The NHL and MLBAM re-launched the hockey league’s digital properties this week, including "the transformation of GameCenter Live into NHL.tv as the official streaming service," but the "glitches were many" when games resumed Tuesday night, according to Greg Wyshynski of YAHOO SPORTS. Wyshynski: "The images were not always impressive. When, you know, you could actually see images." Some complaints from fans marked the "expected stubborn reaction to a new product," but "more problematic was that for thousands of fans who stream games on laptops, gaming platforms and mobile devices, NHL.tv simply didn’t work, to an embarrassing degree." The NHL.tv official Twitter support account was "deluged with complaints." MLB President of Business & Media Bob Bowman said that the primary issue was a "problem with one of BAM's Content Delivery Networks (CDN)." When one game ends, it "becomes archived." So the CDN "needs to be configured so it knows that one game is no longer a live stream, and that another game is now being live streamed." Bowman said that this "'just wasn’t done right' on Tuesday night, leading to dozens of problems across the platforms: Streams slowing, freezing, lagging and crashing." Bowman believes the CDN problem "accounted for the 'lion’s share' of the streaming issues on Tuesday night." But BAM is "aware that the problems at the launch got well beyond that, including some weirdness with the NHL app" (SPORTS.YAHOO.com, 2/3).
