YouTube TV’s New NFL Sunday Ticket Stream Off To A Rocky Start

Cord-cutting, referred to as some sort of myth for many years, is now an obvious trend. And as I have personally claimed for years now, the last thread that is keeping the cable business in a state that's anything remotely like its heyday is live sports broadcasts. In the past several years, however, more and more sports are being streamed across more and more services. Perhaps the most prominent of them is YouTube TV, which is as close a proximation of what you get with cable television as I've seen. The problem is that, while cable tv has had broadcast flubs with live sports in the past, streaming live sports brings with it new and perilous opportunities for failure. We saw an example of this with the World Cup several years ago, in which a semifinal match suffered from a YouTube TV outage that absolutely enraged fans. More recently, in an NBA playoff game earlier this year, the stream cut out and was replaced by a commercial for the forthcoming The Little Mermaid Disney movie on a loop. For a still young streaming service looking to drive up adoption rates, these experiences are what puts the brakes on YouTube TV gaining more customers who are live sports fans.

And unfortunately, it keeps happening. No, it isn't some massive widespread thing, but YouTube TV took over the NFL's Sunday Ticket rights from DirecTV this year, and it certainly isn't going off flawlessly.

WhenYouTube TV took over NFL Sunday Ticket, the key was ensuring that the experience was as good as it had been on DirecTV for the previous 29 years. For its initial seven Sundays, that was the case. But YouTube TV fumbled the ball this Sunday.

Users across social media reported suffering lag and long, repetitive buffering sessions with the streams throughout the day. There were nine NFL games playing on NFL Sunday Ticket yesterday. According toThe Washington Post, subscribers were having problems well into the second half of games."

YouTube acknowledged the problems via its TeamYouTube Xaccount, saying, If you're experiencing buffering issues on YouTube our team is aware and working on a fix. YouTube TV or NFL Sunday Ticket may also be impacted. we'll follow-up here once this has been resolved." However, the social media account hasn't provided an update as of this writing.

Ah, the dreaded buffering." Issues like this are exactly what the cable companies and their apologists warned the public about to try to keep them from switching to streaming services like this. And while the service by and large performs quite well, again, you have to keep in mind that live sports streaming, where delays and outages are a much bigger deal compared with watching traditional shows, is of paramount importance to peeling the remaining cable subscribers away from those services.

So too is the lack of communication from YouTube's support channels. When people are unable to watch their team or their favorite sport and go looking for explanations only to be met with relative silence, it becomes real easy for those customers to think, Oh, I get it, you're just another Comcast that doesn't really care about me or the service you provide." And any time you're being compared with Comcast, that isn't a good look.

Hell, even players in the NFL have had shade to throw YouTube's way due to this.

But that doesn't provide much comfort to subscribers who look forward to Sunday football all week long. And it didn't seem to console Buffalo Bills' DaQuan Jones. As spotted byThe Verge,hetweetedSunday (he wasn't playing):

You pay all this money for streaming services... just so they don't work on the days you actually need them."

Despite all of this, we're still in a when not if" scenario when it comes to streaming services being in the same dominant position cable companies were a decade ago. How quickly we get there, however, depends in part on those streaming services getting it right with live sports. Whether you care about sports or not, it really is that important.