As noted earlier today, it’s one thing for YouTube TV to have latency in the broadcast networks included in its base package. It’s another to have latency in the premium product that YouTubeTV will be offering in September -- NFL Sunday Ticket.
On the question of potential latency for Sunday Ticket, a YouTube TV spokesperson told PFT this on Wednesday afternoon, via email: “The YouTube TV team is working on building a high-quality Sunday Ticket experience. Overall, YouTube TV is built on the infrastructure that powers YouTube and reliably serves billions of playback every day. Users can check their Live Latency in ‘Stats For Nerds’ directly in the YouTube TV app. We’re always working to find the right tradeoff between latency, buffering and quality.”
This doesn’t mean latency won’t be an issue. Instead, it acknowledges that latency is one of the factors that drives the overall experience. If eliminating latency impacts quality, then consumers may have to deal with a certain amount of latency. And if buffering becomes an issue, that will be a much bigger deal than latency.
All in all, the shift from DirecTV should be regarded as good news for consumers. But if there’s significant lag when September rolls around, the same folks who complained about DirecTV will be complaining about its successor.
