So, this arguably important moment in the internet’s history has been and gone. England’s football team, as ever, did the minimum required when it didn’t matter. And lost.

That aside, what was the viewing experience like?

Well, having selected the ‘HD’ stream, I can report that I experienced a reasonably smooth picture, with no buffering issues at all. I wonder how this was for everyone else? I ran some broadband speed checks during the match and found that my normally stable 19mb connection was running at around 6mb. When the match had ended, with the stream still running I had 16mb, and when I disconnected the stream I had 19mb again.

So this suggests that the stream ‘costs’ about 3mb, which is fine, but more importantly it proves that Virgin certainly does suffer from contention issues. Their fibre might be okay, but the switchgear (or something!) clearly isn’t. I’ll come back to this – let me tell you about the picture quality.

Before kick off, we watched the studio in fullscreen:

No one wants to see Sven in particularly high detail, so this was fine. The picture was however obviously low quality as it had been stretched. Switching to normal view yielded a much better picture, but of course it wasn’t really big enough.

When the match began, it soon became clear that at full screen size, it was completely unwatchable. There’s a 34M clip of fullscreen action here: http://v.mukerji.co.uk/2009/10-10-football/fullscreen.avi

On small screen it all came together a lot more nicely: (19MB) http://v.mukerji.co.uk/2009/10-10-football/fullscreen.avi

The trouble is that football needs to be on a big screen! People watch football together – it just wasn’t possible to get any real atmosphere squinting at a tiny portion of the screen.

In fact, the quality was so poor that it often wasn’t possible to tell who was on the ball. The commentators didn’t help here either. Normally as a team pass the ball around you might hear “Cole, to Gerrard, to Lampard” etc, but there was none of that. Why? Because the commentators weren’t there either. Presumably they had the same miserable picture we did.

I had other issues with this experience. Why was the clock/score bar not tucked further into the top left corner? So often it was squarely in the way. This photo neatly sums up both that problem, and England’s general failure:

A minor point, but throughout the match the service informed us that “Team line-ups will be updated on match day” (see the white pane on the right of the screen).

Definitely irritating was that having paid (per view) for a (very low quality) viewing experience, we were subjected to adverts. It seems Perform really can have their cake and eat it.

Overall then, this experience simply wasn’t good enough. Sure, I still believe it’s the future, but things must improve, and fast. The quality of the feed needs to go up considerably. Before that can happen though, UK broadband providers need to fix the contention issues. There were plenty of complaints on Twitter from people who couldn’t watch it properly. My favourite was from @Prezzer:

GOA….. Buffering… 78%… 85%… 97%… LL!!

Perform – You Must Try Harder. If this had been free, I may have passed it for acceptable.

Virgin Media – once higher definition streams are available, I think you might have to try quite a bit harder too.