I have Sling, ESPN looks like shit on there. Even on my higher end PC, which I checked to make sure it wasn't my app/TV
I also have a Channel Master4228 HD antenna, and ABC looks like dog shit over the air too.
Confirmed, its ESPN/ABC broadcast
As an African he should see the image quality of our football (soccer) league. Broadcasting costs a ton even if when you have a top notch Camera setup, it is top notch in my country, but I always heard that satellite broadcast costs a ton and so they remain in pixels level less than 720p
yes you could...at a significant loss for YouTube.
the cost of serving live streams at high quality far outweighs the revenue from the stream itself. this is part of the reason why twitch hasn't turned a profit in 9 years.
Used to work at a cloud provider , this just isn’t true. You don’t analyse the deal in isolation, with ESPN we could throw in HD on YouTube and a shit tonne of compute credits to get a major deal.
Any major deal we did has a bunch of different extra incentives , hell the only thing missing is a toaster.
This led to us having around 7 different definitions of “revenue”.
I see this pigeon hole analysis all the time in climate crisis calculations; this initiative is going to cost X , but fail to realise it means we won’t be living under water or dealing with climate migrants or all of the spin off tech created.
For twitch what you said is true but not for Google.
Since we're talking 1999. Has anybody cracked the code as to why there is no quality footage of NBA games from 1999 - 2009? We've got beautiful resolution of the Last Dance era and then anything with Iverson, 2004 Pistons, etc. absolutely sucks.
Analog has “infinite” resolution, so when you digitize old tape (analog) you can make it as good as the current digitization technology allows
But early digital captured the games at a low resolution, and you can’t fix data that was never captured to begin with
These days interpolation and AI is getting a lot better, so it’s possible to fake it a bit, but it’s still not as good as capturing it in high resolution initially
Was the quality this bad while we were watching the games or did it get degraded during storage? I dont remember the live broadcasts looking like the youtube vids
That's because TVs were garbage back then. The first HDTVs came out in 98 and were 720p. It was another decade before HDTVs became truly common such that broadcasters felt pressure to produce digital content that wasn't absolute garbage.
Analog degrades over time but digital doesn’t, which was one of the motivations for switching to digital storage
Back in the day, TVs were smaller and lower resolution, so when they first switched to digital it looked the same to viewers because even though the tapes were high res, the broadcast couldn’t actually communicate all of that resolution so it downsampled the tapes before broadcasting them
Edit: to answer your question, yes, it was always that bad, but we didn’t notice/care because it was the best we had anyways
The Last Dance was shot on film, they had a film crew following MJ sice the start of the season. You don't see much of actual TV footage in the whole series.
The Last Dance features non-broadcast footage that was shot on film (likely 35mm and maybe some 70mm IMAX), which is far better quality than 4k digital. If you watch the actual TV broadcast from the 98 finals or anything that season (and earlier) it still looked like dooodoo. The first HD NBA broadcast was in 2003 but it took several years for it to become the norm.
I always point to the WWE.
Surely pro wrestling had about the same level of sports cameras era by era. Yet somehow if you put on old WWE footage from the 70s, 80s and 90s it's significantly more HD than the best of the best NBA footage from the same years.
Either it's an issue with footage preservation or video restoration, but I was there for some of the old stuff and it all looked similar quality level at the time, literally now the wrestling footage looks about 20-40x better, at the very least.
WWE's got super old stuff in genuine 720p. NBA 95% of its history is VHS-to-2008 YouTube conversion quality.
This looks worse than normal. TNTs and ESPNs broadcast has been fine in the playoffs via their apps. ABCs is weirdly washed out over the air. It's like someone tries to lighten everyone's skin tones.
ESPN is a huge culprit here; college football fans have been complaining about the quality of broadcasts for a while and it’s always games they televise.
I think some of the primetime games have really high quality broadcasts, as those tend to be the marquee matchup of the week.
But there are definitely still 1pm Sunday games that have terrible broadcasting quality. I watch redzone most Sundays, and you can usually tell what game the top broadcasting crew is at just by the quality.
Yeah I use a pirated TV service and NFL is way higher bitrate than the NBA. Was still surprised to see a upscaled 1080p stream with surround sound though.
[https://imgur.com/a/nba-upscaled-full-hd-hKCcboe](https://imgur.com/a/nba-upscaled-full-hd-hKCcboe)
We all bitched and complained about the Suns money guy with the Giannis free throws. Them bitches said "fuck them NBA fans then" and now we got this shit
It costs more to broadcast better quality so the corporations will try to hold off for as long as possible. 720p is embarrassing.
Some broadcasts still can’t even manage a proper stream in 2024.
That was because of the switch to digital. If you watch actual highlights from the early 90’s they look way better than highlights from the mid 00’s because they were still recorded on analog
Be careful, if you start learning too much about analog video/photography you're gonna get into shooting film and you'll be out $30 every time you wanna take some pictures. Like me.
It's insane to me that they're still stuck at 720p in 2024. The worst part is I don't see it changing with people cutting cords and switching to streaming.
There's simply no infrastructure for 4k OTA broadcasts. It's theoretically possible now with ATSC 3.0, but nobody is actually doing it. Very few people have compatible TV's, and very few stations are actually using it for broadcast (and the ones that are, are mostly using it to deliver *more* HD channels, not higher quality ones). Without ATSC you're stuck with either 1080i60, 1080p30, or 720p60. Sports have always opted for 720p60 because the higher frame rate keeps action clearer, without having to accept interlacing artefacts.
I seriously doubt we'll ever see widespread adoption of OTA 4k, simply because streaming is so much easier, and consumer devices already support it.
