Wayne D's Blog

Live sport streaming information for events in 2013 can be found here http://wdawe.com/index.php/live-sports-streaming-in-canada?blog=1

updated with 2013 links
For 2013 there is an extensive schedule of online 2013 Masters content starting on Monday April 8th for Canadian golf fans on tsn.ca. You can watch the Masters streaming on TSN.ca at http://www.tsn.ca/live/golf/masters2013/. TSN.ca will provide Canadian golf fans with up to five video feeds. Before the tournament there will be coverage of the 2013 Master from the range, and during the par 3 contest. During the tournament there will be streaming video from Amen Corner (Holes 11, 12 and 13), the 15th and 16th holes, two Featured Groups, and Masters In-Depth which I assume will be analysis and highlights. TSN also has an iPad/iPhone app for the 2013 Masters for golf fans with Apple products. Nothing for Android users again this year. Come on TSN, Android now has a bigger share of the smartphone market than Apple does and Android users love golf too.

If you happen to be looking for a golf simulator why not check out the golf simulator I helped build.

This post used to be titled "Masters streaming Canada should return tsn.ca, TSN needs some SEO help" when it was written 3 years ago. My how times have changed, http://tsn.ca is now the first search term returned when you Google "Masters streaming canada". I've updated the original article with the 2013 link information but left the rest of the post as is for posterity.

What follows is woefully out of date

TSN should give ChannelCanada.com a great big kiss because ChannelCanada.com seems to have a clue. I decided to catch some of the Masters today. When I flipped through the channels early in the afternoon and realized that it was televised until later in the day I did what Google has trained all of us to do, open firefox and type "Masters streaming Canada" into the search box. Why "Masters streaming Canada"? I'd argue that "live streaming" has become a generic term to denote video available live on the Internet. I didn't bother to include "live" in my query because it seemed redundant and as it turns out it makes little difference in the results.

The first result Google offered was mastersgolf.ca. When I clicked through and clicked on the large "Watch Live" box in the centre of the screen I was informed that "This service is not available in your area". I had been redirected to the U.S. Masters site and hadn't noticed. The second result was "Masters LIVE Streaming Video in Canada Exclusively at MastersGolf.ca", a press release from 2008. I already knew that wasn't true. Luckily for me the third result is a blog post on ChannelCanada.com that talks about TSN's coverage of the Masters on tsn.ca because the fourth result is "Masters streaming in Canada. Nope! [Golf]" a bulletin board post from 2007. Why doesn't tsn.ca show up in the search? Probably because the banner they have on their main page that says "Watch Masters Live Now" is a graphic with only "Watch Masters Live Now" as the alt text. They don't appear to have tried to optimize for other search terms. If you search for "Masters Live Canada" they show up sixth, behind a number of educational institutions who offer Masters degrees. "Master Live Canada" is an ok choice of keywords but not as intuitive as "Masters streaming Canada" at least to me. Maybe TSN believes that everybody in Canada knows that's where to look for Masters golf coverage but I'd argue that many golf viewers may not know that tsn.ca has live streaming of the Masters golf tournament. It's even more important because we have the day off today in Canada and Canadian Masters fans could have watched most of the day.

The ironic thing was that after I found the site, watched their 1:15 seconds of Flash commercials I couldn't watch the live streaming after all because they were using Microsoft Silverlight and Silverlight doesn't run on Linux.

Another case of major SEO fail? I'm pretty sure I saw a promo spot for the new Red Dwarf series Back to Earth which is premiering in the U.K. this weekend on a Canadian cable station. Unfortunately I forgot which channel I saw it on and this morning I tried a whole bunch of different searches without success. Sigh.