The future of TV is streaming; there’s no way around it. Which is fine, mostly. But for sports fans like me, the streaming future is so, so bleak. Even though the broadcasts themselves are good (mostly; Apple’s MLS broadcasts are excellent), access to coverage and games has its problems.
Take, for example, Thursday night’s Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Lakers game in San Francisco, which was streamed on Amazon. The Warriors’ home arena, Chase Center, plays the home games on giant screens near the arena entrances. Usually, the games play without a hitch because it’s the local broadcast. But since it was on Amazon, Chase Center played the Amazon stream. And during the game, this happened, as documented by Markus Boucher of local sports talk radio station KNBR:
The game started sometime after 7 p.m. Pacific, and Boucher’s post was 38 minutes after the top of the hour, which means that the game was disrupted sometime during the first quarter or near the beginning of the second, assuming that the post was made soon after the installation was triggered. So it’s possible this took place during a commercial break. But still they probably should have waited until the game was over.
However, as Apple TV owners know, the Apple TV itself won’t disrupt a show to automatically install an OS update. So this means that someone on the Chase Center staff decided to run the update in the middle of the game. The IT person who made this decision needs better awareness, but if this were a cable or satellite TV broadcast, there wouldn’t be an opportunity for this to happen in the first place.
Turned out that the only thing Warriors fans were missing was a beatdown by their Southern Californian rivals. After a breakaway LeBron James dunk in the third quarter, I decided enough was enough and watched Japanese Salaryman YouTube videos instead. Had the game been on our local cable broadcast instead, I probably would’ve channel surfed and checked in on the game from time to time instead of abandoning it completely. But after seeing the final score, it’s just as well.