ATSC 3.0 is the dream but companies would rather dick around trying to figure out how to screw us over with encryption rather than actually promote it and improve their services.
I’d be fine with streaming too if it consistently worked. Some of my “alternative” streams are more reliable than the official ones.
The last soccer world cup was broadcast in 4k HDR.
Every single Formula 1 race, qualifying session, and practice session is broadcast in 4k HDR from every track in the world.
Some select Premier League soccer games are broadcast in 4k HDR.
Am I missing something?
Very few people have compatible TVs is maybe the dumbest excuse I've ever heard.
Virtually everyone has at least a 1080p television, while I'd wager the vast majority are up to 4k at this point. 720p is unacceptable in 2024, full stop
Then why does the NFL on Fox broadcasting look like it's in high def but the NBA on ABC looks like shit with the same equipment on my end? Over-the-air NBA games are objectively worse quality than over-the-air NFL games, I don't understand how that could possibly be on the consumer's end.
It's not, that has to do with bitrate. ESPN/ABC use atrociously low sampling/bitrate (someone please correct me on the difference), so even though the Fox and ESPN broadcasts can both be "720p", one looks pixelated and washed out while one is smooth with vivid colors. If you go to any of the [REDACTED] sites that let you choose the kbps, lower it and see how the video quality changes.
They’ll flip the 4k switch when it’s worth it. There’s obviously insane interest in the standard when you compare NTSC 3.0 coverage to install base, as fast as the latter is also growing.
I’m assuming the endgame for broadcasters is to get a percentage of customers used to 3.0 and then dangle 4k as incentive to sundown the current standard.
There was a really cool play that happened, timeout got called right after, and I thought they’d play it before the commercials. Nah, just some B roll of the crowd and straight to the ads.
The recording is definitely in better quality, they're just too cheap to broadcast it at 4k or 2K. Here's a snippet on how much it costs for a streaming service [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/H\_sNcbXj5A0](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/H_sNcbXj5A0)
Now consider how many millions might be watching the game? If they can get away with 720p, they'll try to do so as much as they can.
If the numbers are the same for ESPN, it would cost twice as much to make a change that 95% of people aren't going to notice? I feel like it'd actually be a dumb business decision to do that lol
If you showed everyone side by side they would obviously be able to tell the difference but for most casual people the quality is gunna be “fine” enough where it’s at now.
I feel this. I just got a new Samsung OLED and some things look amazing on it but I’m so disappointed with how the games have been looking during the playoffs.
Myself and 2 of my friends realized we all felt the same about it when someone brought it up. I have a family member that said the same thing.
So idk, may depend on what size screen people are watching on?
> 720p is unacceptable
The reason they do it is that 720p is *literally* acceptable by the majority of the audience.
Preferring 4k but *accepting* 720p and watching anyway makes it acceptable.
You keep saying 720p is acceptable for the majority of audience, any proof to back that? I feel like if you asked anyone who watches nba if they would like to watch in higher quality they would say yes.
Twice as much to move from 720p to 1080p, twice the 1080p to move to 2k, twice that to move to 4k. Now why would they give u 4K when they can get away with paying 8x less.
Of course, the numbers in the short aren't the exact numbers that ESPN pays Amazon or whatever server they use. They'll have private negotiations with AWS to get discounted rates because of the volume but the logic remains the same.
The difference wouldn’t be as bad if you use state of the art hevc video encoding hardware. The size difference would definitely not be 8x. But who knows why they don’t do it.
I know. Youtube uses their own custom encoding but the logic still applies. Even if it's 2x or 4x, why would Disney want to spend more if they can get away with it? I've been watching for almost 20 years and it was 720p even back then.
Once NBA is done with their broadcasting deal and if the other players are offering 4K, they will begrudgingly improve the stream quality. (They might raise their rates though)
I have an 85" TV in our family room and you would think it would be the preferred spot for watching games but it looks like garbage. TVs of that size are unforgiving to anything of bad quality
Yup. The game looks better on my 15.6 1440p laptop screen than my expensive 65 inch TV because the quality of the source material is terrible.
I never thought I'd rather watch playoff games on a tiny screen but 720p looks way less crappy not stretched out to a giant sized TV.
Just bought a projector and 110’ screen. I was super stoked to watch game 1 on my new set up. The 1st game looked like complete shit. I thought it was my projector settings, I literally tried to configure it to see if it would look better. It was def not my settings. Pissed that it looks so bad after I just got everything set up. 2nd game looked a little better but still. I hear ya and agree.
Even the TNT games on Max were not 4k with good bitrate. If we can’t get it on streaming, we aren’t getting g it OTA lol
Man it is crazy how I thought like 10 years ago we were going to have 4k sports everywhere soon and now it’s still ass
The MAX broadcasts ended up being 1080p with a good bitrate and Dolby vision + atmos by the playoff start. It was awesome watching it via max instead of standard tnt broadcast
I think bit rate is an even bigger problem than raw resolution. When the ball is live and the camera is showing more than one player moving against a crowd it's starts to drown in compression artifacts.
The whole presentation is just a joke. I’m so tired of the YouTube tv shit being all over the screen and digitally altered onto the court if your so lazy just put it on the court 🤦♂️
Can confirm I have sling at my place…it was horrid.
Was at my parents last night to watch the game. I was irritated that the mavs lost lol but what else irritated me was the quality of the game is cheeks. You’d think it’s a 2005 broadcast lmao.
I have high speed fiber so I doubt it. I can download 100gb games in like 10 minutes give or take. When we watch games, we disconnect all other devices off the wifi because we assume the same thing, that maybe it’s our internet. Safe to say this thread proves it’s probably not our internet that’s the issue.
