Fortunately, we’re not all losing our minds…
Last Friday night, I thought I was in an episode of The Twilight Zone.
I wasn’t seeing a gremlin on the wing of an airplane or getting harassed by a talking ventriloquist dummy (thank god), but I did get a notification on my watch of the final score of the Flyers-Hurricanes game that I was watching…a full minute before the live broadcast concluded.
Submitted for your approval: a simple, handsome man in the suburbs of a central Floridian city. He’s a simple man who lets a crappy hockey team dictate his moods 82 times a year plus playoffs… just kidding; they don’t make the playoffs…
Of course, I assumed that this had to do with a typical delay, but it shouldn’t be as long as it was, and certainly shouldn’t be spoiling the end of games.
Well, it turns out, I’m not alone. Others have had a strange hockey-watching experience this season, and it appears to be because of a strange quirk with the new ESPN+ app.
ESPN, as you may know, holds the out-of-market streaming rights for NHL games, so having access to it is a must for a lot of hockey fans.
In fact, on the What Chaos! podcast, co-host DJ Bean floated a theory that ESPN+ broadcasts were not live because the app was showing commercial breaks longer than the actual broadcast’s commercial breaks.
After that, the app would rejoin the game as normal, but now substantially behind.
If that happened every break, you’d eventually wind up minutes behind the live action.
It sounds wild, but it would explain the Twilight Zone situation I experienced (which came after the Flyers’ OT-winner got waved off, so it made me even more angry).
This clip of Bean’s theory got a lot of traction on social media. So much so that Awful Announcing got a statement from ESPN, and sure enough, it really is happening.
According to the outlet, ESPN says they know about the issue, and it stems from the fact that the app is designed to pick up where it stopped if it starts buffering. This is a good thing as it keeps you from missing anything if you’re having trouble with your connection, but it does mean that you’re eventually behind the live feed.
However, the ads are contributing to this issue if there is space between them or if they need to buffer.
So, no, you’re not going crazy — and, more importantly, I’m not going crazy — your hockey games haven’t been completely live lately.
Fortunately, ESPN appears to be trying to figure out a way to rectify the issue.
Read the full article here
