New Study Reveals the State of Sports Streaming

telcodad · 2025-07-22T13:34:41+00:00

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 : 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.”

MacLeech

Man-of-Leisure Hard to reduce bandwidth more than cable companies already have, with heavily compressed 720p over QAM

And yet it’s done with HEVC and AV1 ABR unicast streams vs the broadcast MPEG2 or MPEG4 VBR streams used for QAM. It’s why every video provider is migrating that way.

Man-of-Leisure

MacLeech Yes, but the bitrate is still higher.

I don’t know what bitrate they’re using for the 720p QAM feeds, but it’s clearly far worse than 30Mb+ HEVC or AV1.

MacLeech

Man-of-Leisure Cable providers usually fit between 4-8 HD video streams in a QAM depending on the content and if the streams are MPEG2 or 4. Talking heads can compress much more than a movie with a lot of explosions or gradients or sports with a lot of movement. They need much higher bitrates than AV1 or HVEC for the same resolution.

HEVC or AV1 at the same resolutions and lower bitrate could double that video stream count and look better, yet it still doesn’t solve all the various distribution issues streaming providers commonly have as pointed out in the original post of this discussion, especially during big live events.

HVEC or AV1 does allow the cable providers to provide better quality video using less bandwidth on their own streaming platforms compared to their QAM distribution, though.

WalterDnes

MacLeech Multicast might work if everyone was watching the same stream at the same point at the same time from the same video providers;

You’ve just described streaming a live game. Movies-on-demand like Netflix, or other on-demand programming, will obviously be better off on unicast.

lesmikesell

Man-of-Leisure YouTube had it figured out in 2008 lol

It ‘sort-of’ worked back then. Since then they’ve invented a couple of new encodings to make it work better - and can downgrade resolution pretty gracefully for so-so connections.

lesmikesell

MacLeech Aka shovel money at it.

And then raise the price to customers after the initial lowball to steal them from cable.

lesmikesell

WalterDnes I wonder if IPV6 multicast would solve this.

No way cheap consumer grade routers are going to handle multicast at video speeds. Plus you’d need set-top boxes to do what the X1’s do to hold a half-hour or more buffer so you can pause or back up. Existing streaming devices don’t do that.

Man-of-Leisure

lesmikesell For the end-user connection being slow, but they haven’t had issues on the server side of their connections not being able to handle the traffic.

MacLeech

Man-of-Leisure they haven’t had issues on the server side of their connections not being able to handle the traffic.

They have off and on over the years when they’ve had issues buying or building enough bandwidth to various ISPs. Their cloud services offerings have helped since it better balances upload/download traffic demands. Strict streamers (like Netflix) have more contentious negotiations for bandwidth. Overall YouTube has been pretty good at forecasting bandwidth need and build times, along with pushing more advanced compression methods, so bottlenecks tend to be rare.

MacLeech

WalterDnes You’ve just described streaming a live game.

Until someone wants to pause the stream and their device doesn’t have a buffer to support that locally.

It also doesn’t help if the broadcaster allows for insertion of regional or local ads, common in sports, requiring extra complications to the multicast.

Cable providers extensively use multicast video distribution within their own network, between Super Headends doing the major video receiving/processing and their edge QAMs. I’m sure most other video providers are the same within their own networks. It’s crossing those network edges with it that really isn’t done.

urbanriot

Zer0Cool 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.

Oh, I forgot one…

The funniest I’ve seen yet is here in Canada, a couple years ago there was an NFL playoff game with the Kansas City Chiefs that everyone wanted to see but the only way you could see it was sign up for Peacock. Obviously every football fan in the US was super pissed about this because it was the playoffs… but here in Canada, you could pick up the game OTA on CTV, they were broadcasting the Peacock feed. And it was no different than them broadcasting a regular simsubbed game via CBS.

So, yea, my list of not-terrible sports games providers is Amazon, DirecTV, and Peacock (as much as I hate them).

lesmikesell

Zer0Cool 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

YouTube TV re-encodes in vp09 and lets you pick your resolution if you don’t like the automatic choice. They do generally keep surround sound, unlike Sling which oddly only has it on my local NBC channel proving they could do it everywhere if they wanted. Quality seems very good.

timcuth

I own a fairly high-end 4K TV. UHD Blurays look excellent on it. But I recently rented and streamed a UHD movie from Prime Video, and it looked pretty good, but not nearly as good as UHD Bluray.

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