CFL+ Streaming Woes

[markf]

You're signing up, for free, to watch the in-game stadium feed overlayed with a radio broadcast.

...of course it wasn't flawless.

Flawless?

It did not work at all for me till five minutes left in the first half. Not only is it not flawless, That is second rate, bush league.

If the league can't afford to stream a game, the league is in trouble.

They can and should do better.

[ModAdmin]

First, the CFL's main goal, like any business is to make money (you do that through maximizing profitable activities and minimizing costly ones, especially if there' s a low likelihood of ever seeing a return). Second, find me a single fan who struggled with the free pre-season stream and because of that has decided to cut back on their CFL spending as a result. You can't because the statement isn't true in the slightest.

What is true is that it isn't the best experience and the league knows it since it's obvious to literally everyone. You'll get no disputing of that fact from me. The key thing to understand is that it's very likely an extremely lightweight efficient way to get some sort of pre-season coverage for teams that play outside of Ontario since TSN doesn't want to fly people around for pre-season games because there's no money in it which is the crux of the issue.

The reality is the next best option is not to do it at all which is far and away a more likely outcome than higher production values. Guaranteed and without question.

The bolded part is something you can't say with any certainty.  It is, however, more likely that inferior marketing would affect "sales".  I am hopeful that there has been a fix because streaming is another useful tool to promote the product.

[Throw Long Bannatyne]

Flawless?

It did not work at all for me till five minutes left in the first half. Not only is it not flawless, That is second rate, bush league.

If the league can't afford to stream a game, the league is in trouble.

They can and should do better.

The Bombers made $6 million in profit last season, fair to say the teams and the league can probably budget more for streaming.  The fact they overlapped 3 games on one day, indicates they did not take the broadcasting of these games at all seriously.   I hope Super Stewie responds within the next few days with an acknowledgement, an explanation and a plan.

[markf]

The Bombers made $6 million in profit last season, fair to say the teams and the league can probably budget more for streaming.  The fact they overlapped 3 games on one day, indicates they did not take the broadcasting of these games at all seriously.  I hope Super Stewie responds within the next few days with an acknowledgement, an explanation and a plan.

Imagine what an American broadcaster would think of this, when our league negotiates with them for rights to the CFL?

How would an American broadcaster  sell its advertisers a league that can't stream a game?

And the idea that the CFL should run it as cheaply as possible, quality be damned cause the fans have no alternative is not one I support at all.

[Blueforlife]

Some great points everyone, thanks for chiming in!

[Sir Blue and Gold]

The bolded part is something you can't say with any certainty.  It is, however, more likely that inferior marketing would affect "sales".  I am hopeful that there has been a fix because streaming is another useful tool to promote the product.

This is where market segmentation and generally having some business sense comes into play. Because you can be reasonably certain (which is how most businesses operate on a lot of marketing based touchpoints.) You could also propose to do expensive research to confirm this and be laughed out of your bosses office.

Streaming pre-season games is not an effective or appropriate on-ramp to creating new fans. Even established fans often stay away. Tons of empty looking buildings around the league.

The argument is just used by angry super fans to support their anger that the free stream started 30 minutes late and they found that annoying.

If you want to suggest it's a bad idea to anger your die hard fans that's a better argument, but it's not going to, by their very nature, cause them to not attend games they otherwise would have. It just isn't. That's not how a segment of that profile would operate and believe me, that's who's watching the stream.

I think it's a cool bit of work the league has done to allow us to watch pre-season games using entirely assets that already exist (read: free for you and them). Stadium cams and feeds, radio announcers, etc. The alternative, believe me, is nothing, failing a negotiation with TSN to require they be shown, maybe.

[TBURGESS]

My Dad always said "Anything worth doing, is worth doing right". If the CFL is going to stream pre-season or anything else for that matter, they need to do it right. Anything less hurts their brand. 

[theaardvark]

First, the CFL's main goal, like any business is to make money (you do that through maximizing profitable activities and minimizing costly ones, especially if there' s a low likelihood of ever seeing a return). Second, find me a single fan who struggled with the free pre-season stream and because of that has decided to cut back on their CFL spending as a result. You can't because the statement isn't true in the slightest.

What is true is that it isn't the best experience and the league knows it since it's obvious to literally everyone. You'll get no disputing of that fact from me. The key thing to understand is that it's very likely an extremely lightweight efficient way to get some sort of pre-season coverage for teams that play outside of Ontario since TSN doesn't want to fly people around for pre-season games because there's no money in it which is the crux of the issue.

The reality is the next best option is not to do it at all which is far and away a more likely outcome than higher production values. Guaranteed and without question.

We may never hear from a potential new fan who wanted to tune in this year, and their first experience was a stream that didn't work, or looked bad.  We may have lost them at square one.

If it is TSN cameras and production, why they don't air them in the middle of the night for no streamers in the middle of the night, I'll never know.

