Update: DirecTV has issued a new statement on its 4K MLB broadcast issues, which I've reproduced in full at the bottom of this article.
Update 2: On April 29 DirecTV finally successfully achieved a 4K MLB broadcast. I've added feedback on this at the end of the article.
Last week I posted a story about DirecTV becoming the first US broadcaster to deliver live 4K UHD broadcasts of Major League Baseball. In that story I was excited - as a fan of 4K picture quality frustrated by the ongoing shortage of 4K content - to report that DirecTV’s 4K coverage would begin with the game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants last Friday. However, it turned out that not even a single minute of that game ended up being broadcast in 4K due to ‘technical issues’. Oops.
Embarrassing though this undoubtedly was, though, at least DirecTV had the chance to get its 4K MBL extravaganza back on track pretty swiftly by being able to show Tuesday night’s game between the Cubs and the Cardinals in glorious 4K, as promised in last week’s high profile press announcement. Almost unbelievably, though, that didn’t happen either…
So what exactly is going on here? How can a broadcaster with the clout and resources of DirecTV - which is owned, of course, by
Not much to go on
Unfortunately at the time of writing it’s impossible to say with certainty what went wrong as DirecTV has been pretty limited with the official responses it's put out.
Fortunately, though, there is a trail of evidence of sorts courtesy of the excellent TVpredictions.com, which ran an article about the failed broadcast on Friday evening that includes some of the social media chatter surrounding that day’s initial MLB 4K failure. I strongly advise you to check out this article to get a feel for just how unimpressed DirecTV’s most high-end customers were with the first MLB fail, but the key points are these:
- Despite a (not publicly available) DirecTV test channel successfully showing 4K footage of the stadium before the game, customers who tuned into Channel 106 at the appointed time to watch the game in 4K were merely greeted by a DirecTV logo. And after about 20 minutes the entire channel just vanished from the onscreen guide!
- DirecTV apparently put out no information to tell people expecting to see the game what was happening.
- 4K footage from the game later appeared, again only on a test channel, but with a black bar down the middle of the screen.
- DirecTV eventually responded to questions from TVpredictions.com with the following statement: "While the (Los Angeles Dodgers-San Francisco Giants) game was available to our customers in HD on MLB Network, we needed to cancel the 4K broadcast due to a technical issue with a third party's field production truck. The signal was not up to our high standards and we are continuing our testing to ensure we deliver a flawless 4K viewing experience. If viewers were inconvenienced, we certainly apologize.”
Regarding the failure of yesterday’s Cubs/Cardinals game to appear, the only information I've been able to get came via an MLB statement issued just minutes before the 4K broadcast was supposed to start:
“To ensure the delivery of the best possible 4K Ultra HD signal for future live broadcasts, DirecTV and MLB Network will conduct an internal test of the signal during tonight’s Cubs vs Cardinals game. The game will be available to customers in HD, but not in 4K. Moving forward, we are committed to delivering the best experience for our customers.”
There are technical problems and then there are DirecTV 4K technical problems
While it is, of course, common for technical issues to affect live broadcasts for a few seconds or even minutes, I have to say I find the failure of DirecTV to show so much as a minute of live 4K MBL footage from either of the first two scheduled games pretty incredible.
Regarding the first game, it seems amazing that there weren’t back-up facilities in place to make sure such a much-vaunted technical showpiece couldn’t be hit so completely by a technical hitch somewhere in the production chain. Let’s not forget, either, that the average MLB game lasts for the best part of three hours, yet even this wasn’t long enough for DirecTV to sort its technical issues out.
But then 72 hours seemingly wasn’t enough for DirecTV to sort its technical issues out. For if the broadcaster was 100% confident that it had managed to solve the 4K problems that scuppered its Friday coverage it would surely have been falling over itself to get yesterday’s Cubs/Cardinals game up and running in 4K, rather than keeping its 4K streams under wraps for in-house testing only.
As someone who lives in the UK, it’s simply unimaginable to me that our closest equivalent service to DirecTV, Sky, would have dropped the ball (pun intended) so spectacularly with such an important showpiece launch.
DirecTV’s 4K MLB debacle also, it seems to me, raises the prospect of some compensation potentially being due to its Ultimate and Premier package subscribers, some of whom will clearly have upgraded their subscriptions and maybe even their entire AV systems specifically to get the 4K MLB coverage.
Luckily for DirecTV its next scheduled 4K MLB game is April 29 - by which time it will surely have sorted its 4K issues out. If it hasn't then, well, we all know what happens when you get to strike three...
UPDATE: Here is the new statement issued by DirecTV:
"DirecTV and MLB Network successfully tested an internal, live 4K broadcast of [Tuesday's] Cubs vs Cardinals game and are now on track to deliver a live 4K broadcast to customers with the Yankees @ Red Sox game on April 29. Taking the lead in pioneering new technology will always have its challenges, but we believe the rewards are well worth it to bring this unique visual experience to our customers."
UPDATE 2 (May 2 2016): Happily DirecTV did manage to broadcast the April 29 MLB game in 4K successfully. And aside from some concerns that not every camera being used appeared to be delivering native 4K, the viewer response was overwhelmingly positive, with posters on the AVSForum using words like 'beautiful', 'seductive' and 'Wow. Just Wow' to describe the experience, as well as comparing the DirecTV 4K visuals positively against
