The age of streaming has ushered in the parallel age of streaming services failing in the middle of live action.
We’ve seen that time and again, especially surrounding big sports events. (YouTube TV famously offered subscribers a bill credit after a crash during the 2018 World Cup semis, among other similar outages.)
This makes sense! Live sports tends to draw a big collection of users all streaming at the same time, essentially a high-stakes stress test. Similar things have happened during non-sports event programming like the House of the Dragon premiere.
Last night the problem came for Apple TV+ subscribers, especially those trying to watch MLS action.
Christopher Harris had a good timeline for World Soccer Talk, including this gem of an upside:
Reports started coming in that the Apple TV app was not working around 9:40PM ET. Downdetector continued reporting that all of the Apple services were down until around 11:20PM ET.
The Apple TV downtime coincided with viewers missing Alexi Lalas’ guest appearance on MLS 360, so at least there was a ray of light.
Apple TV+ is the exclusive home for many MLS matches now through a new rights deal. With that kind of live sports exclusivity, though, comes a lot of responsibility. While this outage certainly affected all subscribers, not just MLS viewers, there’s a difference in urgency.
If you’re someone paying Apple for MLS Season Pass, you’re almost certainly doing so out of a strong passion and desire to watch games live. Unlike the folks complaining about not being able to finish a Schmigadoon! binge at their specific leisure, a thirty-minute delay to sports viewers has actual consequences.
This is the kind of situation that requires a much more immediate and available public message, too, which was the main complaint of many last night. Apple TV’s Twitter account hasn’t sent anything about the situation. Folks were left to look for other Twitter users with the same issues, or checking Downdetector, which did indeed show quite a spike.
That’s not good enough customer service, especially considering a lot of people affected are likely new subscribers. Let’s hope this is an anomaly going forward.