By: Mike Sullivan/RaceCanada.ca
July 8, 2024
July 8, 2024
So I'm in the process of watching my first race on demand with TSN+, and since I'm writing about it, while it's still on, you might guess the experience has not been a good one. You would be correct.
As I write this I've been watching for 2 hours and 12 minutes, and I've seen 28 laps of racing. That's not a good ratio for watching an on-demand race. And I have completely lost track of how many commercials I've seen, but it's way out of proportion to the amount of laps I've seen.
One of the big advantages to PVRing or watching on demand is the ability to fast forward, quickly, through a rain delay, without having to be subjected to all the commercials or to jump in and out of the broadcast where you want to.
My issues started about 15 minutes into watching when my internet had a very brief outage, just as the cars started rolling. Instead of continuing where I left off, the coverage went back to the very beginning. If this would have happened, say, half way through the race, it's unlikely I would have continued.
What made this a true disaster was the complete lack of ability to control the player. The only options are fast forward 10 seconds, rewind 10 seconds or pause. No 30 second fast forward, no status bar along the bottom you can drag. Just 10 seconds forward or reverse.
And, just to top that agony off, you can only fast forward to the next commercial block. So you have to fast forward to the next set of commercials, when the Fast Forward and Reverse controls disappear, and you then sit through 2 or 3 commercials, then begin fast forwarding again, until the next set of commercials.
And if that wasn't enough, every single commercial break had at least one commercial with significant buffering issues taking an additional 30 seconds, and often more, so what should have been a 60 or 90 second break turned into a 90 second to 2 minutes break, or more.
One of the dumber Kit Cat commercial buffered so many times a single commercial took almost 2 minutes to get through. I should add that I had no buffering during the actual broadcast, just the ads, so it wasn't an internet or streaming issue, it was an ad server issue.
And just to make the ridiculous number of commercials and having to sit through them all a little worse, the volume of the commercials were often different between each of them, and between the broadcast, so I was adjusting the volume during almost every commercial break.
Maybe this set up works OK for hockey or football, where there are no extended weather breaks, but it does not work for racing. With F1 TV, you can either drag the status bar along the bottom until the race starts up again, or have a 30 second fast forward button, with no commercial breaks or buffering, so every moving 20 or 30 minutes ahead isn't a big deal.
At the end of the day, I started watching just before 9:30am and by the time I was finished it was 12:53pm, just in time this this weekends IMSA/CTMP zoom photo meeting. More than 3 hours to fight through all the commercials and watch 58 laps of racing.
I'm still (for now) a supporter of TSN+, it could be so good for fans, but if they want to get TSN+ right for racing fans, this has to change. This was absolutely ridiculous today.
*****UPDATE - After getting a couple of comments on social media telling me other viewers they had access to fast forward controls that would let them fast forward at speeds up to 180x, I decided to take a look on my upstairs TV, which uses a computer and the website, and not the app.
One things I noticed, the race was showing that it was uploaded 5 hours ago, meaning it didn't get uploaded until sometime between 4:00pm and 5:00pm, which is well after the time I first watched this morning. There is a difference between this version and the one I watched earlier today. This new upload now had a status bar along the bottom to drag the progession of the race to where ever you wanted it, and it was available on both the website version, and now on the app versions on both my tablet and my phone. There is still no sign of multi-speed fast forward controls, just the 10 seconds forward and back, and the new progress bar.
The new progress bar also had indicators on it where the commercial breaks were, and when you dragged he progress bar further ahead in the race, no matter how many commercial breaks you moved past you only got one set of commercials.
It seems there are differences between apps and operating systems. Watching on with the computer and website upstairs, there was 3 commericals to start the broadcast and all the the commercial breaks during the broadcast when the progress bar was dragged forward were 4 commercials in length. On the app, everything seemed to be 2 commercals, both to start the broadcast and all of the commercial breaks.
So it seems there are some very big differences, two differnt uploads of the broadcast, and different controls depending on which device you are watching it on. We'll take a look at this again next weekend and see what the differences between this week and next.