Category: Television-Sports

Posts about sports on TV.

Thoughts on The Masters TV broadcast and why golf needs bifurcation.

I spent four days on my couch bingeing The Masters. Here are my fairly unrefined thoughts.

The course and the tournament

Nothing proves the need to bifurcate the rules and roll back pro golf equipment more than The Masters. Out-of-control equpiment forced one of golf’s great layouts to pervert some of golf’s most exciting holes to keep them relevant. For example…

Massive fairway bunkers on the 2nd, 5th and 8th holes are Augusta National’s equivalent to US Open rough: Automatic pitchout. Where’s the chance for a brilliant recovery? The reward for driving past them doesn’t outweigh the risk, so too few golfers take them on. Playing away from trouble is boring content.

Length and ill-placed trees ruined the 11th hole. What should be an exciting, challenging second shot over water is too often a bail out to the right even from the middle of the fairway. I don’t care what Ben Hogan said or did, this makes for bad content in 2024. 

More than any other hole in the world, 13 shows the damage wrought from the governing authorities’ failure to regulate distance. Pushing the tee box back at least made that shot longer, but it is not more challenging. In fact players can how it a straight ball to the middle of the fairway and have a non-momentous chance to reach the green in two. This isn’t how the hole was meant to be played. There’s no benefit to risking a draw close to the tributary on the inside of the dog leg. Distance and low-spin drivers have sadly taken that consideration completely out of play. The only real solution to restoring this hole’s excitement is to relocate the green 20 yards farther away. I doubt the Club is willing to do that. 

What they’ve done to 15 is a crime. The trees on the left betray the Jones-Mackenzie design philosophy. Scheffler said he hit 3- and 4-irons into the green, that’s perfect. I want to see players hit long irons or hybrids over water to a shallow green, not punch out around the trees. But even when players hit the side of the fairway with an unobstructed shot to the green, they too often choose to lay up because keeping the course challenigng means the green is a concrete driveway unable to hold a shot from distance. It’s a shame and it’s ruining this tournament. 

This is the future of men’s professional golf. Players hit the ball so far and so high with such expert spin control that the only way to defend a course is to make it so impossibly difficult as to suck the life out of competition. You could say that’s the proper way to identify the game’s greatest players. I’d grant you that. But I say it too often makes for uninteresting content. 

We shouldn’t want this.

The beating heart of golf is people and places. Its most storied places are already locked away behind private gates, inaccessible to the vast majority of its people except once a year on television. If distance continues to advance unchecked, we risk losing even that as they become too short and too easy for the mens’ game. I don’t see any other way to save it than to bifurcate the rules for men’s professional golf, including drastic rollbacks in allowable equipment. Equipment companies will balk—loudly. But they need to stand down for the betterment of the game. 

The broadcast and the broadcasters

The holes 4-5-6 coverage with Dave Flemming, Jeff Sluman and Scott Verplank is the most enjoyable coverage all week. Because they have fun. Dave keeps it light and they all understand about 19 people are watching. Errant drives still land in the second cut and patrons still sit in patron observation stands. But it’s fun. They’re not trying to impress anybody. They’re just three guys talking about golf. It’s wonderful. 

There’s a short list of broadcasters I want to bottle and save forever. Verne Lundquist is on it. Jim Nantz game him a little send off after the final group finished 16, but I would have preferred they do that ahead of time and let Verne’s final commentary be simply sending the players to the 17th tee. 

Speaking of Jim Nantz, I have a conspiracy theory: Augusta National forces Jim Nantz to script his call after the winner’s final putt. There’s no other reason why such a great announcer would say such cheesy things in such a cheesy way. “All his calls sound that way,” you might say. I disagree. He didn’t script “The Golden Bear has come out of hibernation” in 1986 and his sizzle reel from the NFL and NCAA basketball back me up. Augusta National made The Masters The Masters by insisting on tight control over how CBS presents the tournament. I believe they require him to present the winning moment that way to protect and enhance their brand. 

I don’t get the Trevor Immelman adoration. I mean, he’s a likeable guy and does fine. But he’s not “18th tower memorable”. As a character he’s just flat. Johnny Miller was…aggressive at times. Nick Faldo has quirks and, oh, six major championships. Ken Venturi was dignified and connected to the game’s golden era. I don’t know what makes Immelman memorable. It’s too bad Phil Mickelson broke bad or else we’d have an all-timer in that chair.

