By the time most of us saw Harrison Butker drill a 27-yard field goal with less than 10 seconds left to effectively ice Super Bowl LVII for the Kansas City Chiefs Sunday, fans at the scene had already had time to witness it and let all the emotions of a great game wash over them.
Depending on how one viewed the Big Game, they almost certainly weren't watching it live, despite what the little indicator on their TV may have said. The streaming technology company Phenix Real-Time Solutions tracked the latency time of each of the broadcasts of Sunday's game and found that the gap between the action and the moment it flashed across viewers’ screens ranged between 23 seconds for those who streamed it via the Fox Sports app to nearly 77 seconds for those who watched it on Fubo. Most platforms, including NFL+, lagged by about a minute. Those who watched on TV had, on average, a 28-second lag.
In how many houses across the land did somebody glance at their ESPN app and see that the score was, in fact, 38-35 before the rest of the people in the room got to witness the winning kick tumble through the uprights? For those who wanted to interact on social media, spoilers — including from reporters and others on the ground in Glendale, Arizona — were hard to avoid.
True microbetting relies on fast streams
For the sports betting industry, latency is a pressing issue. For years, industry observers have been predicting that microbetting – wagering on highly time-sensitive events once the game has begun – could become a driving force for sportsbook revenue, but it will be hard for that to happen with one-minute latency.