Being a NASCAR fan, I opted to sign up for a trial period of the NASCAR.com Trackpass Race View package.  It's a package that lets you see a computer generated view of the race from any angle, of any driver/car (you see the car, not the driver), etc.

There are a few other options available too, including their Pit Command type option that lets you listen to driver to crew communication and more.

All of these things are also available to a limited extent to customers of DirecTV via DirecTV's interesting and fairly well done NASCAR Hot Pass package.  I actually subscribe to that package and enjoy it, though I wish that they'd make room for and broadcast about 2 - 4 more drivers per week in the package rather than just limiting things to 4 drivers.  They complain about production costs keeping things limited, plus bandwidth limitations and such, but I've suggested in the recent past that they could address some of the problems by airing different drivers on the standard definition channels than they air on the hi-def channels.  That gets back another of those "our production costs are too high..." discussion/replies that goes on to tell myself and others that have made suggestions about the package that it costs them a lot of money to employ some idiot former racer or current driver that couldn't make the cut for the weekend to be the broadcast crew that will talk about the driver that I want to watch racing.

Personally I could do without any 'team announcers' and would rather just hear the network broadcast or just driver to crew communication while I watch.  DirecTV does make that possible (you can select team only audio if you want), but yet they continue to pay people to serve as announcers when I'd hazzard a guess that most viewers never even bother listening to them saying a word.

Anyway, the DirecTV package is pretty nice and begrudgingly I'd even say it's fairly reasonably priced though I wish it included a free subscription to one of the NASCAR.com packages that would at least let subscribers that are stuck in the office or away from home get the radio broadcast over the internet.  Even if you had to pay a small fee and got a nice discount on the NASCAR.com packages, it would be an added bonus to the DirecTV Hot Pass package and help promote NASCAR's offering.  Besides, in either package NASCAR gets revenue and they help get more awareness for their sponsors and such, so one might think that NASCAR would want to work with DirecTV a bit more to offer up other ways to enjoy the broadcasts to subscribers of either the NASCAR.com package or the DirecTV Hot Pass package.

Since NASCAR.com offers up a trial period, I opted to sign up for a 14 day free trial.  No problem at all in signing up, and no real problems in trying to use the features of the Race View option (the option that lets you follow any car on the track), or at least no problems in starting to use those features.  Unfortunately being able to use the features for a complete race was problematic and just plain didn't work right.  After approximately 30 laps (give or take) the video/viewer would just quit working and then wouldn't come back or would necessitate a shutdown and restart of the browser and/or a possible restart of the entire computer to get things working again.  And again, after approximately 30 more laps you'd be back to the same problem.  Too much baby-sitting required, and even then no guarantees that the feature would keep going.

The radio broadcast audio would also, sadly, quit coming through during my testing/trail period usage.  Not good at all.  Basically all of the features that you're being charged for just aren't working right or at all in many cases.

So, having used the trial period to try to check out two races, I've pretty much determined that the product just isn't ready for prime time and doesn't work as advertised at this time, so it's time to cancel the service before I get charged for it.

This is where things get interesting.  You see, finding out where and how to actually cancel the service leads to a forum that is accessible at NASCAR.com where *many* irate individuals are trying to get the service cancelled and are warning people away from trying the service at all.  They can't find any way to cancel the service and/or can't find a way to cancel the service short of calling a special 866 phone number.  Something that isn't possible for people that live overseas, and something that isn't nearly as convenient to do as was signing up for the trial period of the service to begin with. Uh oh!

In my case I had 'paid for' the service or requested to pay for the service via PayPal so cancelling the charge that hadn't been made yet was pretty easy.  Not super easy, but relatively easy.  Go to Paypal, find the subscription services area, kill the subscription there and no charge will be processed by Paypal.

Now, that doesn't nuke the NASCAR.com subscription, so I still had the fun of contacting the 866 phone number for NASCAR.com to get the service cancelled.  After reading through the forums at NASCAR.com and finding the number, and seeing other people's experiences described there, I knew what to expect and just had to sit patiently to wait for my call to be taken.  It really wasn't that bad, and the customer service person was nice and pleasant and happy to deal with me.  No problems at all except for finding the number to begin with, and except for having to call a phone number to get service cancelled that was started via a few mouse clicks (and should be able to be cancelled in the same manner!!!)

NASCAR does things that confound their fans, their drivers, their teams, etc., many times along the way.  This would see to be such a case.  I expect better of them, encourage them to try harder and hope they will better in the future as news spreads about how screwed up their service is and how screwed up the process of cancelling their trial period services can be.

Hopefully they'll get better over time.  Hopefully.