YouTube suffered its first major hiccup in its deal with the NFL on Sunday — and fans were not happy.
YouTube took over as the sole provider of NFL Sunday Ticket this season, which is a major product for football fans. It’s the main method to ensure you can watch every single NFL game. This past Sunday, YouTube’s NFL Sunday Ticket suffered major buffering and image quality issues. Broadcasts were glitchy, slow, and blurry. Not ideal for watching football games.
The problems seemed to be widespread and fans were not happy. The reactions on Twitter/X were brutal.
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There has long been skepticism from sports fans toward streamers taking over game broadcasts. The stakes for sports are especially high. The game is happening in real-time. Any issues or delays are multiplied in severity by that fact.
Thus far, however, reviews of YouTube’s version of NFL Sunday Ticket seemed to to be generally positive. Most notably, it finally offered a multi-view option, meaning fans could watch multiple games on a single screen. This week was different.
YouTube did comment on the issues, though it did not offer any reasoning for the problems.
“If you’re experiencing buffering issues on YouTube our team is aware and working on a fix,” the company wrote on Twitter/X. “YouTube TV or NFL Sunday Ticket may also be impacted. [We’ll] follow up here once this has been resolved.”
The issues were reportedly resolved by the early afternoon, but that simply isn’t good enough for NFL fans.