As more sports appear on streaming, fans are throwing a penalty flag.
According to a survey conducted by YouGov for video provider Phenix, 72% said they expect bad service during live games.
The Phenix Sports Report found 64% expect buffering issues, 42% expect delays, 32% expect poor picture quality and 30% expect loss of service.
As a result, 63% of sports watchers said they were reluctant to sign up or re-subscribe to live sportstreaming platforms in 2018, with 34% saying they would think about cancelling their service because of the poor experience.
Their concerns including feeling like they were wasting money when service fails, missing key plays or finding results of plays from out sources while waiting for their streaming service to catch up. The survey found that 36% expect issues when the stream the Super Bowl in February.
It’s apparent the ‘live’ streaming industry is fundamentally broken and latency issues are becoming a big, loud problem,” said Jed Corenthal, CMO of Phenix,
“Sports fans aren’t going to stand for this and have the potential to be the primary voices calling for the industry to rethink what it means to truly deliver a game in real-time. They’re considering cancelling their subscriptions or just not signing up for new ones at all next year. Hopefully, these findings will serve as a wake-up call that finally convinces streaming platforms to solve the latency issues plaguing the market,” Corenthal said.
The survey found that fan s also recognized some advantages to streaming games, including being able to get more stats and information, being able to watch more than one game on different devices, watching in virtual reality and getting additional information from cameras in locker rooms, sidelines and coaches’ press conferences.
“With so many major sporting events coming up in early 2018 – the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the World Cup – there’s incredible opportunity for franchises, broadcasters and streaming platforms to finally get the live stream right,” Corenthal said.
