For me, “watching Big Games of College Football” is like “everything on a pizza” and “peanut m&m’s”. I realize the decadence inherent in all of them, but I have decided to surrender to those particular decadences. For all (maybe because of… ) its rampant hypocrisy, Big Games in BTCF have a pomp & ceremony & circumstance I find addictive.… when enjoying on my “sorta” Big Screen HDTV in my home theater a/k/a living room with my refrigerator and my bathroom and with preferred parking 50′ away in my driveway.
That is a choice I 
made…. you have the same right to choose “your way” …. paying $75+ for tics and logistics to roast in sweltering September Saturday afternoon heat during interminable TV timeouts while “your team” whups up on Whattzamatta A&M is “how you do it”. I respect your choice…. respect mine, or not.
Blondie and I may NEVER attend another college football games unless “in a suite” AND “with a parking pass”. “Spoiled”…. yes. It is our lives, our time and how we have decided to spend both. So There!
You probably LOVE tailgating w/ friends, and “being there”, and “supporting your team” blah blah yadda yadda….. we don’t.
Here is info on a revision of ESPN’s GamePlan for streaming multitudes of games this Fall. If you have never “streamed games” here is some info. …. Beware of Buffering !!! Buffering is when your TV screen “freezes” as your Internet downloads the programming. Think of it as like a bad case of techno-Hiccups… that won’t go away.
You can watch streamed games LIVE on either your computer monitor or via your HDTV screen. To watch via your TV screen, you need one of several gizmos. We use Apple TV. No, I don’t know how “it works” but if we figured it out, so can most of you. AppleTV is a one-time buy at around $70. It is “a little box” you hook-up like a DVD / Blue-Ray. How easy? I do it “without cussing”. THAT easy.
At our house, our sports pleasure is St Louis Cardinals’ baseball. We subscribe to MLB.tv which gives us unlimited access to EVERY Cardinal regular season game (except when they play the Wash Nationals who are “in our market”). Actually we get EVERY MLB game every night (except the Nationals). We get to enjoy the Cardinal announcers and No Commercials. The screen shows COMMERCIAL BREAK when there is a commercial for regular cable users.
We “beat the Buffering Beast” by having ATT boost our Internet download speed from a standard 24mbps to The Max of 75 mbps !!! WHOA. I think that means we see the action BEFORE it actually happens in Real Time via some sort of Time/Space Portal. ??? Anyway “No More Buffering At Our House. Check to see if you can “boost your download speed”. It costs us $20/month…. worth it to us.
I’m probably going to order this college football streaming plan. I will drop it after FB season. I still have no interest whatsoever in watching MAC games on Tuesday night or cupcake massacres against Savannah State but I do enjoy Big Games “doing it my way”.
Waaaaay more than you wanted / needed to know…. but you can now amaze your co-workers with all this cool info !!!
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ESPN GAMEPLAN IS NO MORE, ESPN COLLEGE EXTRA TO TAKE ITS PLACE
Posted by Ian Casselberry on Aug 26, 2015 13:15
Say goodbye to ESPN GamePlan, the cable, satellite and streaming package that allowed out-of-market college football fans to watch up to 15 regional game telecasts each week. In its place will be ESPN College Extra, which will apparently be a bundle of the former GamePlan and Full Court packages.
Details haven’t yet been offered to consumers, but bars and restaurants have been given the lowdown on the package for DirecTV. According to It’s All About Satellites, the rebranded ESPN College Extra will include the following:
— Over 600 live sporting events, including up to 140 college football games and over 300 college basketball games
— Includes three (3) “Red Zone” like programs for college sports – ESPN Goal Line for football, ESPN Buzzer Beater for basketball, ESPN Bases Loaded for baseball – at no extra charge (all on channel 615 and in HD)
— All in HDNCAA Conferences included are:
— College Football: ACC, Sun Belt, MAC, AAC, TBD FCS and HBCU games
— College Basketball: ACC, AAC, Big12, Horizon, MAC, Sun Belt, MAAC, MVC, Summit, WAC, Big South, and WCC
For home viewers watching on cable, satellite or internet, ESPN GamePlan was no longer being offered by some providers in order to make room for other channels, many of which have their own college sports package affiliated with individual conferences.
With the advent of channels such as the Big Ten Network, SEC Network and Pac-12 Network, in addition to conference agreements with networks like Fox Sports 1, NBC Sports Network and, of course, ESPN, there are so many more college games — including regional telecasts previously unavailable to out-of-market fans — accessible to the typical consumer now. Why pay $140, which is what ESPN GamePlan cost last year? (And by the way, the package was only available in standard definition, further lowering its value for consumers.)
Well, many people weren’t, which is why the channel was being booted by most providers and why ESPN is now offering something else.
No word yet on how much ESPN College Extra will cost for cable, satellite and internet viewers, but the information DirecTV provided to bars and restaurants advertised a price of $235 in three installments. Considering that’s nearly twice as much as what GamePlan ($142) and Full Court ($109) cost last year, that fee will very likely be different.
