CueSport TV - The Blog

Absolutely gutted!

We were supposed to be at the 8-ball Super Tour event this weekend and left this morning at 8.00am for the relatively short drive to Keynsham.

All was well until we reached Dorchester (about 12 miles) and then smoke started pouring out of the engine, I suppose in hindsight the temperature gauge being above the red should have been a sign, in fact if it could have gone any further round it would have been back at zero!

Pulling over was the answer and then loads of phone calls later we got the RAC out, this was £129.50 well spent! We had breakdown cover with our insurance but as we didn’t have the details with us nobody could help.

A trip to a garage in Dorchester confirmed the problem as the radiator. No replacement available until Monday and no courtesy car available until Monday either. Bugger!

We drove home and are still here, needless to say there will be no live coverage from the 8-ball Super Tour this weekend. We do apologise if this has cause anyone any inconvenience but it is unfortunately something we cannot help.

Hopefully we will be fighting fit next week so we can return to action.

Again our apologies.

English/UK Pool, General 8-ball super tour, breakdown cover, car breakdown, live pool, rac, radiator

Today is my first working day of the week. Monday to Thursday I took my wife and five-year-old son for a few days in Devon.

It was always the plan during this summer to spend a few days away from the office and we decided to go camping. This is something that I used to enjoy quite a lot. However, tastes change and in my eyes what was supposed to be a few days of relaxing and charging the batteries turned out to be very uncomfortable, add to this the high winds and torrential rain and I had a number of near sleepless nights.

I wanted to use the time to remove myself from the -day-to-day running of Cuesport TV and felt that it may focus me when I got back into trying to further drive the business forward.

Advertisers have been hard to find in the current climate and the subscription service is very early on in its life cycle so I needed time to think about how to tackle these issues.

One thing has always been content and updating the videos on a daily basis, there are still hundreds of hours worth of content that we need to make available. I am making a huge effort to turn live tournament recording around into VOD in the shortest space of time.

Before I went away I also launched our first HD content, it has been hugely received, and in my mind the only reason the ratings haven’t been higher is due to the buffering that viewers are experiencing. This is something that cannot be helped when streaming video in HD quality.

The HD video has caused the main channels viewing figures to grow from around 8,900 to 10,500 in the space of about a week though, so it tells me that HD content may be the way forward for the channel. Our next live event, the 8-ball Super Tour, will have the final recorded in HD for later broadcast to subscribers only. This will add to our offering and will showcase the true potential of Cuesport TV.

There are a lot of things in the pipeline and I have also just confirmed the Wytech Ladies Snooker Masters will be featured on Cuesport TV this month as well. I am just waiting on details to see if it can be broadcast live.

So the few days in Devon opened up a bit of freshness in me personally and I hope I can use the renwed vigour to drive this company forward.

I am always please to hear from readers of this blog so please if you have any thoughts at all please let me know.

General 8-ball super tour, camping, cuesport tv, devon, snooker, wytech masters

At the weekend (1st/2nd August) I travelled out to Keynsham Snooker Centre for the first event in this years 8-Ball Super Tour.

This World Rules 8-Ball tour carries a huge £48,000 in prize money across the four events and as a result has pulled in all the best players in the land.

It was also going to be a test for us at Cuesport TV.

We had not had a full two-day weekend live event since we launched the subscriptions and were not sure what the response would be like, it turned out to be an excellent response. We have never ever believed that all of our 22,000 monthly viewers would pay, however, in order to drive the business forward in a tough climate it was better to take less viewers that appreciated the product enough to pay.

This happened and so a big thanks to all of the viewers that did support us this weekend.

On a side note Carl Morris beat Ronan McCarthy 8-6 to lift the title and £2700.00 first prize.

English/UK Pool 8-ball, 8-ball pool, 8-ball super tour, cuesport tv, live pool, subscriptions