Just like the U.S. Men’s soccer team, ESPN had it both good and bad during Wednesday’s World Cup game against Germany. On the plus side, ESPN recorded record audiences for its online broadcasts, easily topping any other sporting event ever, including Super Bowls.
But the bad was about as bad as the U.S. team’s somewhat lackluster shutout. By several accounts, including our personal viewing, ESPN’s live stream of the game crashed several times, and was (according to complaints on Twitter) simply unavailable for many viewers. While it’s an inexact science to track down how and why the problems may have been caused, there seems to be enough circumstantial evidence pointing to some pretty massive infrastructure failures from the worldwide leader. According to the Variety story, Univision’s live stream had no such problems, even though its size was smaller.
The line I love from the Variety story penned by our good pal Todd Spangler is the ESPN rep quoting “unprecedented demand” as a reason for the crashes. It would be one thing if something unexpected happened — like, say, the lights went out — and all of a sudden there was a huge audience that tuned in. But ESPN had to know the online viewership was going to be massive days ahead of time, given the start time in the middle of most of the U.S. business working hours. Plus, ESPN itself has spent the entire World Cup blasting emails about every 10 minutes or so, telling everyone it knows to tune in to games online. So: Huge demand? Yes. Unprecendented? Maybe. Unknown that it was coming? Unexplainable.
Maybe we’re holding ESPN to an unreal expectation here, but I’m trying to think how bad the fallout would be if Fox, or NBC, say, dropped the TV broadcast of a big event for even a few minutes. Media outlets around the world would be howling. It seems like online broadcasts are still getting a pass from observers, as if online doesn’t really count. But according to ESPN’s own numbers, online does count and the audiences are huge — 3.2 million uniques for the game — so why can’t big broadcasters put in an appropriate amount of resources to make sure the show goes on smoothly? Is it just that nobody really knows yet how much capacity it takes to keep a big event running? In that case, are advertisers and/or the sports who sell the online rights asking for refunds or make-goods?
As always we give a hats off to ESPN or any other broadcaster who tries to make as much content as possible available online. We just hope that going forward, those same broadcasters recognize that online is a significant, serious market, and that you underestimate your needs at your own peril.
