NBA fans cry foul as Prime Video cuts out during overtime, fails to sync audio
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I was watching when this Epic Fail happened. This was the kind of game fans dream about, but now it is about how Amazon screwed the pooch, cocked things up, et cetera. Almost as bad as the Heidi debacle in the NBC Epic Fail of the Jets vs Raiders game.
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... yeah, I'm sure having exclusive rights means that Amazon is just SO motivated to deliver a premium (or even unremarkable) viewing experience. If they don't, why, their viewers might just jump ship and watch the game on - oh, wait.
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infernal666
Ars Praefectus
My parents middle of no where church has this down, no excuse for Amazon.
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Prime may have been the only live source, but NBA TV does replays. As I type this, such a replay of that game is in progress on NBA TV. (I actually prefer to record replays on my DVR, because I do a lot of fast-forwarding over short bits of time. Such navigation with a replay on a streaming channel is very cumbersome. For me, this issue arises more frequently with NFL football than with NBA basketball. I have Prime, and I have never used it for either, live or replay.)
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I guess my point is that it’s pretty much all going to be similar digital pathways until you get to the point where OTA is shunting bits one direction and Prime is shunting bits another direction. There would be no particular reason why Prime would have the necessary system to allow for buffering like that while OTA would not. I guess it’s possible that some live production systems can/can’t buffer like that, but it wouldn’t be because of OTA vs streaming. It would just be based on the design of the production system.
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That is absolutely incorrect in a properly designed system with failovers. And life critical systems are designed to failover long before any failure causes life safety risk. Airbus fly by wire computers run simultaneously and failover takes milliseconds.
So, no they don’t “take a bit”. Any discrepancy between systems instantly switches the system into a fallback mode for safety.
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It takes a “bit”, if by that the poster meant one-eighth of a byte.
On a more serious note, life-critical systems really just have to fail over “fast enough”. Sometimes that’s pretty much instantly (which is certainly do-able when necessary). Sometimes not.
In the case of a piece of equipment processing/transmitting digital video, the important factor is that you can easily failover such equipment before the various buffers between that point and the viewer are exhausted — even for a live event where you’re trying to keep those buffers pretty short. Netflix famously does failover tests of their system as a constant QA process, where they regularly kill processes in their stack and have instrumentation that can measure whether the workload was picked up by other processes fast enough to avoid any stutter being seen by the viewer.
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Showing things when they happen is pretty much the definition of "Live TV."
If this is a production truck issue, that means that there wasn't a live feed coming out of the truck. The truck is where they take input from dozens of cameras at the stadium, the talking heads, the graphics, and switch between and composite those into the actual final stream that gets broadcast.
There's no difference between making TV for streaming or over the air broadcast at the venue itself. It's downstream of the truck and whatever contribution stream is being made that it gets turned into broadcast. streaming, or whatever. Based on the article, this is an issue that would have caused a "technical issues" card over analog broadcast 50 years ago as well. not anything streaming related.
(I'm actually heading to the Sports Video Group tech meetings in Las Vegas tomorrow; this is adjacent to my wheelhouse).
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You're getting downvoted by people who don't understand what you mean.
It isn't any different with how OTA works if it is a production truck issue.
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You're entirely right if this was a downstream problem.It takes a “bit”, if by that the poster meant one-eighth of a byte.
On a more serious note, life-critical systems really just have to fail over “fast enough”. Sometimes that’s pretty much instantly (which is certainly do-able when necessary). Sometimes not.
In the case of a piece of equipment processing/transmitting digital video, the important factor is that you can easily failover such equipment before the various buffers between that point and the viewer are exhausted — even for a live event where you’re trying to keep those buffers pretty short. Netflix famously does failover tests of their system as a constant QA process, where they regularly kill processes in their stack and have instrumentation that can measure whether the workload was picked up by other processes fast enough to avoid any stutter being seen by the viewer.
But if it is a technical failure in the production truck, buffers etcetera don't apply. Something broke that prevented them from actually combining all the live inputs into the video feed.
A good production truck will have redundancy; if one monitor or one camera goes down, you work around it. But if the satellite uplink gets whacked by something landing on it, the signal isn't going anywhere unless you can switch to a secondary uplink, which is rarely instantaneous. TV has been very reliable, but there have always been occasional failures like this. "Technical Difficulties" cards have been a thing for the better part of a century.
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Bad enough weather can disrupt watching Dish. TV has a 99.999% uptime, which is very impressive. But with so many channels, those 0.001% of failures still happen every day.
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The broadcast truck is where they make the broadcast. This is upstream of the public internet.
These things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_truck
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Simple?