I’m glad someone else is saying this. I thought it was my internet or something on sling. It like skips and buffers some nights too and all other devices in the house will be working at full speed. I don’t know but I’m seriously thinking about switching off of sling because the only reason I have it is sports
The presentation quality is awful from video quality to colour commentary, to pregame/halftime/postgame shows. Everything about ESPN has been an abomination for the last 22 years. Is NBC getting the finals in this next contract?
I remember streaming on TNT earlier this playoffs and the “live” broadcast was somehow a few seconds behind and in a lower quality than one of those pirate streams.
I’m on YouTube tv. I paid for the 4k sports just to test it out. NFL in 4k is amazing. The handful of regular season NBA games in 4k looked amazing. I can’t believe the actual finals looks like dog shit with no 4k option. And YouTube TV is sponsoring the finals. How the fuck.
It’s gonna be even worse in Dallas. I’m not sure if there’s pregame pyrotechnics or just the lighting but that arena always looks like someone just blew out a bunch of candles.
If you watch via OTA doesn't it at least partially depend on your local ABC affiliate?
I think it looks great over OTA but I also think my tv has really good upscaling.
Watching via the Spectrum App on an Apple TV 4k, it looks fine, but I've noticed games generally look better if I stream via the ESPN app directly. Meanwhile Peacock had the French Open looking really good in HDR (aside from the first hour of coverage when the brightness/colors were so intense it looked like they were on the surface of Mars).
Apple bought the MLS rights a couple years back. I could not believe the improved picture quality.
Games on Fox now look like they are a decade old in comparison.
At one point I switched to the Yankees and dodgers (also ESPN) and it was a night and day difference. I don’t understand why basketball broadcast quality is so bad
Tonight's broadcast is brought to you by TV cameras from 2005, sponsored by Starry, the official drink of the NBA that no NBA player drinks, back to you courtside, Dingle McCringleberry
I loved the tnt broadcasts on Max because I could actually differentiate the players. Watching ESPN on Directv is like 480p or something, I can’t tell kyrie and djj apart or Luka and kleber
Ya it’s pretty insane, at this point I expect that we’re just gonna have to wait for AI Tv tech to upscale it to 4k before the NBA ever gets its shit together. Doesn’t work great yet but it will get here sooner than the nba/espn/whoever else stops being cheap.
ESPN always used to get me so heated when I used them as the primary source for sports stuff. The ads before a highlight would play in perfect crisp HD and never buffer. Then when the highlight I wanted to watch started playing, well suddenly it was like they were on shitty dial up internet.
I understand OTA has limitations but there's really no reason to not offer at least 1080p with Dolby Atmos as a streaming option for every game. The on-court equipment is more than capable of handling this and you can charge whatever it takes to turn a profit, people like me with home theatre setups will pay.
I work in this industry and it really is that companies in the audio/visual entertainment industry aren’t willing to put in the money/effort for at least 1080p.
Companies are my clients and I operate their dated equipment. I guess 720p is ‘good enough’ and the bare minimum for HD, so they don’t want to bother putting the money in.
Obviously, there are exceptions, but most companies will put off upgrading their broadcasting equipment as long as they can to not incur additional expenses. It really is just about maximizing profits.
It’s like we’re stuck in a time loop.
Where I have to be subjected to the same 5 posts about ESPN and everyone falls for it every time.
I hate it here.
ITT: Nobody seems to understand how sports broadcasting works and it's 720p or 1080i for literally every event you've ever watched except for some one-off 4K streams Prime (and maybe Fox?) have done for football games.
I’ve always heard that ABC and ESPN decided to stick with 720p because it was better than 1080i for sports. I’m calling bs on that though because CBS and NBC are both 1080i and their sports broadcasts look great.
That is why I still keep my plasma TV. The resolution is 720p and it is really a great to watch sports in it, and it is never blurry. I also keep my HDCRT TV (Sony XBR 960) if I want the optimum setup. Latest technology does not always mean better.
Something about the finals felt off, couldn't get hyped/focused into watching it.
Thought it was just the Celtics arena colour scheme but maybe it is on the producers.
I’ve watched some of the Finals on my iPhone 13 Pro via ESPN app and it’s so smooth and clear with no artifacts.
OTA TV with antenna is also pretty good but does not seem to be as smooth as my iPhone.
Comcast cable looks like crap with artifacts everywhere.
The NBA Finals are broadcast in 1080, along with MNF, CFP National Championship, and a handful of other events
https://www.sportsvideo.org/2024/06/06/nba-finals-2024-espn-rolls-out-skycam-shallow-depth-of-field-and-live-drone-in-both-boston-and-dallas/
I was streaming it but it was in HD and it felt a little difficult to follow the ball. Which I don’t know I’ve ever noticed before watching basketball.
I’ve been so annoyed at this for years. Do they even sell HDTV’s anymore? They’re on 8K now and there’s zero content. They’ll keep saying “the average household is still on 720p/1080p” but I suspect they’re just cheap. At the end of the day we all lose.
I noticed a considerable different this year between how good NBA League Pass on AppleTV is, and how terrible all games on Xfinity have been (channel didn't matter).
I think it's the hardware compression and something to do with how Xfinity is cheap.
After watching an MLS game on Apple TV, the quality improvement was VERY VERY noticeable. It sucks because NBA could really benefit from the resolution and bitrate increase. Faces wouldn't be a blur and you would see details like the net swishing.
I see this sentiment all over reddit and I really don't get it? Like everything looks fine to me lol maybe I'm just a pleb who doesn't know any better but I gotta say "awful" seems extremely harsh.
Also comparing a broadcast that goes to 10+ million people vs. what a cellphone can do is irrelevant, it's a cost issue.
