Free Streaming football on your iphone
We thought we would try a little experiment to see if we could find any of tonight's UEFA Europa League matches on our iphone. For iphone feel free to read ipad or ipod touch given that the same operating system now runs across all devices.
We started this experiment as the Stoke City v FC Thun game had kicked off. At the time there were very limited options for watching the match online. The MyP2P site only had one link advertising the match and that was on the betting site bet365.com.
We headed over to the Bet365 site to check out the stream on our laptop before going onto the iphone. The game was indeed being streamed from the site but after logging into the site we were unable to watch the match as it was only available to people with credit in their account! Needless to say we checked out the app store on the iphone to see if there was an app. Unfortunately not, so we had to make do with the mobile version of the bet365 site with no live streaming available (if we did have credit in our account!).
Now onto the live streaming TV channels to see if they could offer anything better. A quick search on the desktop Justin.tv site uncovered a grainy unwatchable stream and we didn’t hold out much luck on the iphone. The justin.tv iphone app comes in at £2.99 and there was no way we would be paying that based on the quality of the stream on the desktop site. Admittedly, if the team was Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal or Liverpool we are sure there would be a better quality stream available.
Visiting the justin.tv site on our iphone didn’t get much better. When selecting a channel the Justin site the site wanted to redirect to Twitch TV only for that site to refuse to show anything. Poor showing from the Justin.tv site. We are guessing they want everyone to go with the paid for iphone app.
Ustream, up next. A quick search on the desktop site did not bring up any live streams for the Stoke match. Ustream has a free iphone app and we installed this on our iphone. Again, we though we would give this a try to see what the quality of the broadcast would be like. There’s no doubt that there will be times when games will be available to watch on these live streaming sites. The ustream iphone app seemed to work ok. No major issues with it although it was difficult to find a good quality stream.
Veetle was our next stop. We tried the website first to see if we could find the match. This was where we run into our first stumbling block with Veetle...there is no search on the site! This made it a problem to track down the channel for the football. We had a browse on the site but unfortunately could not find the Stoke match. We did find a good quality stream of a youth baseball game being broadcast on ESPN HD. The quality of the stream was impressive and as good as anything we have come across on other platforms.
Needless to say we tried the same link on the iphone and it was the same top quality result. Using Veetle on a desktop you need to install a plugin but using your iphone you do not need any plugin. When you click on the link on your iphone the stream is delivered using a quicktime stream (in a similar method to how the BBC iplayer site works) and again, the result were excellent. It was just a shame we couldn’t find the match!
So it was a disappointing effort compounded by a poor choice of game. Maybe Stoke City in a Europa League match wasn’t the best match to search for. We are sure the results would be vastly different for one of the big Premier League teams. The Veetle broadcasts appear to be of promising quality, albeit missing a search feature and the ustream free app seems reasonable to. We will also be sure to revise this article over the coming weekends when we are sure we will be able to find more Premier League matches.