Hey, Why Do Sports Look So Bad on TV?

It’s never been more expensive and more convoluted to watch sports. This game is only on this streaming service at this time. That game is only available if you sign up for cable or some digital equivalent. 

What every service has in common, though, is that those sports look pretty crummy! It doesn’t matter if you have an OLED TV, fiber internet—or both. We live in an era where TV manufacturers will brazenly slap an 8K sticker on a piece of equipment, yet you can’t watch athletes toss a ball at half that resolution.

It might seem like a weird thing to get hung up on, but given how much Olympics we’ve been watching at Remap, given how much anticipation we have for the upcoming NFL season, is it any surprise that we’re now fully in the mode of nitpicking how it looks?

This is Remap—do we even consider this a “nitpick”?

Rob: Patrick, I have to tell you about my Saturday because it was one of the most “did you ever think you’d have it so good?” lazy weekends in recent memory. MK and I woke up late and decided to watch The Caped Crusader on Amazon, both of us inordinately pleased that we were getting to enjoy Saturday morning cartoons at our age. Then it was time to catch up on some of the weird Olympic indoor cycling events, each of which seems designed to take sprint cycling and make it somehow more complicated, faster, and dangerous—every single one of them feels like a sport you’d see on TV in a dystopian sci-fi movie, except that everyone would be wearing more latex and neon. Next thing I know, it’s time to watch Caleb Williams in his first preseason game with the Bears (hey, he looked good) and then it was the gold medal men’s basketball match between France and the U.S., which might have given me some of the greatest sports moments of my life.

Weekends, man. They’re great.

But the thing that I wanted to bring up is the fact that most of what I was watching didn’t actually look good. Which is funny because if you watch sports on TV for a couple hours you’ll see at least a couple ads for new TVs that promise to make sports look more lifelike and more involving than ever before. Now those ads always use generic “football!” footage where no league or team branding is remotely identifiable, and I’ve usually assumed that’s because every league now has “official” TV brands they partner with… but I think the fact that any actual game footage looks like compressed, pixelated crap might also have a lot to do with it.

I don’t know how, with a bigger screen and paying more money than ever before to watch TV on it, the names on players’ jerseys have gotten harder to read, but somehow they have. At least watching the basketball game on Peacock you had that gorgeous court that players really popped against, but that Bears game on the NFL Network? I felt like I was watching it on a flip phone circa 2006. It honestly looked like the NFL was hosting a pirate restream of its own game.

I can’t tell why I’m noticing this more these days. Maybe it’s that Youtube TV is just compromised enough that it bugs me more than Comcast’s compression did on my DVR, but it also feels like sports broadcast standards just haven’t improved in a decade? If you’re not watching a flagship sports broadcast, it’s a complete crapshoot as to what you are going to get. The really funny thing is, the local Bulls broadcast generally looks pretty good but anything on ESPN looks like it’s been piped through multiple cable splitters, before being brute-force resized to make space for ESPN’s news crawl.

Is this what we get for being the audience that networks have always known is the most captive? Increasingly I think the only people who regularly watch live TV are sports fans, but I cannot believe how little any league seems to care about how their product is represented. Do you think this ever gets better, or are we going to be watching blocky 720p regional sports broadcasts on our deathbeds?

Patrick: Every few months, I’ll click on the “4K upgrade” option that YouTube TV dangles in front of you during a major sports event. And every time, you’re reminded how very little 4K content there is available to watch, outside of the singular game they’re advertising against. I can’t speak to the exact technical limitations that are preventing the transition to 4K, but reading this reddit thread is pretty illuminating. 

I do think it comes down to being conservative on costs, and knowing the vast majority of people absolutely do not give a shit about 4K and could not tell you if it existed. We’ve gotten used to lower bit rates. We’ve gotten used to motion smoothing. We’re getting used to shockingly good AI upscaling. TV production became a race to produce cheaper panels at larger sizes and slap a 4K sticker on top of it, even though most people aren’t using physical media that could best take advantage of such a display, and I doubt most people are even aware if their streaming service is capable of letting them stream 4K.

That’s before you consider that, in an era of devices, people are often not even watching on a TV itself. 

Plus, we’re instead in an era of convenience, and companies are turning the screws on convenience after hooking us on a decade-plus of unsustainably cheap services that Wall Street is finally demanding should actually make money. At some point, there will be a middle ground between how much these companies can charge, produce, and retain subscribers while ensuring profitability. It’s at that point these companies will have a few less levers to pull to get more out of people. 4K, though, is one of those premium levers, and while it might have less pull on a more disposable service like Netflix, it might have actual pull when you’re talking about a live sports event that’s meant to be consumed and enjoyed as it’s taking place.

4K…as a treat? (Just remember to cancel your 4K upgrade as soon as the event is over.)

Which is all to say that my suspicion is that 4K is coming slowly and mostly by accident, as internet infrastructure moves along, equipment gets replaced, etc. And the moment it becomes possible for 4K to become the status quo, you’ll get charged up the ass for it, especially for sports. Why would they give it to you for free, when they absolutely know that you and I would kill to watch even pre-season games in 4K?