14 DAY TRIAL // The Sport Of The World
What can I say? I'm an avid football fan (European football). I also enjoy getting to see highlights and scores and plays-of-the-day. I thought that a program like Goal TV Videostar would encapsulate all my desires into one thing, a nice, enjoyable, live-feed and score tracker of some football games that are currently playing. Yet, I was sadly disappointed by Goal TV Videostar's lack of effort.
Although this will technically be under reviews, I'll point out before hand that this will be me mostly griping and complaining about the trouble I had with the program, its pointlessness, and reasons why you really don't need to have it.
My time with Goal TV Videostar
Starting out with the program went quite well. It was an easy unzip and install and I was off and running? Or so I thought. Well, I started up the program and it took a little time to get going, but when it did, I was eagerly anticipating live scores and some nifty scouting reports, instead, all I got was disappointment and frustration.
The program itself is designed to accumulate live feeds and score from several different Web sites and give you the opportunity to go to each one and view what's on that page. It surrounds the page with football game updates so you can see who's already played and who hasn't. On top it gives you links to some different Web Sites like Freeonline, Livescore, Telecomandi, TBW Sport, a Chat site (that didn't work for me), Sky Sport, X Scores and Active Scores. Sounds good right? Well, here's where I realized that I should have been using something else.
Unlike 'OnCourt' where it gives you feeds and stats, this program does nothing of the sort. It directly links their program to other websites where you get to browse the net through their interface (which is horrid). Usually, you can choose your Web browser, but with Goal TV, you're made to look at everything through a screen that's a quarter the size of your screen without the ability to resize or reshape or go back and forth (unless you know the hotkeys).
Not only that, but the program itself is supposed to run on fullscreen for some reason. I don't know why this is necessary. If I had an 800 X 600 screen resolution that would be great, but I don't, so it seems as though there's a third of my screen that's just pure black.
If you don't necessarily want to run it in full screen, just click on any of the surrounding games that are continually being updated on the side and it will bring up a smaller window. This smaller windows pane scrolls through the games that have been played. Honestly, I had no clue what I was looking at; there was no date, no time, only the names and the scores.
Now let's get into the amount of system resources that this program took up. Goal TV had an average of about 60%-80% of my CPU usage while using up about 40MB of RAM. My computer was sad.
I was a bit hesitant on the install when I read that there could be the possibility that Goal TV might not give out the correct scores; "ITALSAT will put maximum effort to ensure results are always correctly updated and in no case should ITALSAT be considered responsible for damage derived by incorrect data." Instead, I brushed this aside since I figured that I should give it the benefit of the doubt, boy was I wrong.
This program had no options where I could change the window size, or which games I'd like to be viewed. I had no way of really controlling it or the resources that it was using from my machine. I would have liked to see some general options. Ok, so all you do is link to other websites and show football scores, but where are my options? Where can I set which games I want to appear on the smaller window? Where are some other fields I can fill in? This program definitely needs a lot of work and better programming. There's absolutely no reason why my computer usage should skyrocket to 100% while I have Goal TV Videostar running.
The Good
It gives you great links to some good football sites. You can also use this program to check those links out.
The Bad
I think I've pretty much wrapped up what I had to say about the bad part of this program. It should improve on the interface dramatically. It should also give me a reason for why I want to use it rather than the links that it supplies me with.
The Truth
I don't see any reason why you can't go to those links offered instead of using this program. It fills up your screen pointlessly, it runs your CPU usage to ungodly extremes and it really offers nothing that it's made itself. This is more a combination of websites in a funky viewer than anything else. I suggest you pass.
Check out some pictures below.
