Only Stream Left for 2007

Thanks!

Very appreciated.

Excellent find!

I just watched Wada dominate the Buffaloes for a 2-0 win. It is great to see Oh-kantoku back in the dugout.

(I checked my old Hawks link Saturday, and when it didn't work, I assumed there was no way to watch them this season.)

Again, thank you for your discovery!

Awesome!

Just watched Tsuyoshi Wada own the Buffaloes over this stream. Even with the low quality, it's still good to have the audio feed if nothing else. And I could still see well enough to appreciate things like an awesome Matsunaka dive to snag a Sakaguchi liner. Lots of fun all around.

I have this bad feeling I'm going to have to go from being a closet Hawks fan to a real Hawks fan if they're the only team I can watch games live this year, though. I no longer have the whole "they beat down the Fighters" excuse.

(Fighters and Marines are still tied 0-0 going into the 10th, Glynn and Kobayashi have both gone the whole way as I write this. CRAZY.)

I might have good news for outside of Japan fans. Last night, between innings of the Hawks-Buffalos game, I did a little searching.

On PeerCast they were showing 3 Central League games!

I was able to watch parts of the Carp-Giants, Tigers-Swallows, and Dragons-BayStars games. I say parts because (like the past 2 years) since it is not a direct feed (it is a relay) I get disconnected about every 3 minutes (all I have to do is press the play button).

So my advice is to go to the PeerCast website, download the little software, and try it. In the meantime, I'll try to find a way to fix the connection problem (or even find a stream recorder).

By the way, I don't think they're only going to show the home games (Carp, Tigers, and Dragons).

I wouldn't get all lovey dovey with Softbank just yet. Sure, they have that stream for us to watch Hawks games on, but do you know who owns almost 50% of Yahoo! Japan? That's right, Softbank. They're the ones behind the whole Japan only streaming in the first place. Seems to me like they want to horde all the international audience to themselves, since it's a growing market and Japanese TV ratings are getting lower.

- There's really no reason for them to have this stream anymore, so either Softbank forgot all about it or someone out there is looking out for us.

This was left up for those outside of Japan by Softbank. There's even a small blurb there that says it's for people not in Japan.

There seem to be Taiwanese P2P programs through which you can watch NPB games. Check out My P2P MLB, EU.

Usual caveats apply here. Deal with spyware and viruses, if any, at your own risk.

I just figured out tonight that the Rakuten Eagles have live streaming broadcasts of all of their home games available for everyone, not just those living in Japan. Visit their website at http://tv.rakuten.co.jp/eagles.

As I mentioned, you can watch live streams of their games, which requires simple registration that you should be able to get through with some usage of babelfish, as well as archived broadcasts from previous games. Sure, the Eagles aren't one of NPB's top tier teams, but it's nice to see a team that's being progressive in Internet broadcasting, and this gives me a chance to see the Marines play live when they go on the road to play the Eagles.

Nice catch there! Thanks! It's nice to know that at least one team didn't forget about fans outside of Japan.

I don't think the Hawks feed works anymore. While there is indeed a "100k" mention on the page, it's not actually a link. There are some links to download Windows Media Player, though. It's a shame, since the Hawks games would be fun. The Rakuten page works fine, though.

I think I have the Rakuten page signed up for, but I can't figure out where to login. :-P

Success! I finally got one of these feeds to work. I just watched Jason Stanbridge of Softbank strike out Alex Cabrera of Seibu (ironically, neither native Japanese) with one out in the 5th for my first live NPB action. LOL.

The feed borders on terrible, but I don't care. I just thought I would share this moment with you all.

TomC