To be honest, it tends to be a commentator by commentator thing in my experience, although ESPN may ask their people to say more, and in a game as big as that, providing additional explanatory commentary for those not used to watching the sport that often.
Funnily enough, I've just watched the Algeria v Russia game on ITV4. In its infinite wisdom, ITV chose to put on a fairly dead rubber in Belgium v South Korea on its main channel. So they shunted the alternative winner-takes-all game onto their sister station, where they used Arlo White for commentary. I like him, and enjoyed hearing him when he used to do BBC Five Live radio coverage before he disappeared off to work at NBC. His ITV4 commentary was positively spartan in comparison to most coverage - with long pauses when neither he nor his co-commentator spoke at all. It should be noted that he was doing it "off tube" back in London, and you can always tell when that's the case. In my experience Ian Darke likes to fill every moment with some carefully researched stat, so I'm not surprised you found it quite busy. Overall, I prefer BBC to ITV, but it's a personal thing. A few weeks ago I saw a few minutes of a classic Wimbledon match from yesteryear. We used to have a commentator called Dan Maskell as the "voice of Wimbledon." He would frequently go minutes without saying a word. Perhaps just saying, "Oh I say!" at the end of a long rally. Adam On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 10:13 PM, Tom Wolper <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 5:05 PM, Joe Hass <[email protected]> wrote: > >> After touting their largest non-NCAA-or-NFL-football audience for >> Sunday's USA/Portugal match, you would think they would prepare for an >> online onslaught given today's match occurred during business hours across >> the country. >> >> You, of course, would be wrong. >> >> >> http://recode.net/2014/06/26/espn-yes-were-having-world-cup-streaming-problems/ >> >> Hint to Bristol: you might want to buy more hamsters by Tuesday 4 PM ET. >> > I don't have cable TV so I have been using ESPN3 to watch the games. When > the US-Germany game started I noticed that the ESPN3 page would not load. > So I watched through another streaming site instead. > > As an aside, while looking for a stable stream, I saw some ESPN and BBC > coverage. Even though Ian Darke was doing play-by-play, the BBC commenters > talked a lot less during action than they did on ESPN. > > -- > -- > TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "TV or Not TV" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "TVorNotTV" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
