Imagine your favorite sports team is about to play a crucial game in just 30 minutes. You turn on your TV with your bowl of chips ready on the table, and relax on your couch, ready to watch when suddenly a paywall appears between you and your team — that paywall being services called Apple TV+, ESPN+, or Peacock. If you don’t pay for these services, you’re out of luck!
In recent years, sports events being exclusive on specific streaming platforms has become a regular thing. Thursday Night Football is now exclusively streamed on Amazon Prime Video, and two Major League Baseball (MLB) games are exclusively streamed on Apple TV+ every Friday. Apple TV+ also holds the rights to tons of MLS soccer games that can be watched with the MLS Season Pass.
While this seems bad, it’s not the worst thing ever. For most fans without certain streaming services, there are only about one or two games in a season they can’t watch live unless every game is specifically on one service. Plus, playoff games are mostly streamed on national channels and not exclusive to streaming, with only a few exceptions. Most sports like the MLB and National Hockey League (NHL) air playoff games on national networks like ESPN, TNT, and FOX. So, if you don’t have specific streaming services, you might miss out on a couple sporting events you may want to watch, but how bad really is this?
Recently, Netflix hosted the ambitious Mike Tyson and Jake Paul fight. An estimated 108 million people tuned in live to witness the event. During the event, viewers were bombarded with two big problems from Netflix’s livestream: frequent buffering and shaky video quality. The event definitely had some drastic streaming issues, and the video would occasionally freeze for a few minutes. A class-action lawsuit was even filed against Netflix over the poor quality of the livestream, stating “60 million Americans were hyped to see ‘Iron’ Mike Tyson, ‘The Baddest Man on the Planet’ versus Youtuber-turner-prizefighter Jake Paul. What they saw was ‘The Baddest Streaming on Planet’.”
Along with this huge event, Netflix also exclusively streamed the NFL football games on Christmas day, as well as WWE Raw’s exclusive streaming platform. With lots of more exclusive events on streaming, similar problems to the Tyson-Paul fight are bound to occur. However, does streaming have its benefits over traditional broadcasting?
More and more events are shifting over to livestreaming instead of broadcasting, which isn’t exactly a bad thing. The main difference between the two is that broadcasting can send one signal out to a large group of people who are watching at once, while streaming sends the signal to individual people. With more than 100 million viewers on Netflix at once for the fight, this caused the quality of the stream to weaken, which could have been avoided with a traditional broadcast.
However, streaming in general is better quality-wise, as most services offer a dynamic range of video quality options, and there won’t be unbearable buffering watching an episode of your favorite show unless the rest of the world is simultaneously tuning in.
Another pro of streaming is that, unlike broadcasting, livestreams are not required to start at specific times to work with other programs. They can start at any time, while broadcasting requires scheduling in advance to TV programs being cast live. Sports events are even worse since a single sports game doesn’t have a set end point. Unlike the season premiere of your favorite TV show that can be set from 7:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., a baseball game, for example, can last anywhere from two to four hours, even if the channel schedules the game from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m..
The number of people streaming live events has and will increase, and there’s no stopping it. However, streaming is, overall, the better option and will improve over time.
With paying for multiple streaming services being cheaper than your monthly cable bill, the amount of people switching to streaming is growing, and so is the number of big events being exclusive to these streaming platforms. So, if your favorite sports team is playing on a service you don’t pay for, that’s only one game you’re missing. Streaming definitely has its flaws, but it will only improve in the years to come and is overall the better option compared to traditional broadcasting.
