[AMike]

There is a restaurant/bar in my general area that uses IPTV through Sling or YouTube TV I believe. They have occasional buffering issues which will be a pain during a last minute drive of a football game.

I cut the cord and went to DirecTV Stream. I hate the delay since I get notifications that something has already happened in a game I am watching.

I read somewhere that one of the Canadian providers is trying to develop technology to eliminate the delay of streaming. We’ll see about that.

 

[AMike]

Impossible to answer since no one knows how it is going to be presented. Ask again in about a year.

This is all speculation, but it could be similar to MLB.TV. On the progress line, you can jump to a specific inning if you are watching a game that you delayed the start. You would have to jump around from game to game if you do that and it might be more painful than using a DVR.

The other feature that the potentially new ST could borrow from other sites is the ability to watch archived games.

This will be my first full football season without Sunday Ticket. I have 3 TVs set up in my media room with three 3 different streaming boxes (Roku, Amazon Fire Cube, and nVidia). I'll be fine for college football, but NFL Sundays will be a lot different this year.

 

[AMike]

Since this is an NFL thread…

Football is one of the ad friendly sports out there. Lots of breaks in the action where 2-5 minutes of ads could be shown.

A few years back, I went to a college football game, and at changes of possession and other breaks in play, they went to commercial for it seemed like forever. At each break, they blasted AC/DC over the stadium PA. It was very detrimental to the in-person experience. I hated the guy in the red vest telling them when they were at commercial.

As a side note, this was when I came to the realization that AD/DC has only one song. It’s long and spread out over many albums, but could be seamlessly stitched together into a single song.

Baseball now has a pitch clock and limits the time between innings, limiting the impact of ads on the in-person experience. Baseball is also more pastoral, making Neil Diamond a more appropriate musical interlude.


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Agreed. Football and TV were made for one another. College football tends to last longer than a typical NFL game because of the longer halftime (20 minutes vs. 12 minutes except for the Super Bowl) and the stopping of the clock on first downs. The in-person experience is fun, but it can drag.

I have season tickets to the minor league team here. Games typically last anywhere between 2 hours to 2 1/2 hours. Basically the pitcher has 16 seconds to throw a pitch. Those rules will probably be adapted into MLB soon. It is a zippier experience, but that probably won't be the case on nationally televised games.

 

[AMike]

This has probably already been mentioned, but it needs to be said. DirecTV is hemorrhaging subscribers. Netflix (poor example since they lost another 1 million subscribers) have approximately 68 million subscribers in the US. This is a rough estimate as they combine their Canadian and US numbers which is around 78 million total.

The NFL will make a choice: make our product available to around 10 million subscribers or to at least 68 million for streaming. If the winning provider charges $300 and 10% of 68 million people subscribe, that is over $2 billion dollars in return, something DirecTV could never match.

Like it or not, streaming is the future. It is inevitable, just as death and taxes.