Off The Pond’s Guide to Watching OSN Games in 2010

TV, laptop and HDMI cable. Three essential ingredients to watching OSN games without Comcast.

It’s 2010 which by my understanding of calendars is the most modern year yet. But when it comes to watching Duck football, we seem to be going backwards.

Three seasons ago, I could pay money via ESPN GamePlan and watch the Ducks play games that were otherwise only being broadcast in Oregon.

Then the infamous Comcast deal happened and a total of 8 people are now able to watch games broadcast by the Oregon Sports Network (give or take a few).

So if you’re among the many without access to the game on TV, here’s a guide to watching at home. If this fails, try a watch party in your area.

The first thing you need to do is get access to live games through OZone on goducks.com.

1. Go to goducks.com. It’s not an easy site to navigate, but they’ve added a banner just below the menu to watch live on OZone. Click that banner or click here for a direct link.
2. Sign up for an OZone subscription. It’s $12.95 for 1 month and that will get you both the New Mexico and Portland State games (nothing says degenerate Oregon fan like watching them play Portland State on the OZone…self included).

You can now watch the game online, but why stop there? Let’s put this thing up on the big screen.

1. Take your laptop, drop it in front of that slick 60″ HDTV you bought and get ready for a decidedly low-def experience.
2. Take an HDMI cable and connect it from your laptop to an HDMI in port on your TV.
3. Change the input source to HDMI and you should see a screen of your laptop on the TV.

But what about the audio? How does that work? I can only speak for the Windows crowd. I haven’t done this on a Mac yet.

1. Right click the sound icon in your system tray and choose Playback Devices. You should have an HDMI option.
2. Highlight HDMI and then click Set Default. This changes your system so that it outputs audio through the HDMI cable to the TV instead of using your laptop speakers. Do this before loading the game on OZone or the sound won’t work.
3. Click ok

Let’s put it altogether, shall we?

1. Log in to the Ozone player at goducks.com (there’s a login section about midway down the home page).
2. Choose Live Events
3. Once the broadcast is active, there will be a link to start the game.
4. Once the player loads, you can expand it to full screen and you’re watching football!

Note: If you have a surround sound system, there are ways to plug in to that as well so you don’t have to use the audio through the TV (let’s face it, we all want to hear Joe G. at his best). Personally, I use a bluetooth connection for audio.

Note again: If you don’t have an HDMI connection on your laptop, you can use a VGA cable. Modern TVs should have this type of connection. It won’t handle the audio, but you can probably do that by using the line out jack on your laptop. Worst case scenario, you can pump up the volume on your laptop.

UPDATE: It looks like you Southern Oregonians have joined the TV party. Congrats.