Product Review--NFL Game Rewind

NFL Game Rewind is a subscription service available through NFL.com at a cost of $49.99 per season.  With this subscription, you can watch every single NFL game on demand, in its entirety, in high definition on your computer.  You can even watch games from the 2009 season, in their entirety.  The good thing about this is that they cut out all the commercials and most of the commentators chit chat, so that all you see is the game.  You can search, fast forward, or rewind at any time.  They have a little scale thing at the bottom of the screen so that you can pick out the most exciting moments of every game, and kind of gloss over the duller bits.  Sounds like a great deal, doesn't it?

But there is a but.  A couple of buts, in fact.  The first but is that your subscription is only good for the regular NFL season.  If you want to watch pre-season games, it'll cost you extra.  If you want to watch post season games,  you guessed it, it'll cost you extra.  Not only that, your subscription ends at the end of the regular season.  If you're thinking you might want to watch games during the off season, you can forget about that.  You're better off investing in a good DVR. 

The second but is that any time there is a game actually being played, the service is unavailable.  Let's say you come home from work Monday and really, really want to sit down that evening and re-watch your favorite team's game from the day before.  Well, too bad.  Because there is a Monday night game, the service will be unavailable.  That DVR is sounding really good about now, huh? 

Since the service is unavailable during actual games, that means all of Sunday --well, from noon until nearly midnight-- or Monday nights are out from the get-go.  Later on in the season, when they start playing on Thursdays and Saturdays, you can add those two days to the verboten list as well.  That's assuming you don't also watch college football on Saturday afternoons.  And if you go to you local high school games on Fridays, that night is out, too.  So that pretty much limits your use of Game Rewind to Tuesdays and Wednesdays.  And if you go to church on Wednesday evenings, well, you get the idea.  That's an awful lot of time that the service is of no use to you. 

This might be a good thing for retired people, or people too ill or disabled to work full time, or stay at home moms, or people on welfare who don't work anyway (though if you're on welfare, you shouldn't have internet access in the first place), but for the average person, you won't have time to watch enough games to make a subscription worth the money you'll spend on it.  Now, if the subscription lasted a full year, so that I could watch games during the off season, it might be a good deal.  However, if I had known the service would be so extremely restricted, I wouldn't have spent my money on it.

I sure won't subscribe again next year.  To me, it's just not worth it.