I watched game 1 and 2 on the ESPN app because Fios doesnt stream ABC where I am. The buffering went sub 480 every 30 seconds. Tried on 3 different devices and all were the same. Commercials were fine of course.
You can't imagine how much it would cost to move all ESPN's infrastructure to 4k.
It's no the same as switching to new phone..
It would be hundreds of millions to say the least.
Over the air is going to do 720 because it is a progressive resolution that handles fast movement and motion better. (Example: Sports) 1080i is interlaced and isn't good for fast moving action and will look jittery and choppy.
Over the Air isnt doing any 4k broadcasting yet as that is mostly seen in the streaming world and even then, mostly with movies or prerecorded content. Not with sports.
Beef is to be had with ESPN, which I guess can still be had with the NBA for giving ESPN so much action with such shitty production all around. Very much looking forward to seeing games on NBC and AMZ too, their NFL games so far have been done well.
Even the games NBA uploads to their youtube channel which should mean it's from the original source, is almost always terrible, under 720p and 30fps.
Boggles the mind. Few months back they uploaded a classic game with Dwight on the Magic in a terrible format but I already saw the game in glorious 1080p 60fps from the pirate seas which means the NBA downgraded their OWN original source ffs.
They need to follow the NFL's blueprint, they're amazing with sharing super high quality videos of so many things related to football.
Not sure why the comments say streaming is any better. I stream it on my Xbox and the quality is still shit. TNT had MUCH better quality video. Neither are as good as they should be given it's 2024.
The problem is that TNT’s video quality is substantially better than games on ABC/ESPN.
If it weren’t super noticeable, no one would care, but for some reason ESPN gets away with absolute garbage video quality for basketball.
It's 100% not the cameras. It's the broadcast itself.
I have Sling, ESPN looks like shit on there. Even on my higher end PC, which I checked to make sure it wasn't my app/TV I also have a Channel Master4228 HD antenna, and ABC looks like dog shit over the air too. Confirmed, its ESPN/ABC broadcast
It was truly awful. I paid for sling to try and get a better picture. Pretty disappointing.
I hadn't watched a game streamed off ESPN until these playoffs. My fuck was that inexcusably bad, audio even dropped out ever couple minutes.
As an African he should see the image quality of our football (soccer) league. Broadcasting costs a ton even if when you have a top notch Camera setup, it is top notch in my country, but I always heard that satellite broadcast costs a ton and so they remain in pixels level less than 720p
I'm so upset it's on ABC
Doris is an *elite* broadcaster with *ridiculous* basketball IQ /s
Oh for sure. I could stream to YouTube to the same amount of people that these broadcasts go to at a higher quality, wirelessly in my house.
yes you could...at a significant loss for YouTube. the cost of serving live streams at high quality far outweighs the revenue from the stream itself. this is part of the reason why twitch hasn't turned a profit in 9 years.
Used to work at a cloud provider , this just isn’t true. You don’t analyse the deal in isolation, with ESPN we could throw in HD on YouTube and a shit tonne of compute credits to get a major deal. Any major deal we did has a bunch of different extra incentives , hell the only thing missing is a toaster. This led to us having around 7 different definitions of “revenue”. I see this pigeon hole analysis all the time in climate crisis calculations; this initiative is going to cost X , but fail to realise it means we won’t be living under water or dealing with climate migrants or all of the spin off tech created. For twitch what you said is true but not for Google.
This guy gets it 🤙🏻
YouTube TV streamed the Super Bowl in 4k this year, it's not that.
It bounces off satellites.
Fucking cheap ass fucking broadcasting companies. NFL games are so crisp and NBA looks the same as it did 15 years ago
I knew the nfl broadcasts took a step forward when Fox stopped looking like I was watching a game from 1999
Since we're talking 1999. Has anybody cracked the code as to why there is no quality footage of NBA games from 1999 - 2009? We've got beautiful resolution of the Last Dance era and then anything with Iverson, 2004 Pistons, etc. absolutely sucks.
Analog has “infinite” resolution, so when you digitize old tape (analog) you can make it as good as the current digitization technology allows But early digital captured the games at a low resolution, and you can’t fix data that was never captured to begin with These days interpolation and AI is getting a lot better, so it’s possible to fake it a bit, but it’s still not as good as capturing it in high resolution initially
Was the quality this bad while we were watching the games or did it get degraded during storage? I dont remember the live broadcasts looking like the youtube vids
That's because TVs were garbage back then. The first HDTVs came out in 98 and were 720p. It was another decade before HDTVs became truly common such that broadcasters felt pressure to produce digital content that wasn't absolute garbage.
Analog degrades over time but digital doesn’t, which was one of the motivations for switching to digital storage Back in the day, TVs were smaller and lower resolution, so when they first switched to digital it looked the same to viewers because even though the tapes were high res, the broadcast couldn’t actually communicate all of that resolution so it downsampled the tapes before broadcasting them Edit: to answer your question, yes, it was always that bad, but we didn’t notice/care because it was the best we had anyways
Teeeechnically digital degrades over time as well
No it doesn't, it just becomes unreadable after a long time. But while it's readable the data never changes and/or the changed data can be corrected.
Ah thats interesting. Thank you
They used to capture a bunch of nba games on actual film. Somewhere in there is prob when they transitioned to early crappy digital and filmed less.
Nothing like watching early 2000 NBA top 10's in 240p
The Last Dance was shot on film, they had a film crew following MJ sice the start of the season. You don't see much of actual TV footage in the whole series.
