Millions more people will watch at home and in bars, potentially up to one minute after the thousands of football enthusiasts who pack stadiums throughout America to see the first Sunday of NFL play.
The most devoted football fans have been using the “Sunday Ticket” satellite subscription for nearly three decades to watch games that aren’t televised on standard TV via national broadcast or local affiliates.
These fans will now have to view out-of-market games, which can have multi-second delays after the NFL sold the package’s rights to YouTube for $2 billion a year at the end of last year.
This is due to the fact that digitally transmitted images and audio can take longer to arrive on computer screens than those sent almost instantly by cable or satellite.
According to Jed Corenthal, chief marketing officer of the Chicago-based company Phenix, certain streaming users may encounter delays of up to a minute.
I anticipate some problems for folks, he remarked. “Due to the latency, some people will be dissatisfied. Unfortunately, I’m confident in that assertion.
According to a yearly study by Phenix of the delay between real-time action of the NFL title game versus streaming, viewers of the Super Bowl earlier this year on one of six top digital providers saw the big plays between 23 and 76 seconds after spectators in the stands did.
Google, the firm that owns YouTube, stated in a statement that it is confident about its infrastructure for Sunday and invited its viewers to tune into a tool called “Stats for Nerds,” which analyzes raw statistics on latency and bandwidth.
The infrastructure that supports YouTube and reliably handles billions of playback requests each day is the foundation of YouTube TV, according to the business. “The YouTube TV team is constructing a top-notch Sunday Ticket experience,” said the spokesperson.
However, a representative declined to address any latency problems with “Sunday Ticket.”
According to experts who spoke with NBC News, the delay “Sunday Ticket” users will experience on Sunday is an unavoidable consequence of the state of technology at the time.
A content delivery network (CDN) disassembles bundles of images and sounds before reassembling them for the video that is provided to viewers of streaming services. Delays in comparison to cable or satellite are unavoidably caused by these extra stages.
According to Syracuse University’s Biao Chen, an electrical engineering and computer science professor, “Think of cable as sending all pieces in one truck while streaming needs to send different pieces through various delivery trucks.”
Professor of media technology and design at the College of Engineering at the University of Missouri, Chip Gubera, compared streaming to a trick play in football when the ball is passed over sideways or backward before advancing forward.
Gubera said, “There are more players touching the ball.”
If viewers of traditional TV or streaming content observed the event and reacted with almost the same delay, latency problems would not be an issue.
However, practically all live human engagement in the present era of two screens involves someone tweeting or messaging about an occurrence in real-time.
Delays of even a few seconds can be important for football fans who are riveted to the ongoing social media conversation while also viewing the Sunday action on streaming sites.
When Corenthal tweets about a touchdown that you haven’t yet witnessed, he says, “I think an average fan will understand this.” “More and more people are griping and understanding what all of these delays mean.”
Insider Intelligence media analyst Paul Verna recalls cutting the cord in 2018 and watching the ball drop on his streaming gadget. Even though he was aware that there would be a delay, he was nevertheless surprised when 2019 showed up late.
Verna stated, “I’m watching the ball drop on (streaming) TV as well as I’m looking at the time and it’s already past midnight, much past midnight, and the ball hasn’t fallen yet. Wow, it has been 45 seconds since folks rang in the new year.
He anticipates that some NFL supporters will have the same emotions as he did on January 1st, 2019 on Sunday.
Verna predicted that some individuals “will be shocked.” Some people will encounter this for the first time, while others, like me, who already knew it would occur, will encounter it in a manner that is unfamiliar to them and will find it odd.
Gubera, a Mizzou student, expressed confidence that YouTube will offer a less clumsy product on Sunday.
“They understand it. The infrastructure is there, he added. I believe they will succeed using what they already have while operating at full capacity.
While the professor refrained from making a prediction about how much behind the action YouTube will be on Sunday, it best not be much more than 10 seconds behind cable.
He posed the rhetorical question, “How long would it take to write out a Tweet and send it?” “Five seconds, ten seconds? When I receive the data from the second display before I can see it with my own eyes, that is when it becomes a problem.