Taking The Field With The NFL Sunday Ticket On PS3

For years, people who lived away from their hometowns only had a few options to watch their favorite football team play on Sunday. You could go to a local bar and spend a ton of money on food and beverage to watch the game, scour the web for an illegal stream, settle for an audio feed like the olden days, or sign up for DirecTV and drop hundreds of dollars on the NFL Sunday Ticket package. Now you can skip the new satellite TV service altogether and access the NFL buffet via your PlayStation 3.

After a bumpy first few weeks where service issues forced Sony to offer PlayStation Store vouchers to angry subscribers, I spent my Sunday taking in the first 12 games on Sunday to evaluate whether Sony worked out the kinks and, most importantly, whether the PS3 version of the Ticket is worth the steep price of admission ($339.95, or $84.99 a month for four months).

To download the NFL Sunday Ticket on the PlayStation 3, bypass the store altogether and go into the TV/Video Services on the XMB. You can find the app in the channels section. Downloading and installing the app only takes a few seconds. Once you've completed the installation, you can sign up for the service or sign in if you're already a DirecTV subscriber. If you already pay for the service, streaming the games to your PS3 costs an additional $50.

After a half-minute of loading the stream, the impressive sidebar interface unfurled along the left side of the screen and it was time to enjoy the smorgasbord of games presented in HD. The Ticket gives you access to all of the games being played at a particular time minus the local game being broadcast (or blacked out, if the stadium didn't sell out) in your region. If you're not a cable subscriber, you should also note that this package doesn't include streams of the nationally televised games that are played on Sunday night, Monday, or Thursday.

Navigating between the games is a breeze thanks to the intuitive sidebar interface similar to the one on the iPad that tells you game scores and where the ball is on the field at any given time. Drilling into a menu of the highlighted game, you can click to watch, check out the game stats, player stats, the NFL schedule, or even game highlights. The stat sheets give you the basics, but falls short of the robust options available on many live game trackers on sports sites like NFL.com and ESPN. The highlight packages do a great job of summarizing the ebbs and flows of a game, but after I watched the Titans-Steelers recap suddenly I couldn't access the highlights for the rest of the games.

My favorite feature of the NFL Sunday Ticket is the amazing Red Zone Channel, which dynamically switches back and forth between the games in real time to show you all the meaningful drives and highlights. Best of all, as long as games are being played this channel is uninterrupted by commercials. As a football fan at my wits end with the ridiculous amount of commercials that play during football broadcasts (is it really necessary to show three minutes' worth of advertising before and after kickoffs?), this is an amazing viewing experience. The NFL could probably make bank from selling this channel alone to scoring obsessed fantasy football fans, but as with DirecTV's version of the Sunday Ticket, buying the entire package is the only way to get this channel.

The only interface issue I have with PS3 version of the NFL Sunday Ticket is the order of the games on the sidebar. Rather than changing dynamically to surface the games currently being played on the top of the list, the sidebar keeps the same format throughout the day. This means if you want to switch between the Red Zone Channel and the various late afternoon games, you need to drill way down the list.

One downgrade from DirecTV service is that it takes a while for the new stream to build when you switch between games. My PS3 connects wirelessly to my router via an 802.11g signal, and it took approximately 30 seconds to get the stream running each time I changed the channel. I also noticed some artifacting when the stream begins, but it's nothing worse than I've seen during Netflix streaming.

Once the stream is up and running, the HD visuals were crisp images for the most part. The occasional framerate hiccup occurred, but over a day's worth of games the stream was only interrupted in three or four instances, and it only took a couple seconds to get the broadcast back on track.

After spending the day with the PS3 version of the NFL Sunday Ticket, I think this version is nearly on par with the DirecTV offering. The $340 pricetag is steep for my taste, and I wish you could purchase the addictive Red Zone Channel for a more marginal standalone fee, but if you have the cash and an insatiable appetite for NFL games this is a worthwhile investment.