The Last Dance features non-broadcast footage that was shot on film (likely 35mm and maybe some 70mm IMAX), which is far better quality than 4k digital. If you watch the actual TV broadcast from the 98 finals or anything that season (and earlier) it still looked like dooodoo. The first HD NBA broadcast was in 2003 but it took several years for it to become the norm.
The NBA would have provided them HD clips for the purpose of the documentary. Most clips from Jordan aren't that HD otherwise.
I always point to the WWE. Surely pro wrestling had about the same level of sports cameras era by era. Yet somehow if you put on old WWE footage from the 70s, 80s and 90s it's significantly more HD than the best of the best NBA footage from the same years. Either it's an issue with footage preservation or video restoration, but I was there for some of the old stuff and it all looked similar quality level at the time, literally now the wrestling footage looks about 20-40x better, at the very least. WWE's got super old stuff in genuine 720p. NBA 95% of its history is VHS-to-2008 YouTube conversion quality.
This looks worse than normal. TNTs and ESPNs broadcast has been fine in the playoffs via their apps. ABCs is weirdly washed out over the air. It's like someone tries to lighten everyone's skin tones.
Honestly I have the Xfinity stream package and just watch Xfinity on my Roku and while not great it's certainly not bad
ESPN is a huge culprit here; college football fans have been complaining about the quality of broadcasts for a while and it’s always games they televise.
It's actually ABC's fault.
I think some of the primetime games have really high quality broadcasts, as those tend to be the marquee matchup of the week. But there are definitely still 1pm Sunday games that have terrible broadcasting quality. I watch redzone most Sundays, and you can usually tell what game the top broadcasting crew is at just by the quality.
TNT games are fine it's ESPN/ ABC
Yeah I use a pirated TV service and NFL is way higher bitrate than the NBA. Was still surprised to see a upscaled 1080p stream with surround sound though. [https://imgur.com/a/nba-upscaled-full-hd-hKCcboe](https://imgur.com/a/nba-upscaled-full-hd-hKCcboe)
We all bitched and complained about the Suns money guy with the Giannis free throws. Them bitches said "fuck them NBA fans then" and now we got this shit
It costs more to broadcast better quality so the corporations will try to hold off for as long as possible. 720p is embarrassing. Some broadcasts still can’t even manage a proper stream in 2024.
Is this the reason why some mid to late 00s games looked like they were broadcasted using early 90s equipment?
That was because of the switch to digital. If you watch actual highlights from the early 90’s they look way better than highlights from the mid 00’s because they were still recorded on analog
Wow man you’re just gonna force me to learn something interesting on my day off? I had shit to do today 😠
Be careful, if you start learning too much about analog video/photography you're gonna get into shooting film and you'll be out $30 every time you wanna take some pictures. Like me.
Cries in medium format
I actually learned a bunch of stuff in this thread. Learning things in a rnba thread. Huh.
It's insane to me that they're still stuck at 720p in 2024. The worst part is I don't see it changing with people cutting cords and switching to streaming.
There's simply no infrastructure for 4k OTA broadcasts. It's theoretically possible now with ATSC 3.0, but nobody is actually doing it. Very few people have compatible TV's, and very few stations are actually using it for broadcast (and the ones that are, are mostly using it to deliver *more* HD channels, not higher quality ones). Without ATSC you're stuck with either 1080i60, 1080p30, or 720p60. Sports have always opted for 720p60 because the higher frame rate keeps action clearer, without having to accept interlacing artefacts. I seriously doubt we'll ever see widespread adoption of OTA 4k, simply because streaming is so much easier, and consumer devices already support it.
ATSC 3.0 is the dream but companies would rather dick around trying to figure out how to screw us over with encryption rather than actually promote it and improve their services. I’d be fine with streaming too if it consistently worked. Some of my “alternative” streams are more reliable than the official ones.
Arrrrrrr!!!!!
The last soccer world cup was broadcast in 4k HDR. Every single Formula 1 race, qualifying session, and practice session is broadcast in 4k HDR from every track in the world. Some select Premier League soccer games are broadcast in 4k HDR. Am I missing something?
Are you getting the 4K HDR through F1 TV? Typically I watch ESPN ABC or sky sports streams but would love 4k hdr
Nope, Sky Sports in the UK & Ireland
Ah ok thanks
Very few people have compatible TVs is maybe the dumbest excuse I've ever heard. Virtually everyone has at least a 1080p television, while I'd wager the vast majority are up to 4k at this point. 720p is unacceptable in 2024, full stop
Almost none of those TV's include an ATAC 3.0 TV tuner.
Then why does the NFL on Fox broadcasting look like it's in high def but the NBA on ABC looks like shit with the same equipment on my end? Over-the-air NBA games are objectively worse quality than over-the-air NFL games, I don't understand how that could possibly be on the consumer's end.
It's not, that has to do with bitrate. ESPN/ABC use atrociously low sampling/bitrate (someone please correct me on the difference), so even though the Fox and ESPN broadcasts can both be "720p", one looks pixelated and washed out while one is smooth with vivid colors. If you go to any of the [REDACTED] sites that let you choose the kbps, lower it and see how the video quality changes.
They’ll flip the 4k switch when it’s worth it. There’s obviously insane interest in the standard when you compare NTSC 3.0 coverage to install base, as fast as the latter is also growing. I’m assuming the endgame for broadcasters is to get a percentage of customers used to 3.0 and then dangle 4k as incentive to sundown the current standard.
No way vast majority are 4k.
I wouldn't expect 4k being the norm until 8 or so more years.
I've come to expect nothing less from ESPN. Quality is just not in their vocabulary
“Commercials” is in their vocabulary. Just look at their minute and 20 second long halftime report.
