New Study Reveals the State of Sports Streaming

telcodad

New Study Reveals the Good, Bad, and Glitchy of Sports Streaming in 2025
By Raymond McCain, Cord Cutters News - July 22, 2025
https://cordcuttersnews.com/new-study-reveals-the-good-bad-and-glitchy-of-sports-streaming-in-2025/

The way we watch live sports is changing fast. As cord cutting accelerates and digital natives demand flexibility, streaming services have raced to secure sports rights, and with that shift comes a new set of challenges. ….

According to a new report from wireless‑video innovator InterDigital, Inc. and research firm Parks Associates, more than half of sports viewers hit frustrating roadblocks like buffering, lag, and poor image quality. The report titled, Streaming Live Sports: Where Opportunity Meets Complexity, examines how viewers consume live sports in various forms, including SVOD, DTC, PPV, and paywall systems: https://www.interdigital.com/white_papers/streaming-live-sports-where-opportunity-meets-complexity
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Why Half of Fans Are Frustrated

Despite the explosion of streaming choices, at least 57% of sports fans report at least one technical headache when watching live games:

Video quality woes: 18% of all sports viewers say the streaming picture itself is subpar; among viewers aged 18–24, that jumps to 31%.

Bandwidth bottlenecks: One‑quarter of younger viewers (25%) report insufficient bandwidth for high‑quality streams.

Lag and latency: 20% of 18–24‑year‑olds cite lag, which is deadly for live action, replays and in‑game stat updates.

30% of fans miss events because they don’t subscribe to the right service.

Viewers are often confused about where to watch games, lack channel flipping, and are tired of needing multiple apps.

A better UX is critical for the future of sports as viewers want better search tools, bundling, and streamlined access.

“Sports viewers should not have to deal with technical issues when watching their favorite sports teams. The broadcast and streaming ecosystem needs to work together to alleviate pain points or risk damaging their reputation for future events,” said Lionel Oisel, Head of Video Labs, at InterDigital. “While streaming services need to think holistically about the challenges that come with live video streams, more advanced video codecs can significantly reduce buffering and latency and improve the overall user experience.”

urbanriot

Yep, I can concur that the overwhelming majority of streamers can’t do sports very well.

The only outlets who do a great job is Amazon with Thursday night football and DirecTV. The rest are using high compression rates or frame skipping techniques that look terrible.

Zer0Cool

directv kinda makes sense as they just pipe the normal sattilite feed over the internet dont they? Still theres no reason all the others cant give proper bitrate or frame rate. amazon is the only streaming only one that doesnt have their head in their butts for now

MacLeech

Zer0Cool directv kinda makes sense as they just pipe the normal sattilite feed over the internet dont they?

No, not quite. They process it extensively for adaptive bit rate streaming for web use so it fails gracefully when enough bandwidth isn’t available, along with converting it to HEVC for smaller bandwidth usage. They replicate the stream for distribution through their CDN and storage on cloudDVR.

The CDN distribution is where most fail. It takes a lot of bandwidth as close to the edge as possible to unicast a stream to every viewer.

With OTA, every device is displaying the same single 5-20 Mbps feed, a million viewers is still 5-20 Mbps of bandwidth. With streaming, every device is displaying its own individual 5-20 Mbps feed, a million viewers is 1,000,000 × 5-20 Mbps of bandwidth or 5-20 Tbps of bandwidth.

urbanriot

Zer0Cool directv kinda makes sense as they just pipe the normal sattilite feed over the internet dont they? Still theres no reason all the others cant give proper bitrate or frame rate

I don’t know how to articulate the experience into words but I had DAZN for a couple years and the experience was terrible, the frame skipping juddering was noticeable but if you watched that exact same feed over antenna, like CTV, it was smooth and crystal clear.

At the same time when you watch Amazon or DirecTV sporting events they’re crystal clear and smooth like antenna.

You write “they just pipe the normal sattelite feed over internet” with DirecTV but you’d think they were doing the same with CTV on DAZN, unfortunately it doesn’t translate that smoothly.

Zer0Cool

urbanriot
Most ‘streaming cable’ packages/providers dont. only directv and (i think) youtubetv just pass what they get on, which is why they also have the best quality of the streaming cable bundles and match the traditional paytv quality and why they keep the 384kbps ac3 audio(including the 5.1 when applicable) instead of having stereo aac thats multi gen lossy.

Everything else re-encodes to like 30%+ lower bitrates than they get from the broadcaster and it kinda fucks it up and most set the fps to 24(which is especially bad on 60fps sports feeds like from fox) instead of leaving i as it was. even worse than cable companies re encoding to mpeg2 to save bandwidth.

