After successfully rolling out its NFL Sunday Ticket two months ago with nary a technical hiccup, for the first time on Sunday, YouTube TV had to apologize to subscribers for technical issues preventing them from following their favorite teams.
Issues of pixelation and buffering—the bane of live streaming—during the first slate of games Sunday afternoon were enough to send viewers to social media to complain about technical problems. YouTube tweeted in response:
If you're experiencing buffering issues on YouTube our team is aware and working on a fix. YouTube TV or NFL Sunday Ticket may also be impacted. we'll follow-up here once this has been resolved.October 29, 2023
Eventually YouTube referred subscribers to the NFL app, where viewers—who are shelling out $349 for an annual subscription—could authenticate via their YouTube TV subscription.
YouTube’s apology prompted a number of Twitter/X users to inquire about refunds but it’s undetermined whether the streamer has any plans to reimburse fans.
One viewer complained that the quality wasn’t much better than an illegal stream:
Bro illegal streams are honestly better and they are freeOctober 30, 2023
One sports pundit noted that Amazon, which has been live streaming Thursday Night Football seems to have avoided such issues:
It is basically everybody.This type of day is what Amazon has avoided on TNF, which has been its biggest win. https://t.co/3OLYj4UbgiOctober 29, 2023
When it inked its multiyear, reportedly $2 billion deal to acquire the rights to NFL Sunday Ticket nearly a year ago, tech experts questioned whether Google had the technical bandwidth to handle the millions of viewers that would simultaneously be watching YouTube TV on Sunday afternoons, however until now, there had been very few issues reported.
