In appreciating what TAR does, you have to keep some things in perspective.
First. TAR flys their crew up to a event and all of their equipment. So you got Hotel and Airfare plus they're going to ring up alot in the food, drink and other expenses. They take this kind of hit right out of the box and have no clue whether they're going to reap any of their expense back by PPV.
2nd. Pool and action are not 2 words that go with reliablity. Action matches just kind of happen. They almost cannot be scheduled with any certainty. You got people that say they are going to play and don't. You got people that say they are going to play this race, for this much at this time and don't show up at all or they show up hours or days later. You also have big matches that happen with no warning, they just happen, so no way to advertise them.
3rd. They are always at the mercy of the event location's internet feed. It could be great, it could be half-ass, it could work great and then crap out intermittantly. They can do their best to adjust their encoding of the bitrate going outbound. If the feed is excellent, they can bring a clearer picture to the world, if it isn't they might have adjust down their video encoding to use less bandwidth, which means that the quality suffers.
4th. The 800's and thousands of viewers you see, are when the free feed is going on. When it goes to PPV, you see it drop 15 fold.
5th. They try their best to line up some action to be able to broadcast. This requires the players to agree to play on a TV table, it also requires them to agree to a match and actually show up. See no 1 above.
6th. TAR appeals mostly to hard core pool action junkies. Those people are aware of how matches happen, they are aware that it's not non-stop high dollar action between top name pros, they are watching to see excellent players play meaningful money matches and realize everything that goes with it.
TAR broadcast many action matches with top players for high dollar action over many days. Much of it free. The least a person can do is to keep it in perspective and say I could contribute 50.00 for 9 days of pool, 24 hours a day. Most people would say that is one helluva deal. Along with you getting all of that for 50.00, you also put 50.00 in their pocket to go to their expenses and allow them to continue bringing this kind of action to you in the future.
Both TAR and Accu-stats realized that their Internet feed sucked this year. They had no problems last year, but this year it sucked. Both businesses value their customers and they tried to make it right for them. If you ever have a problem with logging in, or not being able to get the video, Justin will refund your money. No questions asked.
I'm sure TAR is very disappointed in what happened this year, the Hotel's Internet feed sucked which really hurt them. They had some problems with the gaming commission out of the blue and that changed everything for them. I'm sure they wish they could have been able to advertise and show some more Action Matches and that everything worked out with that. They are at the mercy of so many variables and a large part of their potential customer base, is so impatient and are not realistic about how pool action matches work. For some reason, they expect 24 hour a day big money matches lined up for them on several tables at the same time and expect them to contantly switch between matches back and forth.
A few years ago, if you weren't at the Derby, you would have never seen any action. NONE. ZERO. Now you got to see probably close to 50 high dollar matches between some top pros in all games... Bar table, 9 ft'ers, One Pocket, 9 ball, 10 ball LIVE AS IT HAPPENS.
In streaming in this day and age, it is rarely going to come all together and your going to get a stable, fast internet feed out to the world with no problems.
Do we all wish it was like that , sure... Does TAR learn something from each time it goes on the road and it's at the mercy of the event's Internet feed.. I'm sure they do. I know they have many things in the works for the future. Maybe you'll see some archived video footage that you can watch anytime you want. Remember, they have most all the footage archived, that can be gone thru at a later time and edited to have individual matches.
It's all good, just be patient, grow with them. This is a new way of showing pool, one that we never had before. It allows us that can't be there, to be there in a way and to witness some of the best pool in the world, that we would have never got to see, if it wasn't for people like TAR.
At least that's my take on it, my opinion only, I speak for no one else but myself and I'm in a hurry to write this so I can go practice. Hope it made some sense.
I don't know about you, but I was a little disappointed with the overall experience of the DCC via TAR. It started strong with action around the clock. So I bought into the 5 day package on Tuesday for $50 big ones. Then the action seemed to slow down, coverage slacked off. Did TAR get busted? They changed their streaming vehicle like Thursday - Friday, didn't seem like hardly anyone was connected the last part of the week, like 45 - 98, compared to 847 the first part of the week. Did TAR explain this BS? Did anybody get a refund? I hate to nock The Action Report, I appreciated what they do. I just need someone to clearify what this was all about.
So the feed was a little glitchy at times? For the most part my video was great. 
