Most of the times, I think Tennis Channel is doing a pretty good job.  Here’s a prime example.  Last week, in Tokyo, Tennis Channel was not planning to show the quarterfinals live.  But, somehow they managed to do just that.  They put all four quarterfinals on, live, which means in the wee hours of the night.  Tennis Channel knows that the average tennis nut can’t or won’t be up in the middle of the night trying to catch live coverage in a timezone half a world away.

But Tennis Channel realizes that there are tennis nuts who want to catch live telecasts.  And so, even for a non-Slam event, Tennis Channel has been willing to show an ATP 500 event live.  This is something a major broadcast network would never do.  They would look at the logistics of the situation and think why on earth should they bother to do this live?  To be fair, Tennis Channel leans on British-based announcers to do the commentary.  This is typically the trio of Jason Goodall (who is British), Robbie Koenig (South African) and Doug Adler (American) and they’re very good, so there’s no reason, for example, to have Tennis Channel pays its own commentators to fly out when they can leverage great tennis commentators.

But the weird part of Tennis Channel is the crawl at the bottom.  Often, it’s hours and hours out-of-date.  For example, at one point, Wawrinka and Hewitt were playing a Davis Cup match.  The fifth set has been postponed until the next day.  Even a full 24 hours after the conclusion, the crawl still says this match is yet to be completed.  You will often see typos.  I mean this should be unforgivable.  “eleminate”?  They used to misspell players’ names all the time.  That seems to have been cleaned up.  However, they once had Steffi Graf’s name spelled as Graff.  It’s hard to garner respect when the people responsible for the spelling seem oblivious to spelling and tennis.

There are times when the match being shown on TV is a replay with the winner already known, and yet, the crawl says this match is “yet to be played”.  It seems such an incongruity to have good tennis coverage at all hours of the night, and then to have the crawl be out-of-date.  It seems like they could hire a team of 3-4 people that double-check each other’s work and keep it up-to-date (no more than 1-2 hours out of date) for the amount of money it takes to hire one celebrity pro to do commentary for a Slam.

Anyway, Tennis Channel continues to improve so hopefully, they’ll address the issue with the news crawl.  (To be fair, they seem to use a different quality crawl for their HD broadcasts vs their standard-def news crawl).