Letting Dottie Pepper walk with the final group is the best broadcast decision since they switched to color pictures. She was okay in the 13th tower but her best work is following the leaders and it’s elevated the entire presentation. 

I don’t know what CBS is going to do with 15-16 now. 15 hasn’t been the same since Feherty left (coinciding with the Club butchering the hole’s design). Without two greats anchoring those pivotal holes the broadcast is in danger of hollowing out. I can’t even think of who would be in line to take over. NBC’s struggle to replace Paul Azinger shows the lack of golf commentator talent right now, too. 

Lastly, I’d like to see the Club allow CBS to use more ground cameras. Lower angles do a better job showing the slopes and undulations of Augusta National’s greens. I get that there’s brand consistency in having tower cams in the same place for 50 years, but there’s also value in showing viewers the contours players deal with shot after shot. 

The Boys will be boring

The Boys will throw you for a loop if you think satire has to be LOL funny. It doesn’t, and The Boys isn’t. I had to look up the definition to make sure. “The use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.”

Based in a world where superheroes are marketable corporate assets, The Boys holds a mirror up to modern society and you won’t like the reflection. The joke is us. We are the punchline when Homelander lets a plane crash to gin up enough xenophobia to convince the government to let superheroes fight in the military. We are mocked when Queen Maeve agrees to turn being outed (by Homelander) into a marketing campaign. We are the ones made to look like fools for wanting The Deep to get a second chance.

Anyone who puts any thought into what they’re watching is going to feel icky after watching The Boys. Kudos to the show for such biting satire. At times it does feel forced, especially with Stormfront in season two. But you forgive. 

I’m only thru two of the three seasons, and I liked the second better. Sssssssort of. The thing about The Boys that I can’t get past is how unique and thoughtful the superhero storylines are but how cliche and boring “the boys” storyline is. Everything interesting about this show happens when the superhero characters are onscreen. 

(To back up, the title “The Boys” comes from the name of the group of characters who are out to expose the superheroes as frauds. I’ll use lowercase to refer to the characters and uppercase to refer to the show.)

The boys are boring af. There is nothing to the Billy Butcher character other than his obsessive use of the C-word, which gets old after the first six hundred times he says it. Hughie is supposed to be the one we identify with. Can’t. We’re supposed to believe he goes from a limp-spined nobody to a vengeful mercenary because his girlfriend was killed in his hands (literally. It’s very gory.)? Don’t believe it for a second. The rest of the boys aren’t worth wasting pixels on. 

Watching The Boys reminds me of something a sportswriter once said about the athletes he covers, “We don’t know these people.” The Boys introduces us to our heroes and they are not good people. They do awful things, they lie to us and we idolize them anyway. 

The Boys would be better if the boys were just as interesting. Instead they’re boring and the show suffers. I don’t recommend this as a priority show for you. The best use case is for long flights or when you’ve got an hour to kill here and there. Not a show worth bingeing. 

5 ideas for NBC to stop the Olympics TV ratings decline

The 2022 Winter Olympics are over, and once again NBC is dealing with headlines like these:

Winter Olympics end with smallest audience ever

Beijing Olympic ratings were the worst of any winter games

Winter Olympics deliver smallest viewing audience ever

The persistent “worst Olympics ever” narrative is even leading to articles questioning the business case for NBC’s long-term multi-billion rights deal. 

Declining broadcast TV ratings are nothing new and certainly much of the Games’ plummet is due to factors not deriving from the competition. But that doesn’t make NBC blameless. I think it’s missing the mark on how to view its Olympics deal in the context of the modern entertainment landscape. As I’ve said before, sports are just another type of content now. It’s not “sports and Netflix”, it’s “content”.

NBC stood up its own streaming platform—Peacock—so I’m certain its corporate brass understand it at least part of the way. To put a stop to headlines like these the network’s suits need to treat their Olympics deal as an exclusive library of content no different than they do the Law & Order franchise.

Here’s a look at what great content factories do versus what NBC does with the Olympics.

