to hastily browse the web you couldn’t because of the excruciatingly slow satellite Internet connection.  We’re talking 56k here at best.

So the Internet was out.  How about television?  Each stateroom has satellite TV so I should be able to get caught up on the day’s sports news.  Not so fast.  Even though there is satellite TV on the ship, like the Internet, it’s not what we get back home.  For one thing, there were at least a half dozen channels with no programming at all.  Just a logo for “Princess Television”.  Secondly, the channels that were available are targeted toward the Hispanic Community.  A great majority of those on board the ship were from the United States yet the ship’s television broadcasts “Latino TV”. 

The sole sports choice was ESPN Deportes.  Listen, I love soccer, but I need my Baseball Tonight!  The thing that confused me was that most of the programming was in English, yet the commercials were in Spanish.  Sportscenter was nowhere to be found and ESPN Deportes (at least this “Spanglish” version) does not believe in providing the news ticker at the bottom of the screen.  The channel did provide coverage of the NBA Playoffs and The Players Championship, but because we were busy with our vacation we rarely watched and we could never find out the final score.  Baseball?  Don’t even ask.

The ship is equipped with a library.  Libraries carry newspapers and periodicals, right?  I should be able to get sports updates that way, right?  Wrong.  There were newspapers available, but only through a feed to the ship’s purser’s desk.  We had two choices for news, the New York Times Digest and a compilation piece called the USA Times.  As you can tell from these scans there is not much substance here and their respective sports pages are lame at best.

Vacations, specifically cruises, are supposed to provide a relaxing experience.  But trying to keep up with sports news is exhausting business.  I guess it is sometimes lonely at sea!


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