If you were watching Super Bowl LVII on FOX while also following along on social media, you might have noticed that other viewers — especially those watching on the Fox Sports app — were actually ahead of the cable and streaming broadcasts for most of the game. This presented all-too-common annoyance when watching a big game and having a major play spoiled because your people were watching on other platforms and tweeting about what happened before you had the chance to even see the play “live.”
The Fox Sports app, which offered the FOX telecast of the Kansas City Chiefs’ 38-35 victory over the Philadelphia Eagles for free, removed nearly the entire delay (or latency) compared to the over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts and streaming feeds that viewers are accustomed to when watching live sports.
The Streamable tested the delay between the feed on OTA vs. a number of streaming services and the Fox Sports app won big time. In comparison to FOX viewed on an OTA antenna, it was only one second behind the live feed. Fox broadcasted both in HD and 4K, and neither feed drifted more than a few seconds behind OTA throughout the game.
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The Fox Sports app was actually AHEAD of cable, which was a first in the three years that we have tested streaming latency during the Super Bowl. In 2021, the CBS Sports app was able to achieve just a two-second delay vs. cable, but this year the Fox Sports app was a full 17 seconds ahead in our tests of an Xfinity cable box.
In comparison, the next shortest stream delay was the NFL App at 38 seconds behind the OTA feed. The best performer of live TV streaming services was DIRECTV STREAM at 39 seconds, then fuboTV at 52 seconds, Hulu + Live TV at 54 seconds, while both YouTube TV and Sling TV were both at 56 seconds. Of course, the results would vary slightly depending on each individual device being tested and its location to a router. For instance, YouTube TV, which was 56 seconds behind on the web, was just 37 seconds behind on Roku devices.
The one major difference between the Fox Sports app and live TV streaming services is that was carrying a single national feed – instead of offering a local affiliate in many different markets, meaning that it only had to serve one individual feed, while the live streamers were having to use resources to pump out over 100 different feeds around the country.
One of the annoying aspects of streaming video — especially for live events — is that it has historically lagged behind cable and satellite TV. Many sports fans in apartments, would hear their neighbors with cable scream before a touchdown would appear on their stream. Also, big plays can often be spoiled if you follow along on Twitter or receive text messages from friends. But as sports gambling becomes more popular, removing latency will be essential to allow for real-time betting without putting people at unfair advantages or disadvantages.
But, by reducing the latency to almost nothing for Super Bowl LVII, FOX showed that it is possible to stream a massive event online in near real-time without having to worry about being behind your Twitter feed.