Great content factories: Have a single platform for delivering content with personalized recommendation engines.

NBC has: Three different apps that present the same content to everyone.

The NBC app hasn’t worked on my Apple TV in more than a week covering the last two days of the Olympics and the Law & Order return. At first crashed after the logo screen. Now it sits on the logo screen indefinitely.

But all was not lost because I can also stream on the Peacock and NBC Sports apps. Wait, why is NBC streaming across three separate apps? There aren’t three Netflixes. There’s just Netflix. What sense does it make to spread your audience across multiple platforms and dilute your ability to scale technology? Do they have a cross-platform profile of me so NBC Sports knows what I was watching on NBC main? This is as dumb as if Hulu separate apps for OTT cable and its owned content library.

I don’t understand NBC’s failure here. If the network wants advertisers to believe its streaming platforms can deliver value that makes up for the decline in linear TV ratings it has to do better.  

(I should also note this is a bigger problem for NBC than the Olympics. Did you know there’s no Golf Channel app for Apple TV? Or Roku. Or Fire TV. You have to find Golf Channel buried in the NBC Sports App or deep in the on-screen guide in the NBC app. This is golf we’re talking about. A sport with obsessive fans. NBC boasts more than 2,200 hours of live golf coverage with no dedicated OTT streaming app. Unreal.)

Great content: Follows a formula the audience is familiar with.

NBC Olympics coverage: Presents Olympics events differently than any other sporting event.

We hear this all the time: “Sports alone won’t draw an audience for the Olympics. You have to tell the human interest stories behind the athletes.” That’s not wrong, but I think declining broadcast ratings show this approach to covering the Games has failed.

Because here’s the thing: Americans watch sports. A lot. That’s conditioned us to receiving sports content in a certain structure. We expect a beginning, consistent action, innings or halftimes to mark key points in the contest, and drama that builds toward a definitive conclusion. 

In my viewing experience NBC consistently fails to present Olympic events in that structure. It spends too much timing cutting away to other sports or sandwiching features throughout the actual game play. That’s jarring for viewers because it clashes with our conditioning. Imagine if Amazon made you watch 15 minutes of backstory on Rachel Brosnahan in the middle of Mrs. Maisel. You’d tune out.

NBC has gone so far down this road that sports don’t look like sporting events anymore. Its broadcasts are too often weird mashups of multiple sports with no dramatic flow, as if the network treats the 3 hours of primetime coverage as the event instead of, you know, the actual competitions. How are we supposed to be engaged with figure skating when there’s a 30-minute half-pipe qualifying segment in the middle of the men’s short program? 

(Side note: I never want to see qualifying on primetime Olympics coverage. Ever. We tune in to see people win and lose medals, not to see them advance to the next round.)

This is sort of understandable when the Games are in a timezone that allows them to be carried live. NBC and the other global broadcast partners have to work with the International Olympic Committee on this. Olympic Games are made-for-TV events, not made-for-in-person events. The IOC must be willing to manipulate the schedule and timing of its events to produce the most compelling sports content possible or it simply won’t provide viewers a compelling reason to tune in.

It’s different when the Games are held in Beijing or Tokyo and primetime is mostly tape delayed. When that’s the case there’s zero excuse to not edit the events together into a format American viewers are used to. Who cares if a sliver of the audience saw the result online 13 hours ago? Without seeing NBC’s internal data I venture to guess the vast majority of the primetime audience watches tape-delayed events not knowing the outcome. Build content for them. The glorious thing about media in 2022 is you can stream the event live for people who want to get up at 3am and air it all again in primetime. What a time to be alive.

Great content factories: Build our bond with actors and writers.

NBC: Has too few endearing broadcasters.

How can NBC create connection with viewers when Olympic athletes come and go? By giving us consistent broadcasters. Voices like Jim McKay, Bob Costas and Al Michaels are part of Olympic history precisely because we repeatedly associated them with the Games’ biggest moments and brightest stars. 

