matchofthedaynospoilers.co.uk

Match of the Day is on the Internet - hooray! Unfortunately, it’s not on its own part of the Internet - boo!

One of the good things that has happened in the last year or two has been the ability to watch Match of the Day (or Match of the Day 2) on the BBC’s website. To anyone with a decent Internet connection and a large enough monitor / comfortable enough desk chair, this neatly solves the problem of not being able to watch Match of the Day on the telly because a) you live in Scotland and BBC Scotland is showing rubbish Scottish football, or b) your wife is watching Family Guy. It’s streaming only (I presume because of the BBC’s agreement with the English Premiership), and it’s on when England thinks MOTD should be on, not necessarily when your local BBC station scheduled it, so you’ve got to be careful there, but those are minor complaints.

The main problem is rather more serious: it is almost impossible to watch Match of the Day online without spoilers. Which is deeply unfortunate, as surely the main reason for watching a highlights programme is so you can a) see the salient points of all the games without having to sit through a 0-0 bore draw between two mid-table teams you don’t care about, but yet b) maintain the excitement of watching a number of live games by not knowing in advance how the scores ended up.

The news used to say “If you don’t want to know the results, look away now.” The BBC’s website doesn’t let you look away.

How the BBC makes it really hard for you not to know what happened

There are two places you can go to watch Match of the Day online (assuming it’s on). The most obvious one is the BBC’s main football page. You can also go to the individual page for each programme (e.g. this one apparently from last November, although I think I grabbed it later than that). In both cases you’ll have links to other related video - and the headlines give a lot away.

At the moment, the five most popular sport videos are:

• Win puts pressure on Man Utd - Benitez
• We were punished for mistakes - Shearer
• Late goal ‘bitter pill’ for Hodgson
• Highlights - Malaysian GP qualifying
• ‘Squeaky bum’ talk baffles Benitez

You only need to glance at those headlines to know that Liverpool won, Newcastle and Fulham lost. In this particular case this only spoils two games because Liverpool were playing Fulham, but still, this is the two main games of the evening.

And this is on the individual page - whose URL you can’t bookmark or guess because it changes each time. On the main page you’ve got a plethora of links to various news articles, all of which give away either the gist (‘Arsenal getting stronger - Wenger’) or the result (‘Newcastle 0 - 2 Chelsea’) of a game.

If you want to watch Match of the Day online without seeing any of these spoilers, you pretty much have to go to the main football page and stare intensely at the part of the page where the video’s going to load (making sure your gaze never wanders, because if it does you’re screwed), and then clicking the “Full screen” button on the Flash player as quickly as you can to make sure that those goddamn spoilers are on screen for the shortest possible time. I’ve found myself hanging dish cloths over my monitor to hide the right-hand spoilerriffic column at times. That can’t be right.

Now, the reason why the BBC’s website does all of this is that they’ve got two incompatible things: a news website that tells you what’s happening as soon as possible, and a highlights programme that is designed to simulate the afternoon as it happened. Match of the Day is only on for about a couple of hours per week, whereas stuff is happening in the news all the time, so the news wins.

Still, surely we can do better than that?

I’ve just done better than that

I’ve set up a simple website, matchofthedaynospoilers.co.uk (or motdnospoilers.co.uk for lazy typists), which intends to be the solution to this problem. If you go have a look right now, chances are there’ll be nothing much on the site because Match of the Day (or Match of the Day 2) isn’t on TV at the moment. But when there’s streaming video on the BBC’s Football page, you’ll see it on motdnospoilers.co.uk without all of the annoying bumf.

I’m sure there will be teething problems with it - for one thing, I haven’t had a chance to test it live yet; I’ve been using saved versions of the BBC’s Football home page. Still, it was a fun itch to scratch - working out how much of the BBC’s website you actually need to get their video player to work, and the best way to do that without raping the BBC’s bandwidth. I hope it’s of use to someone - and next month when I’m in France, that someone will be me.