NFL's Live Streaming Leaves A Lot To Be Desired: Capping Users, Poor Video Quality

When the NFL announced it would be streaming seventeen games this year on NFL.com and NBCSports.com, dubbed "Sunday Night Football Extra", many were excited to see what kind of video offering the NFL had in store for their fans. With the NFL having now completed nearly half of their broadcasts, the user experience has been anything less than what I would call a quality offering for a variety of reasons.

For starters, I can't figure out why the NFL puts people into a waiting room? In a conversation with the NFL yesterday, they explained that in order to provide the best user experience, they are limiting the number of users who can watch the game at the same time. They also commented that since the wait time is usually very short, I waited between 3-5 minutes this past Sunday, it's not that big of a deal. But the question is, why cap the number of people at all? Through the first four broadcasts, each NFL game averaged around 125,000 total unique viewers online. That averages out to about 50,000 simultaneous users online at any given time. Considering the NFL is streaming the games between two content delivery networks (CDN), Limelight and Akamai, why the limitation? Akamai and Limelight combined can clearly support way more than fifty thousand streams and capping users is not providing any better experience for those who are already watching. Is the NFL simply trying to reduce their cost to broadcast the games, by capping users and keeping their bandwidth bill lower? To me, the rational for capping users just doesn't make sense.

In addition to the strange capping policy, the video feed is also being encoded using less than optimal settings that reduce the quality, not improve it. The NFL confirmed that the encoding is a multi-bitrate file, up to 980Kbps and I have confirmed from others it is being done in H.264. No problem with the H.264 part, but why is the video letterboxed? They are simply wasting bandwidth and video quality with the black bars at the top and bottom of the video window. And if you remove those bars, the aspect ratio of the video window is 490x280. The average aspect ration for a video that is being encoded up to 980Kbps would be 640x480. So why is the NFL not converting the broadcast signal correctly before encoding and why is the window size so small for such a high-quality bitrate? They should be taking the anamorphic feed and stretching it back to the 16:9 ratio and cropping out the black in the encoder to not waste bandwidth.

In addition, as many bloggers have stated before, why is there no full-screen option? For a 980Kbps feed, you could get some fairly decent full screen video quality. But even at the window size they stick to, the video quality for me last weekend was poor. I could not read the numbers on the bottom of the video screen that gave the score and there was way too much pixelation. And being on a 20Mbps FiOS connection and a new MacBook Pro, my connection and computer were not the problem.

As some have pointed out previously, switching between camera angles is a pain as you have to watch a video ad before it switches. So if you want to switch angles in the middle of a play, then you are out of luck on seeing how the play ends. What incentive is there for users to then switch between all of the angles? Why have the different angles as an option if you are going to make switching between them such a bad user experience?

I know that from day one, the NFL has clearly stated that this online video offering is an "experiment" to test the idea of potentially bringing more games online down the road. But even as an experiment, you would think the NFL would want to provide the best quality user experience possible? All they keep saying is that the steps they have taken, like the capping, is to increase the "user experience", yet it's doing the exact opposite. What do you think of the NFL's streaming experience to date?

Comments

[Edward G.]

Dan, I'd have to agree with you 100%. The video quality of the games I have watched has been poor and the lack of full-screen stinks. I don't care about the camera angles as I just stick to the broadcast feed, but when I did try to switch and got an ad as well, I decided that the extra angles were not needed anyway.

[Jason M.]

Couldn't agree with you more. I'd take it a step further and say the experience is completely unwatchable.

[Yossi Wellingstein]

Dan, I wonder if there is any comment from NFL about your detailed analysis.
It would be interesting to know why NFL chose to take these routes and it may be a challenge for Akamai and Limelight to improve the service, or an opportunity for alternative technologies to improve the service.

[Dan Rayburn]

The problem is not with Akamai or Limelight. The poor user experience is not due to the delivery networks and the NFL is committed to using the Flash platform, based on the press release between the NFL and Adobe. The poor experience has to do with the settings the NFL has chosen and clearly there are some business decisions behind things like capping users that I am not aware of. Capping users is not a standard for live events, so the NFL would of had to request it, which means they had some sort of reason for doing so.

[Nico]

The only reason I can think of for capping an event is budgetary; However, I have heard a lot of "concern" expressed over the complexity in configuring a network to skillfully negotiate the live FLV experience - for other on-line experiments that were negotiated successfully, there seems to have been more lead time and more thorough configuration on the back end.

Most of all, I do not believe that previous live implementations that were considered successes attempted multi-bitrate in a single live streaming file - I learned NEVER to use MBR back int he 90's, especially for live. I could be wrong. But not likely ;-)

[Rob]

Remember the MLB when it started? It took a while for them to figure it out and the NFL is a full 5 years behind.

[Clark Pierce]

Dan, In a perfect world with no cost or quality restrictions what would the perfect NFL live game streaming experience be to you?

[Dan Rayburn]

Hi Clark, personally I only care about two things. One, set my expectations correctly. When the NFL announced the new streaming service, no where in the press release or in interviews did they talk about the waiting room or capping users. Let viewers know about that before hand so when they go to the site, they are not automatically disappointed. Other large scale sporting events have capped users but have made it very clear they were going to do that.

Second, personally I don't care about multiple viewing angles, and in the case of the NFL interface, it only takes up additional bandwidth for a viewing angle I am not even watching. What a waste. GIve me the option to get one high-quality stream. What do I classify as "high-quality"? I'd like a 750Kbps stream, with the option to go full screen if I want to and the stream should not be letterboxed. For sports, I'd prefer to see smooth motion over sharpness.

[Christopher Levy]

On one point above the reason they do not let you Full-Screen the video is because you will then lose site of the ads they want you to click on. It's ad-supported which means they need you to visit their advertisers. This is a critical flaw in offering content for free. The NFL should just sell these videos or provide them on-demand with ads using DRM. Right now they are just blowing 100K every Sunday night on bandwidth.

[Christopher Levy]

Oh and I wanted to point out one more critical piece that everyone in this industry should pay attention to:

The NFL cannot deliver anywhere near enough ads on the Sunday Night Football page to come anywhere near the costs they are incurring related to webcasting these games for free.

Success with ad-supported models are almost unheard of.

When is the last time you the reader actually CLICKED on an ad on FaceBook or on a common webpage you visit regularly.

Sure advertising is about repetition however Internet advertising, to be successful, includes the viewer clicking to view the ad.

[Stefan Richter]

Users do click ads. Most users don't but 1% to 2% do. It's a numbers game.

In fullscreen it would be trivial to support overlay ads and have them clickable. Very trivial actually and they must have chosen not to offer fullscreen for other reasons.
Heck if the ads were relevant to the content then the clickthrough rates would be a lot higher. How about overlaying actual TV ads (I am not sure if they have ad breaks in this service) with clickability? And special offers that are only available via the online service?

It really doesn't take much to come up with a few concepts that are worth testing out.

[Charles Simonson]

Did the NFL change their setup for recently? I thought tonight's game looked quite good. The stream I was watching was 800x450, not too shabby for something that is free. And the other camera angle switching worked like a charm.

[Jonathan Hendry]

The Saints vs Bears game was horrible. They talked through most all of the game instead of showing the game. I got better updates on msnbc for game in text.