Review By Ben Patterson of Swinhoe Industries (http://www.swinhoeindustries.co.uk)

Last week, in-time for the QuiksliverPro at Snapper Rocks, Quiksilver released an iPhone App enabling live viewing of the contest from your Apple branded mobile phone.

There are over 100,000 iPhone apps, out there and many of them are average or unimpressive at best, so with anticipation, I downloaded the app and had a look around. Installing the app before the contest began told me little about it. Lots of Quiksilver branding (to be expected), a Day counter, showing how far into the contest waiting period we are, a ‘Live’ toggle, indicating if the contest is on right now or not, a ‘Call’ count-down telling us when the next heats may or my not be called (very handy for us over here in the UK, being that the heats run mostly over night..), photos, videos and news buttons plugging you in to the media from the event as it arrives, Results, Windguru Forecast and ‘Media’ Section all adorn the bottom of the app homepage allowing easy access to the the peripheral data.

So, down to the meat. The contest starts and the heats are in the water, I hit the small but usable ‘Live’ button top-right of the homepage.
A new screen transitions-in, with a big play button, and the form for sending messages in to the commentators beneath it.
I hit the play button. The screen transitions into the native Quicktime fullscreen player for the iPhone, and I’m watching ASP contest surfing live from Australia, sat on my sofa in the North East of the UK. There are few glitches, no pixelation, and the audio and video quality are both about an 8 out of ten – as good as the web at-least.

A quick look backwards

I’ve followed the ASP tour for nearly twenty years, on and off. When I started, I would have to read Surfer Mag each month to see what had happened, and in those day the tour was much less developed, with events changing from year to year and structure and sponsors still figuring things out.

In the last few years, the ability to watch the event live on the web has totally changed the way the tour is covered from a spectator and media point of view. I can now watch live from wherever I am in the world, which is handy, as surfers are often strewn all over the globe. That said, the quality of the streams and the websites has been shaky, with certain contests and sponsors doing the job better than others. There were times when the stream was so bad that it was nicer to wait for the results to be posted through websites.

Quiksliver have nailed it

Quiksilver were always better at the web streams, in my experience anyway, and with their help the sport has moved on leaps-and-bounds, and this year is even being shown live on FuelTV in Australia and other countries.

Its no surprise then that the iPhone app was right on the money. I watched the first five heats of Round 1, before having to go charge my phone, and the quality of the experience was every-bit as good as the web stream I usually watch. The video size appears to be the same as the web, so all that changes really is the proximity you are to the phone. I was sat horizontal on the sofa, resting the iPhone on my chest, watching Slater rip the shit out of his heat. Superb.

Its really not fair to measure the app against a TV show or surf DVD, all we really have is the web-feed to compare with, and it totally stands up to that. Whats more this is a FREE iPhone app, no money down – nothing paid, and it doesn’t get any better than that, especially with the ASP iPhone app costing £2.99 (though this does give you access to all the ASP events, not just Quiksilver ones… but thats a different review.).

Bring on France – the next Quiksilver sponsored event – and lets hope Rip Curl and Billabong jump on the bandwagon…

Some other points

I did try and send a message to Peter Mel and Martin Potter via the form facility, but this appeared to hang, no great loss really. The live scores, accessible from the ‘Live Scores’ button on the Live page worked with a quick refresh, allowing you to see the waves scores for each surfer in the heat. The only other speed-bump was ‘Results’ page, which took till the Round was over before the results filtered in, meaning you couldn’t quickly check the scores in the heat previous. All said though, not a bad show.

Disclosure

As with all web-streamed media, the quality of stream will depend on your connection. I was sat at home using a 2MB WIFI connection with only one other person sharing the bandwidth. Im sure on a 3G connection the feed and app would work very differently, if at-all.

This post is tagged I-Phone, Quiksilver