During New Year’s Eve, a friend of mine and myself spent an inordinately long time trying to figure out how we could get a livestream of the Dick Clark Rockin’ New Year’s Eve or whatever it’s called special, on ABC. Apparently, it’s not as simple as going to ABC’s website and clicking a button that says “LIVE” on it anymore. Far from it.
Even entering in valid credentials for a cable subscription results in no progress on the ABC app, or on the ABC website. A little bit of research revealed that Atlanta is one of countless major markets in the continental United States that have yet to be authorized live feed permissions, and that there are maybe fewer than twenty cities that actually do. How an American network as large as ABC can justify being available to so few markets over the vast and global world wide web is completely beyond me, but the fact of the matter was that we were striking out fast on being able to get the Dick Clark NYE, because this particular friend, like many, have cut the cord and does not rely on cable or network television.
We even tried IP cloning, to make it look like we were pinging from some of the authorized markets, like Chicago or New York, but apparently, ABC is smarter than we gave them credit for, and seemed to be able to detect something was amiss by constantly erroring us as trying to access from outside the country.
Needless to say, Dick Clark’s NYE wasn’t going to happen, and the girls who demanded it would be denied seeing the supposed live performance by BTS.
Later in the evening, closer to midnight, we put a generic livestream on of some no-name upstart network doing some sort of countdown program. Complete with cover bands or maybe they were the real ones of some artist(s), I don’t know, but the goal was just to have some live feed of the Times Square celebration, since that’s kind of the standard for bringing in the New Year.
And right at 11:59 p.m. the feed abruptly stopped, and the screen was immediately populated with the dreaded pinwheel of buffering. We all waited with bated breath for about ten seconds when it became apparent that it wasn’t going to fix itself. Refreshes were executed, alternate sites were sought, but with less than a minute to go, we embarked on the most 2018 American New Year’s bring-in ever: an internet failure, followed by immediately missing the moment. Followed then, by ironic laughter at the bullshit of the whole spectacle.
A day later, as I mentioned in a prior post, I spent the vast majority of actual New Year’s Day, on my ass, watching college football bowl games. Although I have a basic cable package, I do not have ESPN, which I never really thought of as a problem, since I figured I could utilize the WatchESPN app that they themselves plug and advertise with extreme voracity, at every single opportunity they can.
It’s like you’d think something they push so hard onto consumers, it can’t possibly be a piece of shit that incites disdain and resentment towards the creators, right?
I slogged through the Michigan/South Carolina bowl game with minor annoyances at the frequency in which the app would constantly freeze and suddenly fast forward to live footage. At halftime, I switched from watching the game on Piss4 to Xbone, to see if there were any improvement in the latency issues. There wasn’t.
When I decided to play a game of League, I put the UCF/Auburn game on a second screen, so I could watch the tail end of what turned out to be a pretty exciting game. On a browser, ESPN stalled and skipped and froze worse than it did on consoles that I ultimately turned the game off, it was that bad.
By the time Georgia and Oklahoma kicked off in the Rose Bowl, I had decided on the perfect analogy for the WatchESPN app – it was basically the reincarnation of the dreaded RealPlayer of the late 1990s, because much like its predecessor, all it ever did was skip and buffer and skip and buffer, and by the time you actually got through your desired media, you were exasperated and annoyed at the ordeal of simply watching something you wanted to watch.
When I relocated to my bedroom to watch the remainder of the underwhelming Clemson vs. Alabama III matchup, I switched to ESPN on AppleTV. Surprising nobody, the quality of the app was no better here, and actually once crashed entirely, requiring restarting the app.
Now mind everyone, I have pretty good internet. I’m a snob about my internet speed; like the type that bemoans the quality of American internet speeds because I’ve been to Seoul and experienced 80mbps+ internet speed on wifi, and shed crocodile tears at the notion that I will never have such luxuries in my own home. But I pay for premium internet, get respectable (for America) down and up speeds, and save for use on RealPlayerESPN, it’s often reliable for gaming, Netflix or most other streaming services. I even make sure to hardwire the devices that get the heaviest use, to maximize the efficiency to stream.
It’s unmistakable that the problem isn’t my internet, it’s that RealPlayerESPN is actually a piece of shit application. ABC doesn’t even allow its own app to be a piece of shit, which makes them a piece of shit, because something simple as network television is stonewalled to those who don’t live in the right cities.
You can put high-octane fuel into a jalopy, anabolic steroids into a fat slob, the best gun in the game to a noob, good internet into an app. If the vehicle can’t handle it, and nothing is ever done to make it handle it, it’s all for naught.
The point of all of this is that I think livestreaming is destined for mediocrity if this shit doesn’t improve. Streaming media has been something of the norm for the better part of the last decade+, and it’s getting pathetic at just how inept major media corporations are still stumbling around with releasing reliable and available broadcasts live. It’s shit like this that makes cutting the cord less likely for everyone to do, but I would be the least surprised person in America if that weren’t by design. All the corporations from networks to the providers are all in bed with one another, and much like the abolishment of Net Neutrality, if there’s money to be made, regardless of the ethnical ramifications of the decision, it will undoubtedly come to pass.
That’s the American way. Enjoy your shitty livestreams, everyone.
