Paramount's Super Bowl livestream problems are a warning for Netflix and the new mega sports streamer
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Peter Kafka
Feb 13, 2024, 04:29 IST
Some Paramount+ subscribers had errors when trying to stream the Super Bowl.Icon Sportswire/Getty Images
Some Paramount Plus users complained the service's Super Bowl livestream didn't work Sunday night.
Paramount acknowledges there were problems that affected "a very small number of subscribers."
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Super Bowl winners, a partial list: The Kansas City Chiefs. Taylor Swift. Paramount, which broadcast and streamed the game to what was probably the biggest audience in the game's history.
Super Bowl losers, a partial list: The San Francisco 49ers. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had to apologize to his family for an ad promoting his presidential campaign. And Paramount, whose Paramount Plus livestream conked out for some users, who took to the internet to complain.
What happened?
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Paramount won't get into details. But it did acknowledge, through a statement, that it did have some problems Sunday night: "The vast majority of users experienced an uninterrupted stream but we are aware that a very small number of subscribers experienced an error due to a technical issue with one of our partners, which was quickly rectified."
Without more detail from Paramount, it doesn't make sense to speculate about the cause of Paramount's problems.
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What we can say, with confidence, was that Paramount was hoping a lot of people were going to use the service to watch the game, and was hoping it could use the event to sell more subscriptions.
And we also know that when a lot of people want to watch the same thing, at the same time, on the internet, there can be problems.
It is possible that part of the problem is simply the architecture of the internet itself, where data is broken up into "packets," which are routed on different paths and then reassembled when they get to their destination. That works well for email, less well for live video, as Roger Lynch, who was running Sling TV in 2015, told me back then.
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"The internet was designed for what I'd call non-real-time traffic," said Lynch, who now runs Condé Nast. "It's a big traffic-management system."
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