This year’s Super Bowl saw the most dramatic come back in the sport’s history, but this wasn’t enough to stop the dip in TV ratings for the second year in a row, down to 48.8 rating points from 49 last year. Naturally, it was time for live streaming to steal the limelight, but Fox failed to deliver.
The NFL has not been shy in migrating to OTT video, forging streaming deals with the likes of Twitter, Verizon and CBS. The traditional broadcasters are making steps in the right direction, yet still seem to come up against stumbling blocks which mean their OTT experiences aren’t capable of matching the QoE of linear broadcast.
According to the Ooyala State of the Broadcast Industry 2017 report, published last week, live audiences are more patient than VoD viewers, with a live audience willing to watch 24 minutes longer when experiencing low ratios between buffering times to session times (less than 0.2%), compared to VoD viewers who will watch 16 minutes longer.
This suggests that broadcasters have some room to maneuverer with their streaming platforms, but this could be short lived given the increasingly high expectations of viewers, particularly millennials. Having said that, Ooyala’s report claims that broadcasters are deploying server-side ad insertion to solve latency issues at the advertising side of the streaming experience – the part that viewers are least engaged in.
Unfortunately for Fox, its live streaming app Fox Sports Go did not pass the test – it failed during the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, not for a split second, but for long enough that viewers missed some important plays in the closing minutes of the game. This is simply not good enough from Fox, and a spokesman has said the network is still attempting to identify the source of the stream disruption. Some DirecTV and Comcast subscribers also saw interruptions, but the companies said they pinpointed the outages to two fires.
On the technology front, Intel supplied its 360 Replay technology to Fox for a feature called “Be the Player,” which displayed the point of view of any player on the field. Fox’s own Sports Lab project also delivered highlights in virtual reality (VR), as well as augmented reality (AR) features to project lines for the first downs, using a Skycam and 3D graphic imaging techniques.
“From the beginning, seeing and breaking down the play from the player’s point of view is the undiscovered country of sports broadcasting. This broadcast enhancement is like no other — it literally brings the audience down to the viewpoint of the player at the critical decision-making moment,” said Michael Davies, Fox Sports senior VP of field and technical operations.
Super Bowl LI averaged 111.3 million viewers on Fox Sports, the third most viewed in history, but lowest since 2013. There were an additional 1.72 million viewers streaming the game via the Fox Sports Go app, available on smartphones, tablets, PCs, Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku, Android TV, Fire TV and Xbox games consoles. An extra 650,000 users viewed the Spanish-language simulcast on Fox Deportes. Combining all of these, Super Bowl LI was the second most viewed across multiple platforms.
However, CBS said that last year’s Super Bowl was live streamed across multiple devices by 3.96 million unique users, but this included mobile viewers from Verizon’s Go90 app as well as the NFL Mobile apps.
Drones took center stage at the Super Bowl half time show, in a collaborative spectacle between Intel and Pepsi which saw hundreds of the unmanned aerial vehicles dancing in sync. Perhaps drones won’t end up being just a flash in the pan after all, as the Ooyala report projects that filming live sports using drones will be an increasing trend in the coming months.
Major broadcasters including NBC, NHK and the BBC all dabbled in capturing drone footage during the 2016 Rio Olympics. However, safety surrounding drone usage is still an issue, most notably when alpine skier Marcel Hirscher was almost struck down by a rogue drone in Italy last year – an incident which drone doubters jumped on “en masse”.
Once again, the halftime Super Bowl show racked up higher viewing figures than the game itself for the fourth consecutive year, with Lady Gaga’s performance seen by 117.5 million viewers on the night.
These figures meant Fox could charge up to $5 million for a single 30-second ad slot during the broadcast. Data from TiVo says that the ad with the best viewer engagement during the Super Bowl was Bai Brands’ drinks commercial, followed by Kia’s car advertisement. TiVo also reported that the halftime performance was the third most viewed of all time, and Twitter users posted 41,000 mentions a minute.
Comcast signed a contract with Fox Sports last week to live stream in-market NFL games as of mid-February, and CBS struck a multi-year deal for NFL streaming rights on its OTT service All Access in early December. It was not made clear how the CBS deal ties in with Verizon which owns exclusive mobile streaming rights, so the case may be that CBS All Access subscribers cannot stream NFL games on mobile devices, but can do so on other hardware.
Verizon also lost streaming rights for Thursday night NFL games to Twitter back in April, but again this does not include mobile streaming. The CBS deal represents the NFL applying further pressure on Verizon to pay more to renew its rights deal.