By Jennifer Asencio
| Published
Basketball season is winding down and at the time of this writing is in the first round of its playoff tournament. Before that could begin, there was also a play-in tournament meant to fill out the rest of the playoff brackets through one-game matches whose winners would continue to the next round. The games have been frenetic, with most of them decided in the last minutes. Basically, basketball is hurtling down the canyon, about to drop the torpedo into the Death Star.
Imagine you are watching Luke Skywalker just about to use the force to make his shot, when all of a sudden the streaming service you are watching it on interrupts the action for “technical difficulties.” That is exactly what happened to basketball fans on not one but two streaming services.
Peacock and Amazon Prime are splitting the duty of airing the NBA postseason. Amazon Prime aired the play-in tournament, while the two networks are swapping the playoff games back and forth. During three different games, both within the final minute of very close matches, both streamers suffered technical difficulties that interrupted the broadcast.
Technical Interruptions Interfere With Gameplay
On April 14, 2026, the Orlando Magic and Charlotte Hornets were in a match-up for all the marbles. The winner would go on to the next round of the play-in tournament, while the loser went home. With 30 seconds left in the game, the score was 123-120, which, if you know basketball, means the Hornets only needed one shot from the right part of the court to tie the game, and they had the ball. Suddenly, Prime, which aired that game, put up a “technical difficulties” card, during which the Hornets did score another basket, making the score 123-122 while no one could see on television. The contentious game ended with the Magic winning, 127-126, but fans only got to see it because the teams called a time-out while Prime fixed its issue.
A week later, on April 20, 2026, the New York Knicks played the Atlanta Hawks on Peacock. The game ended with the Knicks losing 107-106, but once again, the final minute was interrupted by a “technical difficulties” card. This time, the difficulties were offset by a time out and viewers didn’t miss any of the action, but the Knicks-Hawks game wasn’t the only difficulty Peacock had that night.
Also playing that night after the Knicks-Hawks game were the Denver Nuggets and the Minnesota Timberwolves. For most of the game, the teams traded the lead, ending halftime tied. But in the last quarter (12 minutes of active game time), the ‘Wolves started a major comeback. In the final minute, it was anyone’s game, with both teams bringing their best play to the match … and then technical difficulties struck again.
To the credit of the NBA teams playing these games, all three called time-outs when the technical difficulties overtook the broadcast. Often, interruptions like this cause viewers to miss the action, and the broadcast usually just resumes when it is fixed rather than showing viewers what they missed. The rules of basketball serendipitously offset this with time-outs and frequent breaks for players who are literally running at full speed for minutes at a time, but a lot of live broadcasts do not have breaks like that.
The Streaming Blob Absorption Conundrum
Paramount+ also suffers issues with its streaming services often lagging, and the live TV function on that service is also often inaccessible. Survivor 50 fans lost 15 minutes of the premiere episode because the live TV feature was frozen for many viewers as numerous people tried to watch the show. MLB.TV bills itself as the home of all things baseball, but it also lags and freezes during live broadcasts of games.
With more live broadcasts getting absorbed by the streaming blob, interruptions like this mark an infuriating turn. It is bad enough that many services have interruptions to movies or demand high prices to eliminate commercials from their content. As streaming services become ubiquitous, they are also demonstrating that they can’t handle the load brought on by live television events.
The Balkanization of streaming services has made subscribing to them similar to subscribing to each cable channel individually (can you imagine having to pay separately for CNN, TNT, AMC, USA, and TBS, on top of premium channels like ESPN, HBO or Showtime?). As it is, to watch post-season basketball out of market requires two different premium streaming services (the Peacock games are also aired on NBC, but only regionally). Watching the NFL postseason this past winter required four. Watching the Oscars is going to require a YouTube subscription starting in 2028.
Past Is Prologue, But We Still Haven’t Learned
Interruptions in the middle of live events are so unpardonable from any channel that it was made official policy to show the entirety of a game and preempt the shows following after the infamous “Heidi Bowl” incident in 1968. During this New York Jets NFL home game, the then-Oakland Raiders were dominating the field of play, so the network decided to switch to a made-for-TV version of the German folk story “Heidi.” The Jets came back to win the game in an exciting upset that only fans in the stadium got to see. While this was a bad network decision and not a technical difficulty, it set a precedent for live broadcasting that existed all the way until the Prime-Peacock NBA postseason broadcasts.
What streaming customers are getting isn’t as consistent as what we got from comparable cable channels. The more broadcasting, live or not, that moves over to streaming, the more the services are going to have to address these problems. Streaming was supposed to be a superior alternative to television. Instead, as the NBA playoffs debacle has demonstrated, they are becoming more of a monster than cable and can’t even provide the same level of service.
