The Big Ten almost has a great premium streaming service. As last night’s Michigan women’s basketball broadcast showed, though, it’s still plagued by technical issues that often render Big Ten Plus useless.
THIS CAN’T BE SO HARD
If you’ve followed me the last few years, you know that my fandom for U-M women’s hoops has greatly intensified as Kim Barnes Arico has developed the program into a national presence. Yesterday, the Wolverines played their season opener against a hapless Delaware State squad.
As is the norm for non-marquee non-conference WBB games — and even a number of conference matchups — the broadcast was slated for the Big Ten’s premium streaming service, Big Ten Plus. I logged in early on my Roku because the app is notorious for inexplicable breakdowns, though this time it went smoothly.
I don’t hold high expectations for these broadcasts, as much as I’d like the conference to invest more in women’s sports coverage. To maximize what they broadcast, BTN+ uses student broadcasters or team radio feeds and relays the scoreboard video feed when they don’t have dedicated cameras. I’m not hoping for much more than to be able to see and hear the action and know the score.
It’s shocking how often these streams fail to clear that low bar. Yesterday’s broadcast only had one camera feed and didn’t have any on-screen graphics for a few minutes to open the game:
When they finally got around to putting up a chyron, it was a mess — taking up a huge portion of the screen, squishing the aspect ratio, inexplicably featuring random snippets of closed captioning and looking like it was ripped off a website that hasn’t been updated since 2002:
At some point around when they got the scoreboard up, they lost all sound for an extended period of time. When Michigan got into the bonus at the end of the quarter, three different (and different-sized) “BONUS” graphics littered the chyron. Try to spot them all!
These all fall under the category of minor annoyances compared to what followed. Big Ten Plus went to a break at the end of the first quarter, posting their usual drumline background music and “No Plus Like Home” (good lord) graphic. I started looking at my phone.
After a couple minutes, I realized I’d been looking at my phone for a while. The music, a short loop, had become distinctly annoying.
This went on for what felt like an eternity before the game suddenly snapped back on the screen as if nothing had happened:
Big Ten Plus just… didn’t come back to cover literally 10% of the game, seemingly because someone forgot to hit a button. I captured this video from the archived replay on BTN+ even though I can see from the BTN’s YouTube highlight reel that they did, in fact, have video and audio while we watched a static screen.
The level of give-a-fuck appears to be zero. The cheapest way to access this service is to pay $9.95 per month to follow either a single school or a single sport. This is far from an isolated incident. Watching ice hockey broadcasts is always an adventure. Only God can save you if you’re trying to watch a quality broadcast of a women’s athletic event.
The foundation is there for a great service. When it works, there’s a lot available between live and archived games. It gives students a chance to get real broadcasting experience, which I enjoy considering it’s impossible to get professional coverage of every game in every sport.
But these fundamental problems have existed for years. When Big Ten Plus is no longer a business expense, I’ll have a hard time choosing between the 11 or 12 U-M women’s basketball games scheduled for BTN+ and the ten bucks per month I wouldn’t have to pay for streams I fully expect to fail in the most basic way.
Actually, when I put it that way, it may not be that hard to choose.
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