Fans watching World Cup games online have called foul after the BBC and ITV’s on-demand platforms threatened to buckle under the weight of web traffic.
Now Tuesday night’s vital England vs Wales match will provide another huge test of the UK’s streaming infrastructure as many fans follow the action through mobile, laptop and tablet devices. A record eight million streamed England’s opening match on the BBC,and insiders expect the all-British clash will top that.
The BBC’s iPlayer and ITVX, the replacement for the notoriously glitchy ITV Hub, struggled to cope with a surge in traffic during the tournament’s first week.
Gary Lineker apologised live on air during the England’s opening game against Iran over a technical issue with iPlayer which left angry fans locked out of the platform just ahead of the lunchtime kick-off, while others complained of buffering.
The BBC believes the issues have been solved ahead of Tuesday night’s home nations encounter, which is tipped to secure the biggest domestic audience of the tournament so far.
Insiders suggested the log-in issue had been overcome and iPlayer might not be to blame for the buffering – many workplace internet systems were not designed to be used for live video streaming by multiple workers.
With up to four games a day, millions of fans at the office are dashing to jump online whenever word spreads of a possible upset, such as Saudi Arabia’s stunning defeat of Argentina, which hit a peak before midday on Tuesday and Japan’s mid-afternoon comeback win against Germany.
“The numbers of concurrent streams went absolutely crazy during the last five minutes of the Saudia Arabia game as word spread this was going to be one of the World Cup’s biggest upsets,” Rufus Radcliffe, ITV’s head of On Demand told i.
ITV has hired 250 engineers to ensure that ITVX offers a superior user experience to the Hub, which infuriated viewers with frozen screens during live England games.
That still hasn’t prevented viewer complaints on Twitter that the branding might have changed but the online viewing issues remained during games.
ITV took the high-stakes decision to launch ITVX in the midst of the World Cup to help raise brand awareness of the new, free service which will become the exclusive portal to watch the broadcaster’s high-end dramas.
“Obviously launching in the World Cup is a fantastic opportunity to present your new proposition to huge audiences but you’ve got to make sure viewers can all enjoy it at the same time,” Mr Radcliffe said.
“We will have done a lot of load-testing ahead of the knockout stages when you get really big numbers for games involving home nations.”
Despite the connectivity issues, the Iran game broke iPlayer records with eight million streams of the match recorded over a 24-hour period.
ITV, which showed Wales’s opener against USA, had its biggest day of the year so far for streaming for all programmes, with 13.4 million streams across the day.
One problem BBC and ITV’s brightest tech brains are still grappling with is the time lag between sound and pictures reaching online audiences and satellite TV viewers. Known as “end-to-end latency” among engineers, it’s the reason why people hear cheers from their neighbours when England score well before witnessing the event on screen.
iPlayer viewers complained on Twitter about the delay, caused by the time it takes to process and receive compressed large data files, which can be a minute or more, each time England scored against Iran. One TV executive said the best solution was to “close your windows.”
Help is at hand however with tech firm Akamai working on a cloud-based solution which it says will reduce latency in live sports broadcasts to just one or two seconds.
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“It’s an issue for all broadcasters, everyone wants to narrow that window,” Radcliffe said. “It’s more of a problem in a summer tournament when people have their windows open and they’re watching in pubs and gardens. It’s less of a problem in the dark days of November.
Viewers are already waking up to the Hub’s replacement by the ITVX app, which will be officially launched on 8 December. It boasts a sleek new user interface, modelled on US platforms like recent arrival Peacock, on smart TVs and phones.
Mr Radcliffe monitors viewing numbers minute-by-minute on his digital dashboard and has already noticed one curiosity. “After the football they are calling up Broadchurch (the David Tennant crime drama first shown in 2013) to watch again.”
Although viewers can pay £5.99 a month to watch ITVX’s 15,000 hours of TV shows and films without adverts, bosses are banking on the free tier luring back viewers who are reducing their spend on TV subscriptions as the cost of living rises.
Dramas such as A Spy Among Friends, featuring Damian Lewis and Litvinenko, starring David Tennant, will run on ITVX for up to nine months before being screened on the flagship ITV1 channel.
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