EVE TV Is Free Free Free

For those who might not know, EVE TV is officially free. Well truthfully it’s been free for the last few episodes, but it’s worth mentioning since they’re finally ditching Jalipo as the streaming provider.

Jalipo was, put simply, horrid. The pay-per-view model they were using for EVE TV is not compatible with the EVE playerbase. EVE TV is using Brightcove right now, and the difference is… commercials. Between each segment of EVE TV you’ll be greeted with a quick 15-30 second commercial just like on real TV. This really isn’t all that obtrusive, since you can just not watch them (check your email, poke around in EVE, etc).

Now content wise the last few EVE TV episodes have been pretty lackluster. The Goons episode, my gawd. The only thing worth watching was the Eagle profile, and even then I skipped it since I don’t fly Caldari ships. Honestly, I pretty much fast-forwarded to the end credits. The end credits have been the best part of EVE TV recently, showing all the silliness that happens when the cameras are rolling but nobody expects them to be. It’s amusing of course, but as much as it pains me to say it, they’re the best part of the episodes lately.

Lets hope the content improves, because it’d be a shame to see the show spiral downwards when it’s now available to anyone to watch.

Warp Drive Active #135: A Solid Win

Linkage

Well the 4th Alliance Tournament is over, and the winner … *drum roll*… is HUN Reloaded! Congratulations go out to them, it was definitely an excellent win with a superb setup and team which worked very well together.

I don’t think anyone expected it to go that way, and personally I love it when this kind of thing happens. It was refreshing to have a tournament where the sure thing didn’t win, which should serve to prove to all the alliances out there that you don’t have to own have the map in EVE to be able to compete in these things. Overall the production of this tournament was top notch, with no streaming issues to speak of. This let everyone watch the matches live, and the inclusion of free streams of the prior days’ matches let you recap what you may have missed. Definitely a worthy feature.

The commentary for the final weekend was excellent, save for a few way-too-drunk moments on Sunday. 🙂 And the “CCP vs EVE TV” fight was a riot to watch, especially to see CCP mop the floor with the EVE TV crew.

For the final day’s matches I was lucky enough to be brought over to the tournament system to snag some screenshots. On a whim, I decided to do a bit of virtual photoblogging, putting up a bunch of shots from the tournament in near real-time on Flickr. If you’re curious and want to see what happened during the fights, venture over to my EVE 4th Alliance Tournament photo set and check it out.

A special thank you from me to the GMs who helped organize the event and the fights themselves, and allowed me to attend it in person. 🙂

Wilhelm Naked No More

A while back on Warp Drive Active podcast #5 we did a contest involving sci-fi quotes. We picked a winner, and as a prize he got himself a t-shirt with the comic of his choice emblazoned on the front. Being lazy, I didn’t get around to blogging about this, but here’s a link to his blog about it, including pictures of the shirt.

Congratulations once again Wilhelm.