• Premium (All Teams): $189.95 (Per Season)

• Choice (7 Teams): $119.95 (Per Season)

Wow, this looks awesome.

This does not include any post season (playoff) games. You are paying $189.95 (or $119.95 for the “Choice” Package) for a little more than 5 months of regular season basketball. You should also note that this does not include the “mobile” application for iPhone or Android (that will cost you an additional $49.99).

Certainly not a bargain, but considering the price this is bound to be an awesome experience… right?

Octoshape
When I purchased NBA LPBB last year I was pretty psyched to give it a try. Factoring in the price, I fully expected a high quality service.

After fumbling around on NBA.com for several minutes I eventually found a page that allowed me to “Launch” LPBB (this has since been improved).
As expected, the interface is flash based. What I did not expect was the pop-up dialog asking me to install the “Octoshape” plugin. Despite sounding like a strange feminine product, Octoshape is essentially a P2P (peer-to-peer) piece of software that runs in the background while you use LPBB. What does this mean for the user? It means that instead of NBA.com hosting the video stream via their own bandwidth, they are outsourcing the majority of the bandwidth to the user’s computers. To read more on Octoshape check out this article from windowssecrets.com.

At this point I was thinking “Hold up, didn’t I just shell out good money for this?” But it gets worse…

Usability
After reluctantly installing Octoshape I begin to explore the LPBB interface. In their demonstration videos NBA.com had touted a new feature which allowed users to simultaneously watch three games at once. This was a selling point for me as I naively imagined simultaneously watching 3 games on my HDTV (My computer is hooked up to my Monitor + HDTV). Unfortunately, the simultaneous viewing feature is virtually worthless.

First, let me explain how LPBB launches; LPBB is a 1010×685 pop-up window and it does not re-size to fit the screen. In other words, if you are running a high resolution (i.e. 1680×1050, 1920×1080…etc) you are stuck with a little 1010×685 pop-window that displays your NBA action. There is, of course, a “full screen” mode, but this only works for viewing a single game.

3 games at once! Sort of..

So, how does simultaneous viewing work? It’s really hard to describe in words, calling it ridiculous would be an understatement. You get one large game window and two small ones, and they are all contained within your 1010×685 pop-up window. Take a look at the screen shots to get a better idea.

One other thing that should be noted is that all games are in a 4:3 aspect ratio. This means that if you have a widescreen (16:9) monitor (or HDTV) you get some nice black bars on both sides of your screen.

But hey, maybe you aren’t interested in watching more than one game at once. Maybe you don’t care about the 4:3 aspect ratio. Maybe all you care about is sitting down and watching your favorite team play. Well, guess what? LPBB sucks at that too.

Speed
One would assume that since NBA.com outsourced most of their bandwidth load to the users (See “Octoshape”), the experience would be rather snappy. But sadly, you would be mistaken yet again.

To preface what I’m about to say, I should acknowledge that I do not have the fastest internet in the world (3MB DSL). However, it is most definitely fast enough to run an average quality video stream.

Who designs this stuff?

Simply loading a game can take upwards of 3 minutes of buffer time. Now, I consider myself a rather patient person; I can manage a minute or two of waiting assuming its smooth sailing afterward. The problem is that even after minutes of buffering the stream is often choppy and unstable. But worry not, it gets much worse.

Unlike other video streaming sites (i.e. Netflix, Youtube, Hulu) you cannot switch between full and normal screen modes without re-loading (buffering) the video stream. In other words, you should anticipate a minute (or more) of waiting if you want to minimize or full screen a game.

Of course, all of this is assuming you are even able to watch the game to begin with…

Blackouts
According to NBA.com blackouts are determined by the zip code associated with your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Thus, there may be blackouts on games that are televised in your region. This is all fine and dandy, the problem is that many games appear to be blacked out for no reason. I won’t go into much detail on this — to put it plainly, the closest city with an NBA team is nearly 400 miles away from my location, and I still get random game blackouts.

Any game that is nationally televised is also blacked out. This pretty much ensures that you will not be watching any hyped match-ups between heavyweight contenders. But I suppose a blackout makes sense if the game is nationally televised; after all, the television networks pay good money to broadcast those games.

Probably the biggest bomb of all is the fact that all games aired on NBATV are also blacked out! For those of you not familiar with NBA TV, it is a specialty channel that many cable and satellite providers offer. This year they will televise 96 games. As if that doesn’t sting enough, every Tuesday evening is “Fan Night” on NBA TV. Fan Night allows NBA TV subscribers to vote on what game they’d most like to see. As you can imagine, the best game is almost always selected.

Summary
Obviously, I would not recommend ordering NBA League Pass Broadband but that brings me to one last complaint. I originally ordered NBA LPBB back in October of 2009. It pains me to say that I still pay for LPBB even though that was over a year ago. You see, unknown to me, when you order LPBB you get a “Recurring Subscription”. Maybe this was a failure on my part as I did not read the fine print. Either way, it made me hate LPBB even more.

NBA League Pass Broadband is a poorly executed attempt to bring live NBA basketball to the web. If you must watch non-televised games I would recommend the sites below.

http://atdhe.net
http://espn.go.com/espn3
http://www.justin.tv
http://www.myp2p.eu