I don't come on this board often & I post even less but this is a big issue to me since I have not lived in Buffalo since the 80's & am currently on the West Coast.
Center Ice & Gamecenter experiences will vary based on cable provider & application platform.
I had CI through Comcast for 4 years. Comcast only carries 2 games in HD at a time & due to their unwillingness to work well with MSG they never carried MSG feeds in HD. I get off work after 5pm pacific & have to DVR the games to watch on delay. Sometimes the games were not on the channels they were listed on in the guide & on occasion my DVR would flake out & not record the game either. Other cable companies (Bright House, Verizon have different options than Comcast) I am considering switching to DTV this year for Football & Hockey packages. It seems you can always get HD MSG feed & I can DVR.
Last year I tried out the Online Gamecenter & was able to watch online or on my PS3 or through my Panasonic TV app. Quality for the most part was OK. I have 25/5 MPS internet but still not always a good stream. Often it would degrade in quality & then go back to HD causing the game to loop for 30-60 seconds or so. You could watch the games on demand (no DVR needed) but if you did not start the game before the stream was over, you could not watch the game at all, until they archived it the next day (sucks). For almost every home game you would not see the intermission, only when they played on the road. IDK why that it was that way, it just was. Each app I tried had plusses & minuses. The PS3 has the cool scorboard & the ability to hide the scores, which was great for me watching on delay. The Panasonic did not have the ability to hide the scores nor Online either. Quality of stream was inconsistant across all 3 platforms. After the season was over, I emailed support asking for improvements & stated my general displeasure of the service. Rather than them trying to fix things, or convince me that next season it would be better quality, they just took me off the auto-renew list & said goodbye to my $$.
That's my $.02. IDK which direction I am choosing this year but am quite tempted by getting free Sunday ticket & sign up for DTV & try either CI or the sports channel package to get MSG all the time. Does anybody know if you get the sports package without CI if the games are blacked out, or if you only MSG1 feeds & not the MSG2 feeds?
