YouTube talked a good talk, but when push came to shove, even the lord of streaming video itself couldn’t walk the walk. Last Friday, YouTube streamed the NFL season opener live from Sao Paulo without any subscription or PPV required in what was billed as the “most accessible NFL game ever produced”. This marked the first time a major US sporting spectacle was livestreamed globally for free on YouTube, and expectations were justifiably high. The Google-owned platform did the press rounds before kick-off, ticking all the right boxes by reassuring reporters that YouTube had thought of every possible scenario to circumvent streaming bottlenecks or network outages—including a last resort “Doomsday Armageddon”. The good news for YouTube is that it never…