A few days before Super Bowl XLIX, NBC announced its plan to offer 11 hours of live streaming online coverage, including the entirety of the game. While this seemed like good news for cord-cutters who hoped to catch the game, the broadcast itself was plagued with troubles. A record-setting audience dealt with significant lag and a live scoreboard that spoiled scoring plays before they happened.
First and foremost: NBC’s online coverage of the Big Game was watched by a lot of people. It reached its peak right as New England Patriots’ cornerback Malcolm Butler sealed the victory with a shocking, unexpected interception. At that moment, more than 1.3 million unique viewers were tuned into the live stream. That is a higher concurrent viewership than any other Super Bowl stream, beating out the 1.1 million unique viewers who made up FOX’s peak viewership during last year’s Super Bowl.
CBS and FOX may not be able to claim any more Super Bowl viewership records, but they can still say their online streams passed mostly without incident. NBC’s, on the other hand, left its viewers several seconds behind television broadcasts. AdAge dubbed the result a “meaningful time delay
,” while Slate writer Will Oremus claimed that, “without exception, everyone I talked to who watched the NBC version online complained of a significant lag.” Because of this delay, online viewers risked learning about big plays (whether from noisy neighbors or Twitter) before watching them.Oremus also noted how even the most careful online viewers could not avoid spoilers. NBC’s Sports Live Extra site showed the game score above its video player, and that widget updated live, thus alerting online viewers to scoring plays ahead of their laggy streams.
These issues aren’t backbreaking, and there are far worse problems NBC could’ve had than a laggy stream. At the same time, the online coverage was meant as a way for NBC to “help raise overall awareness of TV Everywhere,” and it didn’t end up serving as the strongest endorsement. Plus, NBC has a history of spoiling the sporting events it is live streaming, so it should probably work on that before the 2016 Summer Olympics roll around.
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