I am a Ravens fan in Oregon. As such I watch live games via NFL Sunday Ticket. I was unable to watch last week as the site was so overwhelmed that it was impossible to renew the account.
This week it was working, and I was happily texting with my sister and nephew about what was happening in the game. This is our weekly tradition during FB season. Given that they are in New York and Los Angeles, they also get their game feed via Sunday Ticket. Some time around the beginning of the second quarter in today’s game the feed started failing. It wasn’t just my local feed as theirs were also down. Over the following twenty minutes or so the site sporadically returned to live stream, but would fail again after fifteen seconds or so. This was happening to all of us. I finally gave up watching.
Meanwhile, I have a thing about continuity when watching sporting events. I don’t like missing parts of the game earlier on as it sometimes causes things later in the game to lack context. I also like to see the flow of energy in the game, and that requires continuity as well. As such, I stopped watching the live stream, and will watch the replay after the game is over. (Please, no scores/spoliers in comments.) This also means that I cannot watch other games before I watch the replay. Otherwise they will spoil the result by giving updates from around the league.
I have a theory as to why this is happening. There were many thousands of NFL fans who quit watching the NFL as an act of solidarity with Drumpf in his Colin Kaepernick defamation. I believe it is quite likely that the reason that Direct TV and Sunday Ticket failed to provide sufficient server power to stream this weekend is because they failed to anticipate this surge of new/former NFL fans. This would be further evidence that the spell is broken for many of them.
And as noted above, this is only a theory. I like it, though and hope that it is valid.
