This weekend I was flipping around the ol’ DISH and noticed about six “TBS Sports” (or somesuch) stations showing the same game, with each channel having a slightly different name. Curious, I switched over and sure enough, each of the six channels was showing the same college football game, each from a different camera angle. One had a low end zone angle, one had a high end zone angle, one had a sideline angle… it was very weird. It was kind of interesting to be able to switch to a different angle at will, but more often than not, it wasn’t a good shot, but the camera quicky panning and adjusting its zoom, something they’d normally do out of the sight of the normal viewer.
I guess it’s kind of an interesting idea, another example of life imitating Madden console games, but having each on a separate channel is pretty much a usability nightmare. There’s probably no other way to do it, especially for those of us with older receivers, but things would start to get messy if they did this for every college and NFL game on the weekend. The number of channels would increase from 150 to probably twice that. (Apparently, it’s not as cumbersome on newer equipment since you can see all six angles at once on channel 100.)
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