Are you referring to drop or non-drop
? Time code could have been simple, but the way we introduced color TV in a way backwards compatible to black and white involved reducing our nice integer 30 frames per second broadcasts to 30/1.001 ~29.97 frames a second, which has made all kinds of stuff fraught for generations.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMPTE_timecode#Drop-frame_timecode
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A minute or so? For a concert, sure. But not for sports. It is really annoying to hear your neighbors celebrating a goal you don't get to find out about for another 50 seconds. A truly humongous amount of technical innovation has gone into getting broadcast latency of streaming down to the ballpark of broadcast.
More like 7 seconds. But that is delayed for all forms of transmission, so you only really notice the difference if you compare to watching in the stadium or listening on radio.
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If it is an issue in the production truck, as stated, it would have impacted any OTA broadcasts as well. All distribution (OTA, cable, sat, streaming) is downstream of the production truck, and all use the same feed.
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The delay for beeping or switching away from wardrobe malfunctions was 7 seconds in events I’ve been involved in.
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My point about buffers is that if you've got a one-second buffer at the home viewer's device, if you fail over within one second the home viewer never notices a problem. I'm not clear why buffers wouldn't apply in the case it was a problem at the truck.
EDIT: As long as failover can be done in a way that there isn't a gap in the actual video, that is. If there is a one-second buffer between the truck and the viewer, then if you can recover the integrity of the system within one second in a way that leaves a contiguous video stream, the viewer will never see a problem. If the failure leaves borked/missing frames in the video stream, then buffers won't help. Substitute whatever correct buffer exists in the streaming system, in place of my wild-ass-guess of one second.
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I have made good money wasting synapses and entire neurons on this. It’s probably worse for my brain than going on a huge bender.Simple?
Are you referring to drop or non-drop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMPTE_timecode#Drop-frame_timecode
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Amazon didn't buy the rights to produce a great show. They bought the rights because some algorithm said they could make money doing it and that includes cheaping out on the infrastructure.
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This link also doesn't fully support your initial claim.
What the article says:
When you said:
Amazon's actions are deplorable.. but there's no need to over-embellish it.
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Sort of. The bought the rights for the same reason Fox blew the market up for Super Bowl rights in order to drive viewership in its early years as the then-considered impossible fourth network. You're on the mark in that it sure seems like they think the games will produce themselves.
As a more-than-casual sports fan, the gulf between what Amazon has done with their opportunity and what the networks and ESPN, who have been doing this for decades, do is huge. The very small sample size I've seen of games each has shown--to my eye--has even Apple TV doing a better job than Prime has done.
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"viewers are still complaining about audio-syncing problems on Prime Video this season. We’ve experienced this firsthand at Ars Technica"
It also happens here in the UK with NFL coverage - both on Sky Sports and Channel 4, the NFL games covered by Prime are far and away the worst to watch (and the ones most likely to lose coverage or audio).
It also happens here in the UK with NFL coverage - both on Sky Sports and Channel 4, the NFL games covered by Prime are far and away the worst to watch (and the ones most likely to lose coverage or audio).
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Do you know how much physically strenuous doing manual CPR is? I do. It's absolutely normal to have two rescuers switching after a few minutes. Proper CPR winds you up in no time.
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caution live frogs
Ars Praetorian
These broadcasts should not be exclusive.
If multiple companies can broadcast, viewers can change feeds if needed - and user choice would drive down prices.
Oh, wait... That would also drive down profits. Obviously we can't have that, so "technical difficulties" it is then
If multiple companies can broadcast, viewers can change feeds if needed - and user choice would drive down prices.
Oh, wait... That would also drive down profits. Obviously we can't have that, so "technical difficulties" it is then
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What's sad is the amount of rage this induces in people who otherwise couldn't give a single fuck about anyone or anything around them. Shit happens sometimes. Yeah, it sucks and I'd be bummed, but it really isn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things. People who start frothing at the mouth over this need to get out more.
As for the technical side of things. Shit happens. This happened multiple times over the NFL season on various streaming feeds (Google TV and Peacock) and the FOX Sports audio has a 50 / 50 shot of being out of sync for me while other Google TV channels don't exhibit the same behavior. Most of the time they're all working off the same feed and none of it is OTA anymore accept maybe the "last mile". However, this also used to happen "back in the day" when it was still all OTA and satellite uplinks so it's nothing new.
As for the technical side of things. Shit happens. This happened multiple times over the NFL season on various streaming feeds (Google TV and Peacock) and the FOX Sports audio has a 50 / 50 shot of being out of sync for me while other Google TV channels don't exhibit the same behavior. Most of the time they're all working off the same feed and none of it is OTA anymore accept maybe the "last mile". However, this also used to happen "back in the day" when it was still all OTA and satellite uplinks so it's nothing new.
