Las Blancas And The Broadcast They Shared

It’s Saturday morning. CD Tacon/Real Madrid Femenino have their first ever home match. I have my coffee ready, and my breakfast is made.

I sat down on my couch, turned on my AppleTV, opened my Real Madrid app to RMTV and found…a replay of a 2002 match against Bayer Leverkeusen.

I double checked the time, I was a few minutes early so I figured the replay wouldn’t be the full match, right?

Wrong.

So I went over to Twitter to see if there was a livestream, and there was! However, it was being aired on a split-screen with the Juvenil A game that was happening at the same time. That wouldn’t have been too much of an issue if they hadn’t been switching back and forth between the commentators for the games.

Thankfully, one of our Twitter followers stepped in with the Facebook page recommendation that saved the day (seriously, hats off to @RM_CDTacon for the link!). There was no commentary, but at least it was a dedicated stream that worked well for the majority of the game. It took 17 minutes to get the game up on my TV, but thankfully I didn’t miss anything major (pro-tip: if you have an AppleTV, get the Facebook Watch app and you can stream any videos you want to your AppleTV from the accounts that show up in the “Watch” section of the website).

This is definitely an issue that Real Madrid TV needs to get worked out. If you’re going to advertise the game as being shown on RMTV, then that’s where it needs to be without having to split the screen with a coinciding game. I understand that not everyone wants to watch the women play, but at the same time, not everyone wants to watch the replay of old matches (at least not when there are live games on) or have to squint at one side of their screen to see what’s going on in the game. Like I said earlier, this is their first ever home match – shouldn’t that carry some weight to it?

I have a bit of a bone to pick with the app developers. If I want to access the Spanish language channel of RMTV (which is where the split-screen of the Tacon and Juvenil A games were being shown, as it turned out) on my iPhone app, I have to change the language in the app settings. If I want to access that channel on my AppleTV version of the app, I have to change the language of my AppleTV. Free* content should not be this difficult to access (*Real Madrid Pass on AppleTV costs $1.99 a month to access).

My suggestion is this: build out the RMTV section of the app to look a little more like the BeIN Sports Connect app. Within BeIN’s app, you have access to eight different channels: its main channel, the channel in Spanish, La Liga TV, and then the remaining five channels for whatever they’re up for broadcasting.

This is absolutely a model that RMTV should follow — at least five channels dedicated to all things Real Madrid:

• A channel for the men’s team, think training sessions, interviews, highlights, Ramos’ Amazon documentary, etc. (I doubt they could broadcast actual live games due to existing contracts and the money in those contracts).
• A second channel for the women’s team where we can watch games, maybe a training session or two.
• A third channel dedicated to Castilla.
• And a fourth (possible fifth) dedicated to the Academy kids.
• Maybe even a sixth specifically set aside for replaying old matches.
• They can even throw in some extra channels for the different specials, documentaries, and shorts they produce within the organization.

Regardless of how they orchestrate the channels, it makes sense to have all of the teams and the media department available on separate channels instead of everyone vying for minutes on the same stream.

If you missed the first home game, here are the highlights:

The full match is available here.