My tennis obsessed girlfriend has been rubbing off on me lately, so now I’ve got the bug to watch some Roland Garros, live.

I hate TV, and don’t want cable, so I can’t just add the Tennis Channel to our tab.

Some baseball obsessed friends of mine mentioned that they could subscribe to streaming video of all the games, so I set out to find a subscription for Tennis. Needless to say, I didn’t find anything. It seems like the nature of the tennis tournaments, with both masters and slams being run by completely different groups of people, makes it impossible to offer all of these events in one location. The best I found was was MediaZone, and even that wasn’t very convincing.

The next stop for me was the Roland Garros website. Hmm, they have a video section. After about 30 seconds of searching, I found their video selection to be quite limited, and fairly behind the times. First, they require you to download various plugins. Web based video has made enough progress, where this shouldn’t be an issue at all. Forcing you to download 2 plugins is crazy! Second, they only have “re-caps” or highlights available online. The error I recieved when trying to view the live feeds looked something like this:

En fonction des accords négociés avec nos partenaires,
ce service est exclusivement ouvert aux résidents des
pays suivants :

Which means, that if i’m not a resident of France, Moncao, Andorre, Senegal, Ivory Coast, etc. I can’t watch the live feed.

I hope all these VC video investments start catching up, because there’s a lot of video out there thats going to waste if it’s not available online. I was able to find Roland Garros 2007 on You Tube until the French Tennis Federation made them take it down. The demand is here, and someone needs to fill it!