courtside1891.basketball

Courtside1891 is the official streaming service from FIBA, allowing me to stream pretty much every basketball game organized by FIBA. For the low, low price of €30/year, you get... ✨ frustration ✨. By far the worst streaming service I ever had the displeasure of using.

Do you think Montenegro is going to score a 3 pointer in this attack? Of course they will, the sidebar is there to ruin the suspense for you. You can't hide it, you can't resize it. You're stuck with it.

But it gets worse! There are three tabs in the sidebar:

• Highlights → They're always unavailable. None of the games I've watched had them. What's the point of having this tab at all?
• Box Score → Shows you individual player ratings. To see team ratings, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom. You can't compare the overall statistics of both teams at a glance, you have to switch between them.
• Live Games → Shows you other games that are live right now that you can switch between... but actually doing so requires 4 clicks instead of one.

Worst of all, every time a new point gets counted, the sidebar resets itself back to the (unavailable) highlights. You're in the middle of checking player stats or trying to switch between games? Oh well, too bad, here, let me show you the highlights which are never available.

Overall, the sidebar is completely useless, and I still have to rely on random shady sites affiliated with sports betting companies like livesport.com to get access to basic stats like these:

Sometimes the stream just stops in the middle of the game and redirects you to a 404 page, at which point it takes a couple of refreshes and re-finding the game on the confusing homepage to get back to the game you were watching. I had that happen in the fourth quarter of a tight game with less than a minute of game time left, making me miss the decisive shot.

The commentators mention Courtside1891 multiple times per game, telling you to scan the QR code on the screen to subscribe to Courtside1891 to watch the games... while you're on the Courtside1891 watching the game. Make it make sense.

Cancelling auto-payments or deleting your account is impossible to do within settings, you have to email them. In my case, I also had to convince them that I've used an email alias to make my account, meaning that I cannot email them from the same email address I've used to make my account.

Summary: Don't bother, pirated streams offer far better of a user experience than the official streaming service. 2/10 ranking I gave it is honestly generous.