NBC's Streaming Football

NBC will be streaming its weekly NFL broadcast over the web. I'm watching the Giants season opener. Some observations:

• The video is kind of choppy on firefox 3.0. I thought it might just be my PC, which isn't the most powerful in the world, so I tried on my work laptop and it was choppy there too. But in IE 6, the video was smooth. On IE 7, however, nothing came up. The page background started, but the flash player never did anything. It must just be my PC. (I don't use IE too much.)
  
• The video is kind of small, being restricted to only a portion of the browser screen. Even "maximized", it only takes up maybe 1/4 of the screen. Maximized should be maximized.
• One of the selling points of the online experience is the ability to choose different camera angles. It works, pretty much. You can cycle through. But I did have the experience of every time I changed angles, I had to see a commercial which was a bit odd.
• I can't help but comment on the UI design, which isn't very friendly. They need to do a better job exposing controls to make things a bit more intuitive. For example, to cycle between cameras you have to move the mouse over either the right or left side of the display and then click on the arrow that pops up for a few seconds. That's neither intuitive nor user-friendly.

All in all, I'm glad to see someone really embracing web-distribution like this. It's a good start and I'm sure they will get the kinks worked out.