Pay-per-view streaming returned to the world of curling last week — with a twist.

The World Mixed Doubles Championships in Geneva once again saw World Curling Television use the Recast (recast.app) service, which charges £0.50 per match. This is the same service that was used at the Olympic Qualifying Event and European Championships earlier this season (which prompted the column below), as well as the recent men’s and women’s worlds.

Regional blackouts were applied (for example, any game shown on TSN was not available in Canada on Recast), but there were at least two matches per draw that were given the full broadcast experience—with on-site commentary, multiple cameras and production, and so on.

Now for the twist. If your favourite team didn’t make the cut for coverage, the WCF added a “light coverage” option to the three other matches that weren’t given the full treatment. Light coverage consisted of two stationary cameras pointed at the two houses in a split-screen presentation, and the action was shown without commentary, replays or alternate angles.

Scores of the other four sheets ran along the bottom of the viewer’s screen.

The audio wasn’t great, as the players’ microphones weren’t on and they had a microphone picking up ambient noise near the ice (and the microphone for sheets A and B must have been near the ventilation system or something, because there was a lot of white noise going on there).

This light coverage costs £0.25; half as much as the matches with commentary, bells and whistles.

While the level of coverage matches that of a curling club dabbling in streaming league play league to YouTube, at least it gives the option to be able to follow any game, which is a vastly superior experience than waiting for line scores to update after each end. We’ll probably never see four or five fully-produced games at once — other than at the Olympics — so this light coverage, which has been requested on many a curling chat group over the years, is a fine compromise.

While cable TV sports coverage isn’t going away, internet streaming is on the rise and will only get more commonplace. I know most will grumble about having to pay to watch a match, but these are essentially micro-transactions, and compared to what you have to pay to subscribe to a cable channel—either directly or through a cable subscription—this doesn’t break the bank.

So, the question that I asked back in December remains… how much is broadcast curling worth to you?