Spark Sport streaming woes signal we may not be ready to move toward Digital only sports viewing.
This year’s RWC was tipped as the dawn of a new era – the first streamed sporting event of major national importance was always going to be a challenge. Spark Sport have the rights to all RWC content available on their subscription based platform. They have also formed commercial partnerships with TVNZ to deliver games in a free to air (FTA) environment and SKY to fulfil the needs to pubs and bars.
TVNZ 1 has FTA coverage of 12 games (of the total 48 games) – this includes all NZ pool matches, the quarter-final (all delayed by 1 hour), and live coverage of the semi-finals and the final.
The relationship between these two major players is vital as there needs to be a contingency plan if things don’t go to plan for Spark Sport in order to keep the nation happy.
Since it was announced that Spark Sport would have the rights to RWC 2019 there have been various questions about streaming capability from consumers – Will my internet speed be fast enough? What will the quality be like? What devices can I steam on? How do I access the content?
All of which are valid queries for a fairly new platform that has the streaming rights to one of the world’s most prestigious sporting tournaments. The combination of the Spark Sport helpdesk along with the online information seems to have helped most subscribers answer these queries and get the best from the RWC 2019. However, up until Friday 20th September 2019, the platform had yet to (stress) tested by large numbers of users.
The opening ceremony and subsequent opening match between the home side Japan and Russia drew in almost 60,000 streams. Most consumers seemingly had no issues streaming these events however it wasn’t completely flawless as there were multiple news reports that a ‘tiny fraction’ of consumers were frustrated with complaints ranging from freezing, lagging to glitches. There was also a small 1% of users who experienced isolated technical issues mostly related to their in-home set up. The most common problem seemed to lie with those using Samsung Smart TV’s – those who switched to watch something else on their TV without first exiting the Spark Sport app experienced issues with their streaming. Overall Spark Sport said that the platform performed “extremely well”.
However the first All Black match vs. South Africa on Saturday 21st September caused Spark Sport to run in to some major technical issues within the first 15mins of the game (think buffering and frozen screens for a number of consumers). Consumers were not shy to express their disappointment and frustration – especially after many years of seamless viewing on SKY. Spark Sport were forced to make a quick decision to move the game to TVNZ and provided a live simulcast of the second half which aired FTA on TVNZ’s Duke.
From Nielsen, approximately 132,000 consumers streamed the match via Spark Sport – if we multiply that by 2.7 (average number of people in a NZ household), that is approx. 356,400 consumers watching the live stream.
In addition there were 568,400 consumers (5+), who watched the game FTA on TVNZ 1 (delayed by 1 hour), and Duke (live) – that’s a total of approximately 925,000 viewers who were watching the AB’s trounce the Springboks – nearly 20% of the total NZ population! This combined viewership is a good sign for the RWC as it confirms that Kiwis are still heavily invested in Rugby.
Due to the technical issues, as of Monday 23 September, Spark Sport are now offering consumers full or partial refunds if they are unhappy with their service over the weekend. This was a decisive and positive move for Spark Sport to help them minimise the number of disgruntled subscribers even when some of the problems are not Spark Sport’s fault.
Presumably Spark Sport knew how many subscribers they had prior to the RWC starting, so theoretically there should not have been any overload issues. Jeff Latch (Spark’s Head of Sport), issued a statement – “The issue was caused by the configuration of the video signal from the US, this has been identified, resolved and fixed”. He believed the rest of the tournament streams would go off without a hitch – this confidence is promising for the remainder of the RWC.
It will be interesting to see what happens for future RWC games, especially those where there is expected to be a large numbers of streams i.e. any games where the AB’s are playing. It remains to be seen if the Spark Sport streaming problems are in fact fixed as they have led the nation to believe. It does open the door (further) for TVNZ to be positioned as the saviour again and reap the rewards if there are any further issues.