Just like having great writers helps publishers build a loyal user base, great broadcasters can help NBC build a connection to viewers that endures from Games to Games. We should want to tune in for Mike Tirico or Ted Robinson (who’s buried on short track speed skating) as much as we want to see the athletes. We’re never going to have that connection with Bill Doleman, Shane Bacon, Leigh Diffey, Steve Schlanger, Jason Knapp, Trace Worthington or Todd Harris. I devoured primetime content for the past two Winter Olympics and still had to look up those names. Hollywood content studios already know viewers will watch a show just because it’s from Shonda Rhimes or stars an actor who they locked up in a first-look deal. NBC has to approach its broadcasters the same way if it wants to build an audience that will tune in every two years. 

But here’s the problem: Unlike FOX, CBS and ABC/ESPN, NBC lacks the pro and college sports deals necessary for discovering and grooming new voices. Instead the network focuses on marquee deals with the NFL, USGA, Notre Dame football and Triple Crown horse racing. You’re not going to put green play-by-play announcers on those properties. Without a farm system there’s really no way to find someone new without poaching them from one of the bigger sports networks.

I think there’s a way out of this though, and it leads to my next obstacle for NBC to tackle…

Great content platforms: Keep you coming back for more.

NBC: All but ignores Olympic sports outside the Games.

In a world where sports are just content you can’t rely on drawing a massive audience with infrequent tentpole content. I’m aware of no television show or publisher who succeeds putting out content once every four years. Yet that is exactly how NBC treats the Olympics. No wonder it’s hemorrhaging viewers. You can’t expect anyone to be loyal to that content calendar. TV shows put out new seasons every year for a reason. 

Fixing this is where things get serious and expensive for the network. 

Most of us pay no attention to Olympic sports outside of the Summer and Winter Games. NBC needs to change this behaviour and view the cost as a necessary investment to get a return on the $7,750,000,000 it spent buying Olympic rights. NBC Sports Network would have been—should have been—the perfect platform for this. Heads should roll at NBC HQ for that failure because it directly relates to being unable to build a stable audience for the real Olympic Games. The stakes are too high to fall on your face this hard and keep your job. But it happened and it’s time to figure out how to use its remaining properties to help these sports earn a bigger piece of our sports consciousness. 

The IOC has a role to play here, too. To keep itself relevant it needs broadcasters. Broadcasters need advertisers. Advertisers follow viewers. The IOC has to understand all of that is downstream from expanding the fan base of Olympic sports. It should view this similar to MBL’s Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities or First Tee, a joint nonprofit funded by some of American golf’s most prominent governing bodies.

Great content platforms: Make it easier to find what you want.

NBC: Does anyone know when curling is on?

The last obstacle NBC has to solve should be the easiest: Offering a clear broadcast schedule. We’re living in the age of apps. We should be able to download the NBC app and set up custom schedules with alerts when a broadcast goes live (and just for when a broadcast goes live, not with the results). If there’s a way to do this, I couldn’t find it. 

Trying to deduce the schedule for a particular sport through the OTT apps brings us back to the first problem: The apps are terrible. They’re hard to navigate and there’s almost no consistency between NBC, Peacock and NBC Sports. But for the peacock logo you wouldn’t even know they’re from the same company. If you’re not compelled by the announcer and you haven’t watched it in four years, are you really going to work this hard to find when rhythmic gymnastics is going to be on? Well okay maybe yes because it’s the best Summer Olympics sport. But you get my drift. At some point if content is too hard to find you move on to something else. I can tell you right now new episodes of 1883 come out on Sundays, Mrs. Maisel on Fridays and Law & Order on Thursdays. I should be able to tell you when the ski cross final airs.

Thank you, loyal reader, for sticking with this incredibly long post. The moral of the story boils down to this: NBC seems willing to buy the rights to broadcast Olympic content, but unwilling to invest in making it successful. It will continue to face recurring stories about historically low TV ratings until it recognizes that sports are just content and figures out how to deliver the Games in a way that’s relevant to the modern audience.

5 steps to fixing baseball on TV

It’s 7 p.m. on a Tuesday night. The week is off to a good start but you’re tired. You plop on the couch. What are you going to watch?

Your streaming subscriptions are out of control, so you have options. Try The Crown? It won Emmys. So did Ted Lasso. Is Apple TV still free? They say Handmade’s Tale recovered after season two. Wait, The Voice is on. You can stream that anytime on Peacock though. Speaking of Peacock, The Office would really hit the spot. The Office it is.

