The fine folks at StreamingMedia.com have an article I wrote late last night, after the Super Bowl ended, about the failure of large-scale streaming for those trying to watch the big game on their desktop or laptop computers.
It's touched a nerve, apparently, and the article has rocketed to the top of the most popular list on this Monday morning after the game. Some commenters are expressing embarrassment over having tried to show their friends the alternate angles offered by the online stream—that is, if you didn't mind waiting a full minute after the game play to actually view the "live" stream.
Something's gotta get better in this whole live streaming scenario...
[Update: The New York Times' Media Decoder blog from Brian Stetler quotes a bit from—and links to— the StreamingMedia.com article.
Stetler notes that NBC is blaming low-quality streams on last-mile issues or "connection issues" as Kevin Monaghan, managing director of digital media for the NBC Sports Group, calls them. It's disingenuous for NBC to blame last mile issues when a) much higher-quality live content was also delivered across the same networks during our testing and b) there are many consistencies in the overall problems that viewers have commented on—from variable lag times to consistent poor quality at the height of the game's key moment, one of which Monaghan mentions.
It's as if, in the early days of TV, the broadcast engineer says "hey, the signal looked good when it left our building" and it's a reminder that we're in the early days of large, live events—enough so that we can all "blame it on the blockbuster" if the event has problems.
We look forward to eventually seeing the numbers from NBC Sports, which we suspect will show that the adaptive bitrate worked but only if measured by the fact that the number of viewers seeing sub-standard, low-bandwidth streams are considered an acceptable viewing experience.]
It's touched a nerve, apparently, and the article has rocketed to the top of the most popular list on this Monday morning after the game. Some commenters are expressing embarrassment over having tried to show their friends the alternate angles offered by the online stream—that is, if you didn't mind waiting a full minute after the game play to actually view the "live" stream.
Something's gotta get better in this whole live streaming scenario...
[Update: The New York Times' Media Decoder blog from Brian Stetler quotes a bit from—and links to— the StreamingMedia.com article.
Stetler notes that NBC is blaming low-quality streams on last-mile issues or "connection issues" as Kevin Monaghan, managing director of digital media for the NBC Sports Group, calls them. It's disingenuous for NBC to blame last mile issues when a) much higher-quality live content was also delivered across the same networks during our testing and b) there are many consistencies in the overall problems that viewers have commented on—from variable lag times to consistent poor quality at the height of the game's key moment, one of which Monaghan mentions.
It's as if, in the early days of TV, the broadcast engineer says "hey, the signal looked good when it left our building" and it's a reminder that we're in the early days of large, live events—enough so that we can all "blame it on the blockbuster" if the event has problems.
We look forward to eventually seeing the numbers from NBC Sports, which we suspect will show that the adaptive bitrate worked but only if measured by the fact that the number of viewers seeing sub-standard, low-bandwidth streams are considered an acceptable viewing experience.]
