Is the NBA App Bad?

A subscriber lodges a complaint

Like many around this time of year, I’m really enjoying the Masters Tournament App. It not only allows me to track coverage of the competition in whichever specific way but it offers cool services I’d never considered wanting. I would not have thought to ask for player driving range stats, but now I love having them. This isn’t an ad. The Masters App doesn’t really need an ad here, or anywhere else. Golf fans just love it and talk about it glowingly.

Apparently this might not be the case for the NBA App.

From Subscriber Clint:

Not sure if this is really in your lane and this is kind of old news now, but I’m on medical leave now and have wanted to watch more NBA. I have had league pass for ages and being on the east coast I used to catch up on the league by watching the 4Q of games in the morning with my coffee. YouTubeTV has a great UX and you can watch games really efficiently by fast forwarding through commercial, timeouts, replay reviews (Jesus fucking Christ the reviews...), etc.

Since the NBA loves money more than fans, part of their deal with Amazon was to move league pass exclusively to Prime. I cannot overstate how shit the Prime app (or the NBA’s own app) is compared to YouTubeTV. I have just completely given up using either of them. They don’t buffer the video enough, fast forwarding is super slow, they have tons of bugs, etc. I thought maybe I was just uptight and too much of a nerd about this, but I found plenty of Reddit threads about this as well.

For a real fan of the league, watching “condensed games” (yay I can just see the made baskets!) or highlights just doesn’t give me the same excitement as watching *the actual fucking game*. And I am not going to watch a replay of a game with all of the interminable timeouts, commercial breaks, etc. So this year I’ve basically watched zero regular season games.

I’m sure the NBA got some extra money from Amazon to push their product to this shit app. But this is another example of how they care about money more than the actual fan experience. The NBA has alway been my favorite sport, but between the tanking, too many games and injuries (the way the game is played now is just way different than 20 years ago and the current schedule just doesn’t make sense anymore), the non stop complaining about refs, and the wokeness (sorry I’m never going to forget the fucking social justice slogans on the jerseys) I’m almost done with it. The NFL is my clear #1 now and it isn’t even close.

“Fracking the pie” is spot on. The NBA is just fucking themselves going for short-term dollars. My son is 9yo and plays travel soccer and should be a big future NBA fan but I can’t watch a game with him because they take forever and any time we sit down to try to watch, usually half of the best players aren’t even on.

BTW your columns and pods have been a big emotional boost for me whenever they hit while I’m on medical leave (I don’t have cancer or anything but I’m dealing with some stuff). It brings me a little joy any time I see something new from you hit my phone. I hope you’re enjoying your life on Substack. My friends and I enjoy your columns and pods and you usually hit on topics we are discussing in our group chats :)

Have a good day!

Best regards,

Clint

First off, wishing Clint the best of health. Second, I can’t so much speak to the NBA (Or Amazon) app experience beyond asking industry friends who use it. I will say that Clint’s sentiments echo a lot of what I hear. I know that, for years, Adam Silver has hyped up such products with promises of a personalization that nobody appears to crave. At the All-Star Tech Summit, Silver said:

As I look at the world and the predictions, we’re seeing much of it already on how AI is changing everything about our personal lives and our business lives; for me, there’s no doubt that AI will have the same impact on sports. One area in particular that I think is worth addressing is the impact on the fan experience. And one of the things that we’re beginning to see already is how we’re going to be able to, more than personalize, almost hyper-personalize our telecasts, allowing people to experience the game in any way they want. Many of you have probably experimented with this already, but in essence, you’ll be able to hear the game in any dialect, any language, you’ll be able to hear a hardcore X’s and O’s commentary, maybe one that’s more comedic if that’s what you’re interested, or somebody for a novice explaining each foul and the rules as it goes along.

Oh, how would be fans yearn to have each foul and the rules explained in grand detail. Oh, how there’s quite a market demand for Kevin Hart doing X’s and O’s commentary.

Meanwhile, most people just want delivery on the basics: Good games, with star players, on an app that functionally works. The Masters has succeeded and exceeded with an app that IBM developed. Has the NBA failed on this front after joining forces with one of the world’s most successful companies? Curious what all of you think.