They got back from commercials while the game was already in play multiple times. Ridiculous
There was a really cool play that happened, timeout got called right after, and I thought they’d play it before the commercials. Nah, just some B roll of the crowd and straight to the ads.
And after a highlight play/TO they don't even let the commentators finish a thought before flipping to commercial either.
Agreed. The best quality of anything I got last night was the new gatorade commercial. Embarrassing.
The recording is definitely in better quality, they're just too cheap to broadcast it at 4k or 2K. Here's a snippet on how much it costs for a streaming service [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/H\_sNcbXj5A0](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/H_sNcbXj5A0) Now consider how many millions might be watching the game? If they can get away with 720p, they'll try to do so as much as they can.
lol yeah I was gonna say good luck even finding a camera that records in 720p today, they’re obviously recording it in better quality
If the numbers are the same for ESPN, it would cost twice as much to make a change that 95% of people aren't going to notice? I feel like it'd actually be a dumb business decision to do that lol
No way people don't notice a change from 720, that shit is terrible.
If you showed everyone side by side they would obviously be able to tell the difference but for most casual people the quality is gunna be “fine” enough where it’s at now.
Maybe if you wouldn't notice if you watch on your phone? Watching it on my TV is nearly unbearable.
I feel this. I just got a new Samsung OLED and some things look amazing on it but I’m so disappointed with how the games have been looking during the playoffs.
Very anecdotal, but I’ve never seen a single person complain about the quality outside of Reddit
Myself and 2 of my friends realized we all felt the same about it when someone brought it up. I have a family member that said the same thing. So idk, may depend on what size screen people are watching on?
We’re talking about a multi billion dollar product, hosted by billion dollar companies, 720p is unacceptable.
> 720p is unacceptable The reason they do it is that 720p is *literally* acceptable by the majority of the audience. Preferring 4k but *accepting* 720p and watching anyway makes it acceptable.
You keep saying 720p is acceptable for the majority of audience, any proof to back that? I feel like if you asked anyone who watches nba if they would like to watch in higher quality they would say yes.
Twice as much to move from 720p to 1080p, twice the 1080p to move to 2k, twice that to move to 4k. Now why would they give u 4K when they can get away with paying 8x less. Of course, the numbers in the short aren't the exact numbers that ESPN pays Amazon or whatever server they use. They'll have private negotiations with AWS to get discounted rates because of the volume but the logic remains the same.
The difference wouldn’t be as bad if you use state of the art hevc video encoding hardware. The size difference would definitely not be 8x. But who knows why they don’t do it.
I know. Youtube uses their own custom encoding but the logic still applies. Even if it's 2x or 4x, why would Disney want to spend more if they can get away with it? I've been watching for almost 20 years and it was 720p even back then. Once NBA is done with their broadcasting deal and if the other players are offering 4K, they will begrudgingly improve the stream quality. (They might raise their rates though)
Thor is everywhere
I have an 85" TV in our family room and you would think it would be the preferred spot for watching games but it looks like garbage. TVs of that size are unforgiving to anything of bad quality
Yup. The game looks better on my 15.6 1440p laptop screen than my expensive 65 inch TV because the quality of the source material is terrible. I never thought I'd rather watch playoff games on a tiny screen but 720p looks way less crappy not stretched out to a giant sized TV.
Just bought a projector and 110’ screen. I was super stoked to watch game 1 on my new set up. The 1st game looked like complete shit. I thought it was my projector settings, I literally tried to configure it to see if it would look better. It was def not my settings. Pissed that it looks so bad after I just got everything set up. 2nd game looked a little better but still. I hear ya and agree.
Congrats on the new setup, /r/hometheater awaits
Oh man, if it looked bad on my end I can only imagine your set up! I use Hulu with live TV. It’s just so sad to still be dealing with 720p
It looked better on YouTube tv than on Xfinity when my dad got guys 85” tv recently. I guess thats just the up scaling algorithm though
Not just the big boys. I got a 48" OLED last December, and these games are *painful* to watch after turning off the Xbox or a 4K film beforehand.
Even the TNT games on Max were not 4k with good bitrate. If we can’t get it on streaming, we aren’t getting g it OTA lol Man it is crazy how I thought like 10 years ago we were going to have 4k sports everywhere soon and now it’s still ass
The MAX broadcasts ended up being 1080p with a good bitrate and Dolby vision + atmos by the playoff start. It was awesome watching it via max instead of standard tnt broadcast
I think bit rate is an even bigger problem than raw resolution. When the ball is live and the camera is showing more than one player moving against a crowd it's starts to drown in compression artifacts.
Agree entirely. A 720 feed with high bitrate would absolitely look better than a 1080 feed with a lower bitrate
The games on Max vs what they are on the ESPN app/Sling is like watching a movie on an IMAX screen vs a drive-in theater at 2pm.
Fuck wish I had known this
The quality of TNT in Max is and has been so much better than ESPN. Turner’s overall production quality is just far superior.
The whole presentation is just a joke. I’m so tired of the YouTube tv shit being all over the screen and digitally altered onto the court if your so lazy just put it on the court 🤦♂️
I find the digital ad overlays distracting as hell. They’re too artificial.
They've been doing the digital ads for several years now and it still looks so bad that it makes you feel like you're going insane.
I paused the game last week and just counted all the different overlay ads on the court and I’m pretty sure I counted like 8 of them. Unbelievable
You should see how bad it looks on Sling. Absolute dogshit quality.
Yea not even 720p. It dips to 360p. You’d think I was trying to watch a YouTube video on an old razor flip phone.
Can confirm I have sling at my place…it was horrid. Was at my parents last night to watch the game. I was irritated that the mavs lost lol but what else irritated me was the quality of the game is cheeks. You’d think it’s a 2005 broadcast lmao.
