• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, February 5, 2015

Someday, you’ll be able to watch a big deal live event on your laptop, phone or iPad without getting a second-rate experience, but the Super Bowl was not that event.  And what strange complaints!

About 1.3 million people live streamed the game, but many of them were not happy.  

Call it revenge of the “corded viewer” — so sick of those sanctimonious cord-cutters they keep reading about.

It turns out the NBC stream ranged from slow to very slow. Apartment dwellers streaming the game invariably heard the roar and whoops from other apartments—the people with cable or satellite—that signaled a big play, as much as a minute before they saw the same play on their device.

The whole world needed a spoiler’s alert for tardy streamers.

Akamai was the main supplier of downstream, and while it’s done far better with other live events, this one had lots of moving parts that made it a Super Difficult Super Bowl, according to a few accounts.

Whatever happened, streamers saw it late.

“I’m told this Super Bowl was among the most exciting in history,” wrote Will Oremus, for Slate.“But for me and others who watched online, the suspense was ruined.”

He continued, later, “If Sunday's 'streaming event' was meant to be an advertisement for the quality of NBC’s TV Everywhere services, I suspect its effect on most viewers was the opposite of what the network intended. If, on the other hand, NBC’s live stream of the Super Bowl was an elaborate trick to punish cord-cutters, I’d say it was a great success.”

Making this streaming abuse even worse was the fact that even if you lived alone on a quiet country lane, you would have still missed the game’s  full punchlines, including that whopper at the end.

That’s because in an astonishing duh move, NBC was streaming the score in real time, while showing an online stream that was at least a play or more behind. NBC got the same complaint when it streamed the Olympics from Sochi.

“Broadband sports providers must do better,” chided The Diffusion Group’s trenchant smart guy, Joel Espelien, in a blog item titled “Second Class Citizens.” He wrote:  “It is time for live sports streaming to be in real time, experienced live in the most literal sense or risk viewers losing trust in the streaming experience at the very time demand is ramping up.”  

When Fox Sports streamed the game last year, it didn’t get those complaints. And while MLB.com’s live video and audios stream of 162 baseball games, by all teams, every day, for a full season, has some irritations, it’s generally great.  (And astonishingly for the grand, old slow game I love, MLB’s streaming is beginning its 13th season this spring, and for the third season in a row, it will do it this year without a price increase. )

To me, the strangest complaint about NBC’s stream is one that’s unique to the Super Bowl itself: NBC didn’t show most of the commercials. Apparently advertisers, already nicked for $4.5 million per .30 were required to shell out extra to stream. Few did, and so for the one television event where commercials are a part of the whole package, streaming viewers saw dead air, or, as it turns out, several showings of the same commercials from the few advertisers who ponied up, including T-Mobile. Groused Espelien,  “No one should be subjected to Kim Kardashian’s T-Mobile commercial that many times. It’s inhuman.”

pj@mediapost.com