So today's the day everyone's phone is either going to be really useful or completely useless, depending on who your carrier is. Super Bowl XLIX kicks off tonight, Patriots and Seahawks, and NBC is doing something it's never done before: streaming the whole game live online. Which sounds great until you read the fine print.
Here's the deal. If you want to watch on a computer or tablet through NBCSports.com, you can, but only if you log in with credentials from a "participating" cable or satellite provider. Fine, annoying but fine, that's the TV Everywhere model we've all gotten used to complaining about. But if you want to watch on your phone? Forget the cable login entirely. The only way to stream the Super Bowl on a phone this year is through Verizon's NFL Mobile app, and it only works if you're actually a Verizon Wireless customer.
I've got AT&T. Have for years, mostly out of inertia and a family plan I don't want to untangle. So tonight, if my cable box dies or I end up somewhere without a TV, I am simply out of luck. Not "buffering and low quality" out of luck. Not "geo-blocked, use a workaround" out of luck. Just flatly cannot watch the biggest live TV event of the year on the device that's in my pocket right now. Verizon apparently paid a pretty significant sum to the NFL for that exclusivity, and I get why they wanted it, but it's a strange kind of progress where "we streamed it online for the first time ever" comes with an asterisk the size of a billboard.
The thing that gets me is how this keeps happening with sports specifically. Music, movies, even a lot of live news, we've mostly worked out how to get that stuff to whatever screen we want. Sports rights are still locked up in this tangle of regional blackouts and carrier deals and provider logins that feels like it's from 2009, not 2015. My buddy Dave, who does have Verizon, was practically bragging about it at lunch yesterday like he'd won something. He kind of had.
(Small tangent, unrelated except in my head: this is the first Super Bowl since the blackout one, back in 2013, when the lights went out in the Superdome for 34 minutes and Twitter basically invented a new genre of brand marketing in real time with that Oreo "you can still dunk in the dark" tweet. I think about that tweet more than is probably healthy. Anyway.)
I'll be watching the normal way tonight, on an actual television, because I happen to have a Time Warner Cable login that qualifies. But it bugs me that "normal way" is even still the fallback plan in 2015 for something NBC is publicly calling a streaming-first moment. If you're one of the people trying to catch the game on a lunch break at work or on a phone at a bar with bad TV reception, and you're not on Verizon, you're watching a scoreboard app and some brave soul's live-tweets instead.
The ads matter more to some people than the game anyway, and this year a bunch of tech and gadget companies bought spots, which I'll probably write about tomorrow once I've actually seen them instead of just reading the previews. GoDaddy already pulled one of theirs after backlash over a joke about a lost puppy, which tells you something about how careful even a company known for being deliberately obnoxious has gotten.
Anyway. Kickoff's at 6:30 Eastern. If you're stuck without Verizon like me, there's apparently a delayed on-demand version through the app the next day, which is a very generous way of saying "you can watch the highlights tomorrow like a normal person." Enjoy the game, or enjoy the ads, or enjoy watching your Twitter feed lose its mind about the halftime show, whichever applies.