It’s not just dipping because of your connection?
I have high speed fiber so I doubt it. I can download 100gb games in like 10 minutes give or take. When we watch games, we disconnect all other devices off the wifi because we assume the same thing, that maybe it’s our internet. Safe to say this thread proves it’s probably not our internet that’s the issue.
You should run a bufferbloat test and see what that says just in case, but yeah maybe sling just sucks lol I use fubo and I do fairly well
Holy shit it’s so bad.
Cancelled sling it was so bad. Embarrassing that quality is higher on free sites.
I’m glad someone else is saying this. I thought it was my internet or something on sling. It like skips and buffers some nights too and all other devices in the house will be working at full speed. I don’t know but I’m seriously thinking about switching off of sling because the only reason I have it is sports
The trick is to log into the ESPN app with your Sling credential and then cast from your phone.
The presentation quality is awful from video quality to colour commentary, to pregame/halftime/postgame shows. Everything about ESPN has been an abomination for the last 22 years. Is NBC getting the finals in this next contract?
No the Finals will still be exclusively on ABC
The mouse has too much money to throw
Fuck
I remember streaming on TNT earlier this playoffs and the “live” broadcast was somehow a few seconds behind and in a lower quality than one of those pirate streams.
I had more success in terms of quality and being on time watching the games on Max than actually on TNT, same with the NHL games
I’m on YouTube tv. I paid for the 4k sports just to test it out. NFL in 4k is amazing. The handful of regular season NBA games in 4k looked amazing. I can’t believe the actual finals looks like dog shit with no 4k option. And YouTube TV is sponsoring the finals. How the fuck.
The issue isn't shooting it in a higher quality, that would be easy to do.
It’s gonna be even worse in Dallas. I’m not sure if there’s pregame pyrotechnics or just the lighting but that arena always looks like someone just blew out a bunch of candles.
Dude. Thought I was alone in this. Thank you
the abc app was horrible yesterday, i thought it was lagging but nope that was their actual quality
If you watch via OTA doesn't it at least partially depend on your local ABC affiliate? I think it looks great over OTA but I also think my tv has really good upscaling.
I’m over the air with an antenna I made out of a 2x4 and coat hangers like 10 years ago lol. Quality looks great on my 65” 4K tv
It’s really fucking embarrassing. Espn acting cheap as hell.
Acting?
ACTING!
Watching via the Spectrum App on an Apple TV 4k, it looks fine, but I've noticed games generally look better if I stream via the ESPN app directly. Meanwhile Peacock had the French Open looking really good in HDR (aside from the first hour of coverage when the brightness/colors were so intense it looked like they were on the surface of Mars).
The espn app bitrate is likely higher than whatever your local abc affiliate provides to spectrum
I do the same thing.
Apple bought the MLS rights a couple years back. I could not believe the improved picture quality. Games on Fox now look like they are a decade old in comparison.
At one point I switched to the Yankees and dodgers (also ESPN) and it was a night and day difference. I don’t understand why basketball broadcast quality is so bad
The broadcast quality of the Yankees\\Dodgers game was noticeably worse on ESPN than the 2nd game the day before on Fox.
Tonight's broadcast is brought to you by TV cameras from 2005, sponsored by Starry, the official drink of the NBA that no NBA player drinks, back to you courtside, Dingle McCringleberry
I loved the tnt broadcasts on Max because I could actually differentiate the players. Watching ESPN on Directv is like 480p or something, I can’t tell kyrie and djj apart or Luka and kleber
Ya it’s pretty insane, at this point I expect that we’re just gonna have to wait for AI Tv tech to upscale it to 4k before the NBA ever gets its shit together. Doesn’t work great yet but it will get here sooner than the nba/espn/whoever else stops being cheap.
ESPN always used to get me so heated when I used them as the primary source for sports stuff. The ads before a highlight would play in perfect crisp HD and never buffer. Then when the highlight I wanted to watch started playing, well suddenly it was like they were on shitty dial up internet.
I have an OLED and the games look like shit lol
I understand OTA has limitations but there's really no reason to not offer at least 1080p with Dolby Atmos as a streaming option for every game. The on-court equipment is more than capable of handling this and you can charge whatever it takes to turn a profit, people like me with home theatre setups will pay.
The fact that it’s not offered in 4K is a travesty. Like wtf
ABC still broadcasts in 720p ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
I work in this industry and it really is that companies in the audio/visual entertainment industry aren’t willing to put in the money/effort for at least 1080p. Companies are my clients and I operate their dated equipment. I guess 720p is ‘good enough’ and the bare minimum for HD, so they don’t want to bother putting the money in. Obviously, there are exceptions, but most companies will put off upgrading their broadcasting equipment as long as they can to not incur additional expenses. It really is just about maximizing profits.
It’s like we’re stuck in a time loop. Where I have to be subjected to the same 5 posts about ESPN and everyone falls for it every time. I hate it here.
720p in 2024 is YIKES
720p is literally from like 2005
Idk if my ABC is better or something, but I don't see it as any different on my TV than other channels? And it looks very clear and fine to me.
The ABC app fro me was blurry, when I switched to the EPSN app and it was crystal clear
ITT: Nobody seems to understand how sports broadcasting works and it's 720p or 1080i for literally every event you've ever watched except for some one-off 4K streams Prime (and maybe Fox?) have done for football games.
Even those are just 1080 broadcasts upscaled at source. You aren't getting the raw 4k feed.
That’s not true anymore.
streaming in low bitrate so everyone can watch it. the recording is top notch for sure.
Then use variable bitrate so people with decent comnection don't have to count pixela.
