TORONTO – Long-time competitors TSN and Sportsnet are continuing their years-long battle to see who can provide the lowest quality online streaming option for Canadians still willing to pay to watch sports live.
“TSN and Sportsnet have been rivals for decades. First it was, who has the best daily highlight show hosts? Then who can win the rights to hockey or the Olympics,” said industry expert Matthew Lam. “And now it’s clearly, who can make a streaming service so bad it actually causes Canadians to scream in frustration.”
“It’s too early to declare a winner. Other than reddit sports streams of course.”
The popular cable channels have taken differing approaches to making their apps unwatchable. Sportsnet Now has gone with the classic, ‘make the video freeze constantly,’ combined with ‘constantly play annoying commercials for Sportsnet Now on Sportsnet Now.’ TSN on the other hand has chosen a ‘what if the picture was bad all the time’ mixed with a little bit of ‘randomly telling people the ‘video file could not be played’ even though they were just watching it’ approach.
“We all know Canadians, especially young Canadians, are cutting the cord and that is why we offered online only plans,” said TSN and Sportsnet in a statement. “But we also hate the young people who cut their cords and want them to suffer, and that is why we’ve made our online plans the worst audio-visual experience we could possibly imagine.”
TSN and Sportsnet hope to offer new features to make their streaming services even worse. Sportsnet will now have its intermission hockey panel speak during game-play in a splitscreen, while TSN will make sure its app crashes everytime a close game enters the final two minutes.
Fortunately both services will continue to cost more than Netflix, Crave or any other streaming service that works perfectly.
