NFL Game Pass is an internet streaming service. You pay around £140 per year and get access to live streams of all of the games. Except if Sky Sports is showing them, in which case they’re blacked out. You also get on-demand replays of the games.
Or that is the theory. Except, this year more than most, the NFL has been unable to deliver on their side of the bargain.
Broken TV apps
Let’s start with Apple TV. The app just doesn’t work anymore. At all. If you try and use it, it just says that they are migrating to a new app. But there is no App Store on the old Apple TV, so it doesn’t work, that’s just tough luck.
And broken tablet apps
The iOS app does not seem to be fairing much better. Here is the endless spinning of the login screen:
This is probably one of the many reasons why they have managed to score a total of 1 star on the App Store reviews system:
Browsers not working
I used to use Firefox to watch the video streams on my desktop. But that is no longer an option because the sound doesn’t work any more. So, I’ve been forced to switch to Chrome instead.
Video streams constantly freezing
In week four, as customers often experience, the video streams would often freeze up or drop to an unwatchably low quality. Yet, when you contact the NFL about this, they blame it on your connection.
In fact, we have become so used to this now that we are forced to run a speed test alongside the stream in preparation for the NFL blaming it on us. Here is mine:
With enough speed to watch 30 simultaneous Netflix shows, it seems unlikely that the problem is at my end. Or the many other ends from which people are complaining.
Video streams not working
Week 5, things got worse. The website wouldn’t load and nor would any of the streams. You either got stuck on accessing the website itself:
Or, if you were lucky enough to get through, you got no video:
It eventually started working at 7:23 pm, almost an hour and a half after kick-off, and four scores into the game.
Customer service not even responding
After week 4, I send out a full and detailed complaint setting out why I thought the NFL’s service was unacceptable and that they were failing to provide the service I was paying for.
I would post it here, in full, except I cannot because the NFL did not give me a copy of it, or ever respond to it. You have to use their online contact form to send your message, and they do not seem to respond to them or even acknowledge their existence.
I’m not the only person they are ignoring:
Fake reviews
BBC journalist Mark Simpson has been on the case to the NFL. He questioned them about it, and they said: “we have a 99.3% reliability”. Which is terrible, of course. Data centres typically offer you a 5/9 reliably, which is 99.999%. 99.3% does not cut it, especially when the .7 is when the games are actually on.
Here is the interview:
And it turns out that to try and cover up how poor the apps were, staff have been faking reviews to make it look better than it was:
The Independent covered the story, as did NBC Sports.
An army of disappointed fans
A quick search of Twitter shows how many people are having problems. While the NFL put out insulting tweets saying:
We are aware of an issue that some users may be having. We’re working to get it fixed as quickly as possible.
Note that “some users” seems to be the whole of the UK and Europe. 20 tweets a second were appearing from angry users during Sunday’s 6pm kick-off.
