Amazon Prime Broadcast Fails Completely During Several Minutes Of NBA Playoff Game
from the prime-time dept
With the streaming world turning into a wild, chaotic, fractured mess, there is no better example of how terrible this can all be than with live sports. We’ve already seen all kinds of issues among streaming services when it comes to sports. Buffering live games piss people off. Exclusivity deals worked out among several services for a single league can make finding where a game is being showed a Sherlock-ian experience. Local blackout rules abound and suck for the consumer.
But if there is one thing a streaming service cannot do, it’s got to be buying the exclusive rights to important games and then throwing “technical difficulties” at the viewer. And that’s exactly what happened during part of an overtime period in an NBA playoff game between the Hornets and the Heat. For several minutes at the start of the overtime period, the stream simply cut out.
As reported by ESPN, Prime Video started showing a message that read “technical difficulties” seconds after cutting off the game’s commentator in the middle of a sentence. Viewers missed a Hornets possession that included a score by LaMelo Ball. By the time the stream came back online, 22.1 seconds of playing time had passed, per ESPN, and viewers were dismayed.
“Tell me the game didn’t just cut off?!!? Am I trippin?? WTH,” LeBron James, a Los Angeles Lakers player who previously won two championships with the Heat, said, adding a face-planting emoji, on X.
Prime Video’s fumble is made worse by the fact that the streaming service had exclusive rights to air the game. The only other way to experience the game was in person or by listening to select radio stations.
Imagine someone signed up for Prime because of this deal with the NBA. Sure, that isn’t going to be a huge percentage of the viewership, but it won’t be zero percent of it, either. To have the stream cut out in the opening minutes of overtime is going to be incredibly frustrating.
It’s also worth noting that more traditional broadcasts also have had equipment failures, but they don’t have the resources Amazon has. And, frankly, Amazon’s streaming service doesn’t have the best reputation to begin with.
The latter point is especially concerning because, after four years of this, viewers are still complaining about audio-syncing problems on Prime Video this season. We’ve experienced this firsthand at Ars Technica and have heard commentators announce a completed three-point shot before the stream shows it happening.
“The entire year the audio has been a split second ahead of the video on half of the Amazon games we’ve watched,” Bill Simmons, a former sportswriter and current host of The Bill Simmons Podcast, said in today’s episode: “The three-pointer’s halfway toward the basket. It’s like, ‘BANG! It’s good!’ And you hear the crowd, and it’s, like, the ball hasn’t even gone in yet. How have we not figured this out yet? You guys, [Amazon], have 8 kajillion dollars.”
At some point, the NBA itself is going to have to step in here, because its reputation is going to take a hit along with Amazon’s. The league risks alienating fans that are pissed off that the league foisted broadcast partners that apparently can’t deliver a product of the quality of cable TV, of all entities. And I refuse to believe that these streaming contracts don’t come with contractual requirements for quality of service.
Streaming is both the present and the future. It isn’t going away. Neither are live sports. This has to be figured out and delivered in a way that fans don’t completely miss important parts of games. The alternative is lost fans for the leagues and I can promise you that won’t be stood for.
Filed Under: amazon prime, basketball, live sports, streaming, technical difficulties
Companies: amazon, nba
Comments on “Amazon Prime Broadcast Fails Completely During Several Minutes Of NBA Playoff Game”
Yes, because no live airwave broadcast has failed ever.
I am totally open to balkanization claims, and how streaming isn’t covered by antitrust exemptions, etc.
But “oh no, they had technical difficulties” is not a real comment of any substance.
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They always have technical difficulties, and they were given a total monopoly.
Whatever dude.
(Disclosure: Things like pro sports and streaming can die in a fucking fire for all i care.)
Think of the opportunities!
This begs for a modern remake of “The Sting” where the purported betting heist was based on horse racing bets being manipulated by getting ahead of buffering.
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Although it’s important to avoid buffer-bloat and pauses for re-buffering, buffering in general is absolutely essential to modern networking. Sure, there’s cut-through switching, but there’s basically zero chance that literally every router along the data path can accomplish it for every packet. So-called “live” television hasn’t been truly live anyway for some decades, which is easily seen when the New Year’s Eve ball drops at like 00:00:05; even my elderly relatives have been noticing that their phones (with accurate network-based time) show it several seconds earlier.
If a user somehow managed to disable video-stream buffering on their own end, they’d be really pissed off from the constant freezing and skipping. This can be verified by using a video player such as mpv, that allows buffering parameters to be adjusted and can show the buffer-fill in real time.
Re: Re: Multicast distribution
You make the case for some sort of Internet scale multicast distribution. Instead of millions of unicast connections to a CDN, multicast feeds are accessed and the routers and switches forward them to every interface requesting it, so instead of handling the aggregate of all the viewers at the top level, you are only serving one stream out at each bitrate.
IPv6 certainly has the structure for it, it’s just a matter of coming up with the best way of implementing it at a scale beyond local and metro area networks.
Re: Re: Re:
I think cable operators with video-over-IP have used multicast. There’s still buffering, of course. And if a packet gets dropped, there needs to be some way to get the missing data before the end-user buffer runs out. To mostly or entirely avoid buffering and packet loss, we’d probably need some kind of virtual circuit-switching using isochronous timeslot reservation (USB, ATM, DOCSIS, and anything with TDMA provide enough support for doing this over individual links, but it’d need to be extended across the whole network).
If the likes of Amazon and Netflix expected multicast to save them a ton of money or to operate much better, they’d be doing it—or, at the very least, presenting research papers at NANOG and IETF meetings. But their architectures look a lot like multicast already: they have caches in major ISPs and IXPs, such that the data only needs to be transmitted into the cache once. They’re already not “handling the aggregate of all the viewers at the top level”.
I don’t expect there’s much demand to get the remaining few seconds of latency shaved down. Among all the bitching about rising streaming costs, would you pay an extra couple dollars a month to see the ball drop exactly at midnight? (Keep in mind that if you say “yes”, they could just collect your extra money and move the real-world ball drop to 23:59:55, hoping that the people at the event will be too inebriated to care. And your television would probably still add at least 16 ms of latency.)
Amazon should really AI-generate the missing bits just to piss off even more subscribers.
TRWTF is LeBron is posting on X.
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lol yeah fuck that guy. Who knows.
Thursday night game
Candace, if you want to be a ref then be one. Otherwise shut the eff up about fouls. “I don’t know” in single song doesn’t make your opinion any more relevant. Do better!!!!