It’s 7:02 p.m. As you navigate to the Peacock app you remember the Padres are in town. Aren’t they good this year? You exit the AppleTV input and get to NBC Sports Bay Area as it cuts to commercial. Crap. You scroll TikTok until the game comes back and, wait, they’re still not playing yet. You check the time. 7:06 p.m. Another commercial? You just wanted to watch the ball game. This is a lot of work. Back to Apple TV>Peacock>The Office.

By 9:30 you finished five episodes. How’d that Giants game go? Back to the cable box. Giants lead 6-2 in the seventh inning. You decide to watch this for a bit. By 10 p.m. you’re asleep.

You might be wondering the point of this blog post. There’s a lot of discussion about the state of the game of baseball, and I want to wade into it with a perspective I haven’t heard anyone take. Which is this: 

Sports are no longer sports. They’re content. Baseball is content.

With that perspective, baseball’s biggest competitor is not the NFL. It’s Netflix. It’s Hulu. It’s all the other things you could watch on a Tuesday night. Or a Sunday afternoon. Or together with friends. The rise of on-demand streaming has thrown what used to be separate cohorts of viewers into an omnibus audience of content consumers. Not necessarily by producing better content, though peak TV certainly counts as better content, but simply by becoming options.

Sports leagues kept up by moving their content online, but I assert the net-new content is close to zero. Baseball and basketball still play 162 and 82 respectively. Only football really expanded as college created a short playoff and the NFL added one week to its regular season. You could conceviably calculate an increase in sports content by including all the ancillary programming surrounding it: Pre-game, post-game, debate, previews, reviews, etc. But even that can’t keep up with all the content flooding the market from streaming platforms. The end effect of this content inflation is sports loses ground while the volume of non-sports content skyrockets.

There are some ways sports will never be able to compete with streaming content. Games happen in real-time and are hard to avoid being spoiled; streaming content is on-demand and spoilers are more easily avoided. Sports are also longer than most content types. Even a swift NBA game is long enough to stream five or six 30-minute episodes. Baseball—as fans are painfully aware—is a three-hour commitment if you’re lucky. Most games with a 7:10 p.m. first pitch will end closer to 10:30 than 10:00. One night with your local ball club could be spent watching three episodes of Bridgerton. 

Thinking about baseball as content starts to crystalize how fixing the product—ie, the game—can’t be separated from fixing the way the content is delivered and consumed. Baseball could implement pitch clocks, ban shifts, insitute a universal DH and still not secure its future if it doesn’t address how and where it presents the game to fans. 

Here are five ideas for how to accomplish that.

Solve the blackout problem. Sports leagues are run by a commissioner selected by team owners, but in reality that commissioner is beholden to the league’s television partners. The broadcast and regional sports networks call the shots on commercial breaks and game times (see the next idea), but more critically on how and where users access MLB content. To the point: They simply won’t allow baseball to do anything that would potentially eat away at their subscription revenue. I live two blocks from Oracle Park and can’t watch Giants games. Not because they’d rather have me buy a ticket but because they’d rather have me subscribe to a cable platform that collects carriage fees. 

Totally understandable. And totally destroying access to the game. Modern content consumers expect all content to be available when and where they want it. In a marketplace where streaming subscriptions range from $5 to $20 per month they also don’t expect to be asked to fork over $55 or more for a cable subscription just to get a handful of sports channels. That’s a completely non-competitive position for the cable outlets. 

Even if you are a cable subscriber, you can’t validate your subscritpion with the MLB app and watch local teams in the same interface as out-of-market games. You have to switch from MLB to Bally Sports or NBCSN or whatever app carries the hometown nine. I can’t underemphasize how annoying that is. It means you basically can’t switch between two games. Again, baseball stands in the way the content we want when we want it. 

Move up first pitch. People are conditioned that new content starts at the top and bottom of the hour. It’s why the TBS superstation shifted its schedule back five minutes; it wanted you to watch more TBS by breaking that habit.

Why then does baseball delay first pitch until 7:10 p.m.? Every regional sports network airs at least 30 minutes of pregame content already. What’s the point of making viewers sit through another 10? Oh right: Broadcast partners want those two valuable commercial breaks before the real content starts. Great. Meanwhile the casual viewer is already second-screening by first pitch or has tuned out all together. 