[Blueforlife]

We may never hear from a potential new fan who wanted to tune in this year, and their first experience was a stream that didn't work, or looked bad.  We may have lost them at square one.

If it is TSN cameras and production, why they don't air them in the middle of the night for no streamers in the middle of the night, I'll never know.

As a business owner I know how hard it is to make a good impression on one customer.  You fight hard for those moments.  One mistake can burn you with 100 potential clients.  And I'm just a small fish.  This could have a big impact imo.  1st impressions are huge.  People don't have the patience for things that don't work.

My Dad always said "Anything worth doing, is worth doing right". If the CFL is going to stream pre-season or anything else for that matter, they need to do it right. Anything less hurts their brand.

A wise man

[TecnoGenius]

Here's the crux of the entitlement. Of course you could. But you don't.

But of course, you're the expert in this scenario.

I literally am the expert in this scenario.  I literally build and manage multiple web sites for large USA clients that get many times the traffic the CFL PS page gets, and are 100X more complex.  This is 95% of my business, of my own small business, for 25 years.

I 100% could have done better, and probably for less $.  But CFL didn't hire me.  Thus I'm here giving my expertise pointing out how it didn't have to be this way.

P.S. The fact that the GDT thread contained a pirate stream site to hit is the icing on the cake.

[TecnoGenius]

We may never hear from a potential new fan who wanted to tune in this year, and their first experience was a stream that didn't work, or looked bad.  We may have lost them at square one.

This.  Many people don't understand about the marginal customer.  We're not talking about losing wide swathes of uberfans.  We're talking about the guy that watches most home-team CFL games but nothing else.  We all know many people like that, they are more common than uberfans and STH.

There's also the teen or 20-something tuning in to see what Bomber ball is all about for the first time, maybe after watching the GC and hearing about our great stadium.  Or the 30/40-something who used to go to games as a kid but dropped off the radar for 1-2 decades (that's me).

These marginal existing or future fans may indeed laugh in disgust ("see, it's a joke compared to the NFL") and never come back, or postpone it another decade.  The only question is how many are at that margin.  100?  1000? 10000?  No way to know.  But I bet it's more than SB&G thinks!

I know my buddy likely won't bother tuning in to PS2 now.  He wasted 1 hour trying to get the stream up and was miffed at me he wasted time he could have been working on the yard.  Granted, he'll probably watch the reg season on TSN, but there may be some like him who now don't bother.

Even losing 1 marginal customer is costly because that could be the next me, who goes from 0 CFL to 100% CFL in a couple of years.  $0 to, oh, guessing $4k/year including post-season travel.  The CFL elderly fan base is literally dying (I know many personally) and we need the new blood or the league will die with them.  (I'm on the board of an unrelated club and we face the exact same problems.)  Eyeball/attendance acquisition is everything in this post-covid world filled with many people who hate being near other real live humans.

[TecnoGenius]

The reality is the next best option is not to do it at all which is far and away a more likely outcome than higher production values. Guaranteed and without question.

Your whole post is again a shift to the "production values" argument, which has nothing to do with what the last entire 2 pages of thread are about.

And you seem fixated on cost.  The issue at hand here with the stream-container page would have cost literally a few hundred bucks more.  They simply didn't provision enough servers (or maybe even more than 1 server!) to handle the traffic.  If you're not in the industry, you may not know how simple & basic this is.

The gateway / server-health errors are the reverse-proxy box telling us the back-end servers are overloaded.  If they already are scaled to multiple servers (reasonable guess) then firing up a few more costs literally $10s of dollars (if cloud like AWS) or $100s (if bare-metal rentals) for the short PS they need them for.  If they on-premise host then they needed maybe a couple more high-power servers for a few $1000s and their resident nerd/team to get them provisioned.

I find it kind of funny that they can stream to the USA & Intl all '24 with zero problems but blow up on the first SSK/WPG game.  That means the traffic from just SSK & WPG alone is more than all the other-country fans combined.  LOL.

[TecnoGenius]

The reality is the next best option is not to do it at all which is far and away a more likely outcome than higher production values. Guaranteed and without question.

They should simply do what they say they are going to do.  They announced and promoted we could watch (almost) all PS games on CFL+.  Then they pulled the rug.  Bait & switch.

If they weren't sure, or were testing new tech, or only gave 1 guy 3 days to get it all working with no budget, then they should have said "CFL will attempt to stream the PS games on a best-effort basis, bear with us, we hope it works".  If they did that, no one would have be annoyed.  UPOD

[TecnoGenius]

Streams seem 100% ok today.  Report any problems here.

CFL probably added a server during the week     

[TecnoGenius]

CFL has removed the week 1 and week 2 PS individual-game pages.  Previously they kept working past the 48-hours mark if you had the page open already (I was up to 10 days later on the week 1 game).

Guess someone @ CFL read my post and said "well, we can't have THAT".       

Guess we have to watch all these things within 48 hrs now.  Doh... or ... <furiously working the linux command line>