RAFAEL NADAL MAKES TENNIS SPECIAL. ATP LIVE STREAMING UNRELIABLE

When TV doesn't air tennis matches, or the streaming stalls or completely doesn't work - and the "paid for" sites are the most unreliable - youtube is the place to see the sport of tennis. And customer service on ATP's live streaming site is not that helpful to the individual. Recently so many fan-uploaded tennis matches or parts of matches have been removed from Youtube. My personal opinion is that this hurts tennis. The money that the tennis copyright holders are trying to save for themselves to make surely isn't diminished by uploading tennis to Youtube or other similar sites. We want to see it live, but failing that, Youtube tennis viewing promotes the sport, peaks and nurtures interests and only helps those who want more people to tune into tennis so that they can make money.

Youtube in effect is free advertising for the corporate tennis administrations. But they delete the tennis youtube videos continually thinking they are protecting their money-making ventures. Roland Garros deleted videos continually during the French Open.

Rethinking their philosophy and method to make money and allowing videos to be put on Youtube and Daily Motion should be allowed so that more people are brought into the viewing tennis population.

I actually have bought the passes to ATP (which most of the time doesn't work) and Wimbledon. Wimbledon by far is the better. I couldn't get the live matches (probably because of too much "traffice"), but the downloads of entires matches are fantastic. The ATP was having technical difficulty at the Toronto final last Sunday, so the entire match was unavailable. And ESPN was knocked out by a thunderstorm in my area.

ATP doesn't upload entire matches of the current tournaments, just selected matches of the past. And of those, I have always had difficulty getting these matches to play all the way to the end.

Yesterday, I was so surprised to be able to view the entire match on the ATP site of Rafael Nadal v Nicolas Lapentti. This only proves it is not my computer. It probably means that since the match was televised the traffic on the ATP site was so much less and I was able to to have success. ATP is better than TV in that the change overs are shown and there are no commercial breaks.

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Rafael Nadal beat Nicolas Lapentti in Cincinnati August 1, 2008 7-6(3), 6-1 and secures the number 1 position.
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