Contrast that with NFL content. When you tune in at 1 p.m. Eastern on Sunday you get kickoff at 1:02. No extra commercial breaks, no fluff content following the hour long pregame show. Sit down, tune in—BAM—football. Baseball should steal the NFL’s idea and move first pitch up eight minutes. It won’t shorten the length of the game or improve its pace, but it will create a sense of immediacy for viewers and give them the content they want when they want it. Why, that almost sounds like on-demand. Scary.

Shift shifts to a graphic. Infield shifts changed the game, and television broadcasts haven’t kept up. Fans have no idea where fielders are positioned unless TV cuts away to show the infielders or announcers verbally convey who is standing where. Each moment in a broadcast is valuable and something as common as shifts shouldn’t have to take up that much time. Luckily there’s an easy solution.

Every network displays a graphic showing the runners on base, looking something like this:

Screenshot of a baseball game with the score, count, outs and men on base in the upper left corner.

Why not use that same graphic to show where the fielders are positioned around the infield? Just like the score bug freed announcers from having to recite the count, outs and score this simple change would give fans the information they need while letting announcers provide more compelling commentary.

Highlight pitch sequencing. Pitch sequencing is one of the most important aspects of the game. Most broadcasts ignore it entirely in their commentary and graphics. Both need to change, I’ll focus on the graphic aspect here and address the broadcasters’ contribution in a later point. 

The adoption of widescreen HDTV did great for showing more of the football field and the hockey rink. But for baseball…we get a lot of infield grass. This is wasted screen real estate. There is plenty of room on either side of center screen for a concise graphic showing the type, speed and location of each pitch during an at-bat. Viewers would have an immediate visual to follow if they want to, or to ignore if they don’t. Credit to ESPN and MLB Network for tinkering with this idea by occasionally putting the type and speed under the score bug in the upper left of their screen. Every network should follow. 

Re-frame the meaning of action. It’s a common complaint when comparing baseball with football. “Football has a play every 40 seconds. Baseball might go five minutes without any action.” Oh really? 

There’s a hidden conversation between pitcher and catcher before every pitch, and pitches happen at least once every 20-30 seconds. To make the game broadcasts more compelling content, broadcasters need to do better at peeling back the curtain of what goes into every pitch. What’s the scouting report on this hitter? (A heat map could easily integrate into the pitch sequence graphic or the electronic strike zone—which, by the way, proves fans will adapt to graphics overlaying the game action.) How’d they pitch him last at bat? How did missing with two sliders affect what he can throw on 2-0?

“So you want commentators to yammer on like Chris Colinsworth after every pitch?” No. It has to be done in the course of a plate appearance. At-bats presented that way would turn a ho-hum game into almost non-stop action. Isn’t that what they say the game needs? You don’t have to create action by instituting a pitch clock or banning the shift (both of which I support and would definitely be wise moves). You can simply change the way the game is commentated to re-define what action means. 

I know what you’re thinking. “Come on, seamhead. The casual fan doesn’t want to be bombarded with stats and graphics and graphics about stats. You’ll turn more people away with your analytics and numbers.” Oh? More people than are turned away by the four-hour game I went to last week when one team changed pitchers three times in the first two innings? What do you think those Nielsen numbers looked like at 10:30 p.m.? 

Get over the famous former players. A personality already proven to be marketable is a rare thing in television so we all get why former players are a draw for the networks. But just because a player sold jerseys doesn’t mean he’ll be a compelling broadcaster. I’m willing to bet for every A-Rod and Justin Morneau on TV there’s a former player who didn’t get his own shirseys but could convey the game in a more compelling way than those two. Find them. Train them up. Put them on the air. 

There you have it. I’m certain baseball and its broadcast partners compile mountains of research on what viewers want to see, and therefore the television product we get is the sum total of that research. I’m a data-driven marketer who can hardly fault them for that. But as a baseball fan and avid consumer of television I’m convinced the league is out of step with every trend in television content.

Baseball already lost its place in our sports landscape to football and basketball. If it loses out in the competition among content providers it could be game over.