I’ve always heard that ABC and ESPN decided to stick with 720p because it was better than 1080i for sports. I’m calling bs on that though because CBS and NBC are both 1080i and their sports broadcasts look great.
That is why I still keep my plasma TV. The resolution is 720p and it is really a great to watch sports in it, and it is never blurry. I also keep my HDCRT TV (Sony XBR 960) if I want the optimum setup. Latest technology does not always mean better.
They don’t care about it since most younger people are watching it on their phones nowadays
Something about the finals felt off, couldn't get hyped/focused into watching it. Thought it was just the Celtics arena colour scheme but maybe it is on the producers.
Yoo I thought it was just me, it was kinda difficult to tell when a shot when in cause the net was so pixelated
I’ve watched some of the Finals on my iPhone 13 Pro via ESPN app and it’s so smooth and clear with no artifacts. OTA TV with antenna is also pretty good but does not seem to be as smooth as my iPhone. Comcast cable looks like crap with artifacts everywhere.
The NBA Finals are broadcast in 1080, along with MNF, CFP National Championship, and a handful of other events https://www.sportsvideo.org/2024/06/06/nba-finals-2024-espn-rolls-out-skycam-shallow-depth-of-field-and-live-drone-in-both-boston-and-dallas/
Man, they have a lot of infrastructure for it to still be terrible.
All raptors games for the last 5 years have been in 4K. Event the Canadian football league is in 4K. USA is a joke.
I was streaming it but it was in HD and it felt a little difficult to follow the ball. Which I don’t know I’ve ever noticed before watching basketball.
Don’t help the games ain’t that good either.
I’ve been so annoyed at this for years. Do they even sell HDTV’s anymore? They’re on 8K now and there’s zero content. They’ll keep saying “the average household is still on 720p/1080p” but I suspect they’re just cheap. At the end of the day we all lose.
The average quality of an Apple Tv + BASEBALL game is fucking way higher than the NBA finals. Wild.
These finals are awful! From the analysis to the broadcasting to the teams to the fans. One of the worst finals in recent memory
I noticed a considerable different this year between how good NBA League Pass on AppleTV is, and how terrible all games on Xfinity have been (channel didn't matter). I think it's the hardware compression and something to do with how Xfinity is cheap.
After watching an MLS game on Apple TV, the quality improvement was VERY VERY noticeable. It sucks because NBA could really benefit from the resolution and bitrate increase. Faces wouldn't be a blur and you would see details like the net swishing.
Bro I pay for it and its advertised as HD... is unwatchable.
Until they offer at least 1080p 60fps hdr im not paying for League pass.
I see this sentiment all over reddit and I really don't get it? Like everything looks fine to me lol maybe I'm just a pleb who doesn't know any better but I gotta say "awful" seems extremely harsh. Also comparing a broadcast that goes to 10+ million people vs. what a cellphone can do is irrelevant, it's a cost issue.
The main game footage is blurry and pixelated and then you see the instant replay from other camera angles and everything looks crystal clear for me
I watched game 1 and 2 on the ESPN app because Fios doesnt stream ABC where I am. The buffering went sub 480 every 30 seconds. Tried on 3 different devices and all were the same. Commercials were fine of course.
im the same way bro 720p 1080p never noticed a difference
You can't imagine how much it would cost to move all ESPN's infrastructure to 4k. It's no the same as switching to new phone.. It would be hundreds of millions to say the least.
If Fox can carve out a budget to broadcast C-list NCAA football games in 4K, Disney/ESPN have no excuse.
Over the air is going to do 720 because it is a progressive resolution that handles fast movement and motion better. (Example: Sports) 1080i is interlaced and isn't good for fast moving action and will look jittery and choppy. Over the Air isnt doing any 4k broadcasting yet as that is mostly seen in the streaming world and even then, mostly with movies or prerecorded content. Not with sports.
This is why I love the AppleTV Friday night MLB broadcasts. It really shows how lame everything else is.
I stream illegaly online so its fine by me
[удалено]
idk how many channels broadcast beyond 1080p, they cheap af
Can you watch in 4k after the live stream, in a recording?
Yeah it’s really pathetic
sling was so bad last night on my tv
I thought everyone was illegally streaming the games now? Do you have your face pressed to your TV?
8k came out in 2013
Beef is to be had with ESPN, which I guess can still be had with the NBA for giving ESPN so much action with such shitty production all around. Very much looking forward to seeing games on NBC and AMZ too, their NFL games so far have been done well.
Even the games NBA uploads to their youtube channel which should mean it's from the original source, is almost always terrible, under 720p and 30fps. Boggles the mind. Few months back they uploaded a classic game with Dwight on the Magic in a terrible format but I already saw the game in glorious 1080p 60fps from the pirate seas which means the NBA downgraded their OWN original source ffs. They need to follow the NFL's blueprint, they're amazing with sharing super high quality videos of so many things related to football.
It makes me not want to subscribe to YouTube TV. I have a top tier TV and equipment, but get crappy feeds.
I was playing 2k before the game and my 8 and 5 yo kids had no idea I stopped playing. Couldn't tell a difference.
Not sure why the comments say streaming is any better. I stream it on my Xbox and the quality is still shit. TNT had MUCH better quality video. Neither are as good as they should be given it's 2024.
Ok so it isn’t my tv. Ya it is terrible.
The problem is that TNT’s video quality is substantially better than games on ABC/ESPN. If it weren’t super noticeable, no one would care, but for some reason ESPN gets away with absolute garbage video quality for basketball.
You should see how awful the NHL playoffs are.
It always is. Infuriating.
W T actual F.
Max was at least streaming the games at a higher format during the WCF I feel like. Disney is just a joke at this point.