So I spent the morning dealing with the results of a car accident (not my fault, BTW) that happened after dropping my daughter off at daycare. Once back in my office, I’ve been inundated with comments about the continued problems with Mastersgolf.ca. In fact, just minutes after coming in the door I received a call from Graham Sanborn’s office, the organization that has control of the Canadian rights to the online broadcast. Turns out G4G readers are bang on — this isn’t working. In fact right now it says “server too busy.”
The person at Mastersgolf.ca said the problem was international in nature — but the truth is that the site I suggested yesterday — AT&T Blue Room — is working just fine for me. So who knows what to believe — just try the alternative folks and forget about the Canadian feed for the time being. It isn’t working — and who knows if they’ll get it to work.
The Globe’s William Houston mentioned the problems with Mastersgolf.ca in his column this morning:
The only outlet providing live Masters coverage before 4 p.m. EDT yesterday was Mastersgolf.ca, a website launched just a few days ago by the tournament’s Canadian representative, Graham Sanborn Media.
In the first hour, the streaming channel received 200,000 hits and crashed.
Graham Sanborn had anticipated perhaps 250,000 hits over four days.
“It was a case of taking the good with the bad,” said Mark Zecchino, an executive with Graham Sanborn and a former PGA professional. “It was, like, oh, my god, what a success. And, oh, my god, we’ve got a problem.”
The problem was, the bandwidth couldn’t handle the traffic. “The bandwidth came out of the U.S. and it didn’t come in the size that was expected,” Zecchino said. “I don’t know why.”
After an absence of about two hours, the live streaming of Amen Corner and the 15th and 16th holes resumed in the afternoon with a temporary signal, but the picture quality was weak.
Well it has gone from weak to nonexistent. Is that an improvement? I wonder if Acura and Titleist — the two big sponsors of the Mastersgolf.ca site — are paying attention.
Update: The Mastersgolf.ca site worked for me for the first time just a few minutes ago (about 1:45 pm)
A bestselling author and award-winning columnist, Robert Thompson has been writing about business and sports, and particularly golf, for almost two decades. His reporting and commentary on golf has appeared in 
can’t get the blue room to work with Mac.
weak.