MLB At Bat Has A Season To Forget

Oh, the promises were there in spades. When Apple announced its revamped and much improved Apple TV on September 9, 2015, MLB Advanced Media was there to showcase a brand new MLB At Bat app for tvOS. 2-in-1 viewing. 60 fps video. Tech Times loved it, and who could blame them? We all salivated over how we’d watch baseball in 2016.

So how’d that work out for ya?

Almost from day one, the new MLB At Bat app on Apple TV was an utter disaster. To understand how, let’s look at some of the best features of the previous app:
Hide scores. Hide scores let you toggle the scores on or off so you’d never be spoiled if you joined a game late.
Inning select. A simple click on the old Apple TV remove brought up a marked line for jumping from inning to inning. Couldn’t have been easier.
Game events. Likewise, keep clicking and you’d get a menu that let you jump from one big play to the next. Awesome for reviewing games.
Runs scored. A third click brought up the runs scored menu. Another great way to zip thru a ball game.

It wasn’t perfect. The previous generation Apple TV had some limitations. But it worked, reliably, and provided cool features that made it easy to watch the games you want.

Spring training streams aren’t always the greatest, whether it’s due to the inferior ballparks or what I am not sure. So when the Dodgers broke camp for a freeway exhibition against Anaheim at Dodger Stadium I was blown away by the new 60fps stream.

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”><a href=”https://t.co/SFvNePHcXp”>https://t.co/SFvNePHcXp</a&gt; picture quality on the new AppleTV is as if I have a new TV. Motion is so smooth. Blown away.</p>&mdash; Kevin Watterson (@kwatt) <a href=”https://twitter.com/kwatt/status/715731575158259712″>April 1, 2016</a></blockquote> //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

I am not a fan of the way modern TVs display artificially smooth motion, but this was different. It didn’t look artificial. My TV is a Sharp Aquos from 2006, and At Bat made it look like a top-of-the-line debut model.

That was late March. I’ve seen a stream at 60fps once or twice since. Where it went, I have no idea. I don’t know if they had to downgrade the app to handle poor performance issues or if they simply gave up on it. But it’s gone.

You might be thinking, “Okay, Watterson, maybe you’re just so used to it that now you don’t even notice the 60fps.” Nope. Whenever I pull up a stream on my iPhone 6 I’m mesmerized again, because that is consistently 60fps.

That wasn’t so bad. You can’t really miss a feature you never had.

What made the “new” At Bat app such a pathetic fail is that all those features I listed above disappeared. Flat went missing. POOF. Only the inning selection has come back – in June, three months into the season and 10 months after the app was displayed at the AppleTV announcement – and that in a way that spoils the outcome of a game even if you’ve hidden the scores. The rest are gone and MLB support has given no indication when, if ever, they will return.

Speaking of hide scores, that took months for MLB to iron out, too.

If you tried to get an answer from At Bat support you would get a copy-paste response that it would report your concerns to their development team. Then it would delete your question from their support forums. Over and over again fans would ask, and over and over again they would get deleted.

On top of the missing and slow-to-arrive features, the app’s new UI is somewhat poor. Customers with premium access to home and away broadcast streams lose the option to chose in split-screen view. I don’t know how an app gets released with a UI that takes away premium features, features that we paid to have. That seems to me to be the opposite of what should happen.

All of this sits beside the app’s incredibly inconsistent performance. For the first few months of the season it would freeze almost nightly between 8:30 and 9:00 p.m. That eventually got resolved but I’m not sure if there have been any nights when it hasn’t crashed at least once. It crashed once while I was writing this column.

How did this happen? There’s a concept in development called MVP (minimum viable product). I won’t go into it but it basically says release your product at its earliest viable state and iterate, iterate, iterate. MLBAM clearly had access to the new tVOS long before anyone else, yet their flagship app seemed to be released to paying customers as an MVP. At best it was an MVP. I’d actually say from my experience it felt more like a beta.

If I were cynical I’d point out that MLB was forced to offer MLB.tv subscriptions at a lower price this year and say maybe this is why the app was so bad. Why bother refining a product you’re not able to charge full price for? But I’m not that cynical.

Missing features that customers paid for. Miserable performance. MLB Advanced Media owes its paying customers an apology for the product it gave them on Apple TV in 2016.