So basically its a cost savings thing.

iirc tubi did do it the right way with the superbowl 4k stream this year but then look who owns them lol course they are gonna do it right.

MacLeech

Zer0Cool EVERYBODY reencodes live content for streaming. OTA broadcasts aren’t built for adaptive bitrates (ABR) needed for streaming

Man-of-Leisure

MacLeech Most content isn’t OTA any more.

Unless the event is broadcast on NBC, ABC, CBS, or Fox, OTA isn’t even a factor.

All of the cable channels (and increasingly the direct to streaming events) aren’t limited by ATSC or those broadcast limitations.

Even so, the broadcast channels could easily produce in native 1080p or 4K, then downscale for ATSC as needed. Just like HD channels were downscaled to 480i for SD cable boxes.

The only limitation right now is their old broadcast equipment, and the networks not wanting to spend the money to upgrade it.

Lots of countries in Europe and Asia have native 4K broadcasting now for things like the Olympics, but not the US.

MacLeech

Man-of-Leisure Most content isn’t OTA any more.

Unless the event is broadcast on NBC, ABC, CBS, or Fox, OTA isn’t even a factor.

Excuse me, make that linear feeds then. None of the video providers just send out the raw linear feeds from OTA, satellite, etc. to their streaming platforms. They’re re-encoded for ABR so they fail gracefully if the bandwidth isn’t their for full resolution. They want resolution to decrease, not chunks missing in the display of their video.

This isn’t about ATSC, 1080p, 4k. It’s about how the feeds used broadcast sources (one to many) for sports aren’t directly piped over the internet for streaming.

Man-of-Leisure

MacLeech True, though I think few services struggle with that at this point.

I mean YouTube has been live streaming online to millions of people since 2008.

I’ve watched the last several Olympics and Super Bowls (in 4K no less) over IPTV and haven’t had any issues with the quality dropping or streaming issues.

You don’t necessarily need your own CDNs either. Lots of big companies offer CDN services for rent. Google, Amazon AWS, etc.

MacLeech

Man-of-Leisure True, though I think few services struggle with that at this point.

There are still plenty of issues with streaming live events on multiple providers, with larger events having more issues, as pointed out in the original post that started this topic.

More examples:
https://sports.yahoo.com/super-bowl-viewers-vent-trash-003116200.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/paramount-super-bowl-streaming-error-issues-why-explained-netflix-2024-2
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2025-03-03/hulu-technical-glitches-mar-oscars-streaming-debut-for-many-viewers.
https://www.nbcnews.com/sports/boxing/netflix-streaming-problems-tyson-paul-event-frustration-jokes-rcna180443

The bandwidth and server resources needed to replicate the streams millions of times is very demanding. Not all of the multiple providers in between the source and client are up to the task, yet.

Man-of-Leisure

MacLeech All of those are companies without much experience with live streaming lol

MacLeech

Man-of-Leisure All of those are companies without much experience with live streaming lol

Still, they’re some of the biggest streamers out there, but the only way to get experience is to do it. Just about every provider doing live streams has gone through the growing pains and failures. It’s not easy.

Man-of-Leisure

MacLeech YouTube had it figured out in 2008 lol

WalterDnes

MacLeech The bandwidth and server resources needed to replicate the streams millions of times is very demanding.

I wonder if IPV6 multicast would solve this.

telcodad

WalterDnes MacLeech The bandwidth and server resources needed to replicate the streams millions of times is very demanding.

I wonder if IPV6 multicast would solve this.

I know that AT&T used IP multicast with their U-verse TV service. In the demos I saw it seemed to work very good.

MacLeech

WalterDnes Multicast might work if everyone was watching the same stream at the same point at the same time from the same video providers; ISPs were willing/able to carry the multicast streams deep into their network; AND the end devices in the customer home could handle them.

It worked on ATT Uverse because ATT controlled the network and devices using multicast video streams end to end. They ditched it with their FTTH product.

Man-of-Leisure

MacLeech They’ll figure it out. That’s what they’re getting paid tons of money for.

No one is being caught off guard that traditional TV is dying and IPTV/streaming are taking over.

MacLeech

Man-of-Leisure They’ve already figured it out. Get the needed servers as close to the customers as possible; pay what it takes to get the bandwidth for the highest viewership projected; reduce the video stream bandwidth as much as acceptable; and remove all the single points of failure possible. Aka shovel money at it.

Man-of-Leisure

MacLeech Hard to reduce bandwidth more than cable companies already have, with heavily compressed 720p over QAM lol

I’ll take a 30Mb 4K stream over that any day.