The biggest problem in hockey, we can agree, is how mean Canadian media is to players. Obviously. The second biggest problem is when your broadcast is so far behind the live game that you get a notification on your phone about a goal before you see the goal happen.
It is my belief that Aaron Portzline, senior writer for The Athletic, might be the fastest goal-tweeter in the NHL. This is a compliment. Except the man can post a goal update one full-ass minute before I see it on my TV. And it’s not just me, and it didn’t use to be this bad.
(The rest of this story is not about Aaron Portzline. I’m sorry, Aaron Portzline. This isn’t your fault. You do great work.)
In the past, what we saw on TV was near enough to live action. People used to listen to the real-time radio call while watching national games, and they’d almost line up. Something changed. I don’t know for sure, but I think the complexity of casting to so many platforms and services is at fault. One conspicuous example of that complexity is the dynamic advertisements inserted along the boards. That program, called digitally enhanced dasherboards, or DED, began widespread adoption in 2022.
In the early days, those digital ads struggled; for example, this glitch-out from January 2023.
This next example is my favorite: transitioning from disgraced crypto company FTX to, um, graced weapons manufacturer Raytheon (who coincidentally changed their name to RTX a few months later) while Anthony Mantha scored off a feed from Lars Eller. A time capsule from another era, one slightly less cursed than our own.
The NHL reportedly enjoyed a 21 percent increase in sponsor ad revenue as a result of the DED program. And though these ads have given boundless joy to shareholders and fans alike, they may also have some downsides too.
To work out the kinks in the dynamic ad insertion, broadcasters required additional processing time to locate the boards, track camera movement, and mask them to get replaced by the ads. That processing time added to the delay already needed to encode and then transcode the game into our viewing feeds, which then have to be decoded on our devices.
It felt to me, who spends his nights reacting to and joking about what’s happening on the ice, like I was falling further behind – even though I had been watching the same way I always have: Monumental Sports Network over cable. (I have since cut the cord; here’s my report on that.)
But feeling is for English majors. I am a numbers-based STEM person now, and I need cold, hard data. Was my cable the issue? Is it faster on other platforms? And how long is the delay depending on how you watch?
RMNB has found out.
Methodology
We asked the #crashers from the RMNB Discord to a) self-report their method of watching and then b) post at the precise moment they observe the game’s first puck drop. The timestamp of their post was then compared to the timestamp of live action to calculate the delay. The exercise was conducted twice – for a national broadcast and a Monumental broadcast.
Summary
- The shortest delay is more than 20 seconds.
- The average delay is between 25 and 35 seconds.
- Monumental over cable is often the fastest.
- National games are more delayed than local games.
- There can be significant variance in delay for viewers on the same platforms. (More on this below.)
- Amazon Fire Stick seems to have a longer delay, suggesting on-device decoding could be a drag.
- Hulu is generally behind other platforms.
- One viewer watching using a cellular signal reported a bigger delay than a fiber-optic viewer on the same method.
- Streaming Sportsnet from Canada – you might as well just read about the game in the newspaper tomorrow.
Figure 1 – Seconds behind live play per viewing method
Note: In this case, Sportsnet refers to SN+ over streaming. Also, please don’t talk about pirating options in the comments.
Several times our respondents noticed, later in the game, that their feeds had fallen behind others’. This is because small, almost-undetectable buffering pauses had accumulated over the course of the broadcast – until you realize you’re minutes behind live action. Reloading the game fixes the issue on pretty much every platform.
We’ve also seen the same game feed delivered on ESPN and TNT be noticeably behind on the TNT side. It’s a black box.
I’d love to repeat this test. I want to know more about other kinds of platforms, like Roku. I noticed my TCL TV streams the Monumental app much more poorly than my Sony – both on the Google TV platform – why? I would like to know how other regional sports networks (RSNs) perform.
We have an extensive guide on the different ways to watch games, and we’re always updating it. If you have thoughts, please share them in the comments or get in touch directly.
In the meantime, someone ask Portzline to slow down.