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I'll put a buck each way on:
1. planned end-game ad-blast cut in, then someone mashed the wrong buttons trying to get back to the overtime feed
2. some new OB roadie was told to start packing cables "as soon as the game ends"
1. planned end-game ad-blast cut in, then someone mashed the wrong buttons trying to get back to the overtime feed
2. some new OB roadie was told to start packing cables "as soon as the game ends"
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https://www.thewesternedge.media/p/everyone-is-replaceable-death-rattles
This one has the very specific interview from the video I had originally seen it on. Does this qualify as "begging" to you?
And I won't be taking your advice, because this story DESERVES some emotional resonance to it. I'm adding commentary and my personal opinion here, after all, not a "just the facts" report of the matter.
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I wasn’t there. I can only form opinions based on what is reported of the incident.
This article does provide additional context that your initial link did not. And yes, based on this additional context.. your description seems reasonable.
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You'd be surprised how hard it was to track that specific article down. I gave up using a search engine entirely and went back to my youtube history to pull up the video I'd originally seen and then looked at background details until I finally found an image of the web site in question. Unfortunately the video didn't link directly to the article in it's additional text blurb under the... do they still call it "the fold"? Anyway I caught the site's logo in there and used that to search for the news site... which was ALSO surprisingly difficult as search engines kept linking completely unrelated businesses, but eventually I found that and then from there was able to find the article in question.
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coconutboy
Ars Praefectus
The audio sync issue on Prime’s nba broadcasts has been F’ing annoying. It’s always present, and highly irritating. Technically, it’s a few milliseconds or so, which may not sound like a big deal. Then try watching the broadcast as a fan who is genuinely invested, it’s awful. Knowing the ball was stolen a split second before you actually see it happen on screen. Same goes for that crucial game-winning shot at the buzzer.
It’s like frame rate lag in an fps game where you already know you just got fragged, and now get to watch it happen after the fact. All immersion is completely gone.
Imagine watching football (both of ‘em) and hearing “touchdown” or “goooooooaal” before seeing the score. Prime sucks.
Meanwhile, the NBA is touting the awesomeness of their new media deals, but it’s probably skewed bullocks, because when I ask my many friends who are die-hard sports fans, most of us are not pleased with the NBA spreading out their broadcasts across so many platforms.
I will give Prime credit though for their few positives, like the video-game-style shot clock appearing in the jump-circle in late shot clock situations.
Even better has been Prime’s studio crew of Dirk Nowitzki, Blake Griffin, Udonis Haslem, Taylor Rooks and other guests subbing. Inside The NBA, as great as it has been ever since Shaq joined way back when, has become kinda stale imo. Comfortable shoes, but same ole same ole. Meanwhile, it has taken a season, but Dirk and Blake have started to edge a bit closer to actual criticism and stronger opinions of what they see during games. This is great! Players hate being critiqued, but many ex-players are often too shy about telling us what they really think. Udonis Haslem never had that problem, but it’s good to see nice-guys Blake and Dirk bringing a bit more pointed analysis.
It’s like frame rate lag in an fps game where you already know you just got fragged, and now get to watch it happen after the fact. All immersion is completely gone.
Imagine watching football (both of ‘em) and hearing “touchdown” or “goooooooaal” before seeing the score. Prime sucks.
Meanwhile, the NBA is touting the awesomeness of their new media deals, but it’s probably skewed bullocks, because when I ask my many friends who are die-hard sports fans, most of us are not pleased with the NBA spreading out their broadcasts across so many platforms.
I will give Prime credit though for their few positives, like the video-game-style shot clock appearing in the jump-circle in late shot clock situations.
Even better has been Prime’s studio crew of Dirk Nowitzki, Blake Griffin, Udonis Haslem, Taylor Rooks and other guests subbing. Inside The NBA, as great as it has been ever since Shaq joined way back when, has become kinda stale imo. Comfortable shoes, but same ole same ole. Meanwhile, it has taken a season, but Dirk and Blake have started to edge a bit closer to actual criticism and stronger opinions of what they see during games. This is great! Players hate being critiqued, but many ex-players are often too shy about telling us what they really think. Udonis Haslem never had that problem, but it’s good to see nice-guys Blake and Dirk bringing a bit more pointed analysis.
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Ouch! Audio sync issues and in the wrong direction! If sync's going to be off, it should always err on video first sync issue, because that's the way our brains are "wired" for (for seeing and hearing distant events like lightning strikes or land slides I mean). Hearing and then seeing? That's uncanny and far more jarring.
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