Streaming services are spoiling [live sports on TV]

https://www.theverge.com/24070601/super-bowl-streaming-delay-spoilers

by mikece • 2 years ago

1 3 2 years ago

mikece• 2 years ago

TL;DR: stream lag "ruins" watching the game. Maybe if you were in Kansas City and people start setting off fireworks before the critical play being celebrated showed up on the stream or -- like in my house -- my wife decided to go "quietly watch" on her phone but the screaming from my kids and me pretty much gave away that something big was about to happen.

But is that "ruining" the experience? I would argue that it allows for meaningful multi-tasking. I've watched college basketball games on ESPN+ while listening to the radio broadcast which is about 45 seconds ahead of the stream and this allows me to work on other things while listening and when something big happens I can see/relive in real time what just happened by watching the stream. In those cases streaming IMPROVES the viewing experience because I can be somewhat productive instead of being completely locked on the video/TV or miss seeing big plays.

veunes• 2 years ago

I think it depends on what kind of football watcher (if I can say like that) you are. For me it does not matter, I just want to be able to peacefully watch the game using cable or streaming platform... It does not matter for me

ericfrederich• 2 years ago

I came on here looking for an article about all of the network issues last night streaming the game. Couldn't find one so I'll rant here in the comments ;-).

In my neighborhood we have 3 ISPs but one is only just recently available (Google Fiber) so there's not many on it as we already have Spectrum and AT&T fiber available. Lots of people complaining across different streaming services (YouTube TV, Hulu, Paramount+, etc) and also across different internet providers (Spectrum and AT&T... just 1 data point for Google Fiber). Lots of buffering, scaling down to extremely low bitrates where you couldn't even make out how many timeouts were left and could barely make out the score.

Sending each customer their own bespoke video stream works fine for movies and shows, but apparently works terribly for popular live events.

Some sort of multicast solution would fix this... but then theres DRM.

Streaming services are spoiling [live sports on TV]

Related Stories