Another week of NFL football is in the books, and things are really starting to take shape. The Titans might not be the best team in the AFC, as they dropped a big game to the J! E! T! S! JETS JETS JETS. The Giants look like the best team in the NFL. The next few weeks promise to be exciting, so surely you want to keep up. What’s the best way to get all the NFL action on your BlackBerry? NFL Mobile Live, of course. Problem is, it’s only on Sprint. If that’s not horribly frustrating, I don’t know what is.
The story, as I understand it, goes a little like this. When the application first appeared, you could download it to any device. People had varying levels of success running it on other networks, but from what I gather some Verizon and Alltel customers got the service working for a few weeks.
Then Sprint issued a mandatory upgrade. The service would not work without it, and once the upgrade was installed all non-Sprint users were blocked. Booooo!
Honestly, NFL Mobile Live is a great idea. You can listen to the radio broadcast of every game, which is great if you’re on the go — in the car, on the train, at the in-laws, etc. The biggest bonus, though, is that it broadcasts all NFL Network games, which began earlier this month, every Thursday night. So if you had the NFL Mobile Live app, you could enjoy the Eagles-Cardinals game on Thanksgiving.
As it stands, even some Sprint customers are having trouble. The only advice I got was to watch the Thursday night games through Sprint TV. Otherwise, the application seems to do the trick.
I don’t want my irateness to be hidden, though. The NFL is the most popular sport in the country, in terms of total unique viewers, but they continually screw the consumer. The Sunday Ticket only on DirecTV? Shady season ticket waiting lists? A mobile service on what has to be the crappiest carrier in the country? How far can one entity go to alienate its customers, yet still flourish? If the NFL continues the way it’s been going, I guess we’ll soon find out.
