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All those with cable subscriptions got to watch the Oscars, while I got to “watch” by rapidly clicking refresh on my browser for poorly-recorded video clips on X and waiting for updates from the Oscars X account. Certainly not as fun or passive as viewing this exciting live event, and—more importantly—it’s not what I pay good money for each month. Overall just a bad, bad experience: 0/10.
Others online were just as upset with users sharing their angst, disappointment and frustration on the very same thread that reassured my own fears: -
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If this was the first time in the short history of the online streaming of live events, it would be one thing. But alas, this year’s Superbowl was also a streaming-service-induced cluster.
We’ve truly come full circle. Streaming was once the answer to pricey cable subscriptions. You could pay the price of a cup of coffee, and access tons of movies in a simple app. Now, we’ve reinvented cable TV as a dizzying array of streaming services merge together into expensive packages. Instead of just having Netflix and cable TV, you now have to choose from Netflix, Apple+, Paramount+, Disney+, Sling, Peacock, Max, Hulu, Prime Video, Tubi, Fubo, and don’t forget good old-fashioned cable as well… the list goes on and on.
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I was told I could watch the big game, featuring my beloved Philadelphia Eagles (versus some other team featuring Taylor Swift’s boyfriend), on a free streaming service. Excellent!
As the big game began, the issues with streaming began, as people shared on social media. First, the game wouldn’t load on the app. So, I figured out a different way to watch the game by manually typing in the URL. Now I could see the game, but at a low resolution of 480p (what is this 2003?). You could, at best, make out the colors of the pixelated figures as they blurred across the screen. Worse still, the video, which resembled a gif in appearance, might as well have been a gif since it had no sound—absolute silence. So I pulled up the game’s audio on my phone screen and played the sound alongside the video on my TV. Now I could watch the game on the big screen while listening on the smaller one, but the sound never once synced up with the game. Overall, while not as bad as the Oscars streaming debacle, it was a really bad experience: 2/10. And I wasn’t alone in this experience: Other fans reported “freezing, stuttering, and buffering” throughout the entire Super Bowl game.
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Imagine hosting a viewing party for one of these events, guests standing around idly while the hosts desperately try to finesse their streaming service into playing the live event that they’d already paid for. Even though fewer people watched the 2025 Super Bowl than in previous years, some platforms just can’t seem to handle that big influx of viewers.
As one marketing director noted, issues that some platforms had two years ago are still issues today. As any sports fanatic can tell you, even a few seconds of lag time can make a huge difference in your game-watching experience. At least the 2025 Superbowl wasn’t a nail-biter, since the Eagles had a 34-6 lead over the Chiefs by the end of the 3rd quarter. It would just be nice to just watch live TV without all of this hoopla surrounding it. A return to the days of typing the channel number into the remote control would be a dream come true. We should be cheering on the big game or rooting for our favorite celebs to win their awards, not scanning QR codes to reset our passwords and asking random Redditors to help us solve our TV problems.
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What is the point of these streaming services if they fall flat during every big event?
As people frantically sign up for free trials of random streaming services to watch their events, I was reminded of this tweet-turned-copypasta:
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What can be done about all of the streaming confusion? From a streaming company’s perspective, what’s the point of fine-tuning your streaming service if you don’t have to? Is this an issue for the FCC to take up? Does the burden fall upon average citizens? We’re all paying for these repeated mistakes with our hard-earned dollars!
When will viewers finally say “enough is enough”? Maybe when there’s a viable alternative we’ll turn our backs on streaming services and their juvenile, half-cocked attempts to turn into cable services at cable prices. (Maybe we’ll all return to cable!) But until then, we’re stuck watching laggy live events… if we can even view them at all.
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The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.
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