Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images
If you follow major league sports in the US, you know you have to sit through an astronomical number of ads.
The average NFL TV broadcast features only 11 minutes of actual game time, but a full hour of commercials. Basketball fans have to sit through 90 — yes, you read that right — 30-second ad spots for every NBA broadcast. Not even radio is safe: one analysis of MLB radio broadcasts found that the average baseball team accounts for over 28 ad breaks per game.
In fact, between the top four major sports leagues in the US, the average fan will sit through 128.5 full days of commercials in their lifetime, according to one industry estimate.
The point is, it’s a lot of ads. But now in the era of live streaming, ads aren’t just an annoyance; they’re actually causing live feeds to fall behind the real-world action.
That’s according to DJ Bean, former hockey reporter turned host of the podcast “What Chaos!” who reports that commercial breaks on the ESPN app now run much longer than ads on cable TV. That creates a problem: when the game finally resumes after the ads are finished, what you’re watching has now fallen behind what people are seeing live and on cable TV.
In other words, anyone who starts streaming the game on ESPN will soon be behind the rest of the world, even though the feed is “live.” After an hours-long broadcast, anyone streaming at home is liable to be up to three in-game minutes behind — an unforgivable amount of lag in the sports world, especially if you’ve got money riding on the game.
Bean and his co-hosts confirmed this by recording a live NHL game broadcast on the app.
“See this ad in the upper right, these things are often two-minutes plus,” Bean explains early in the hockey game, when his feed is roughly lined up with the game. When he checks back in after two periods of hockey and a deluge of ads, he’s a whopping minute and twenty seconds behind.
“Unbelievable,” he scoffs. “I’ve blown this wide open.”
“Regardless of whether it’s ineptitude or purposeful, it definitely need to be fixed,” his co-host says. “A minute and a half is f***ing ridiculous.”
When it comes to cable TV ads, most networks sell air-time as 15, 30, 45 or 60 second spots, with 30 seconds being the most popular. In the US, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) strictly regulates the timing of cable TV commercials. It’s the wild west on streaming platforms, however, because Congress hasn’t granted the FCC any authority to do the same. In effect, streaming ads can run as long as the app’s owners wish.
In a statement to sports industry publication Awful Announcing, ESPN said it’s “aware of the problem” and “looking at ways to improve the user experience.”
“On select Smart TVs, the ESPN app video player is designed to return buffering streams to the point of interruption, ensuring that viewers do not miss content due to latency issues,” the statement continues. “However, this behavior also applies to ad breaks. When the video player takes time to populate ads, or if there is buffering time between ads, this can cause users to return to live action late, which can accumulate over time.”
With hockey season well underway and basketball season tipping off soon, ESPN could be in for a rough end of the year unless it can keep up with the puck.
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