YouTube TV (GOOGL) committed a cardinal sin for sports fans on Wednesday night.
The TNT broadcast of Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals match-up between the Miami Heat and Boston Celtics on YouTube TV suddenly stopped during a commercial break with under five minutes remaining in the game. The Heat were leading 114-109 at the time of the disruption.
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Viewers took to Twitter to express their outrage, complaining that their stream was stuck or rerunning a trailer for the upcoming movie "The Little Mermaid." Fans had to find other means to watch the remainder of the game -- including via TNT’s alternative broadcast on Twitter -- but some were unable to watch the important finish at all.
YouTube was only able to provide feedback at 11:43pm Eastern Time on Twitter when the game was already decided.
“if you have an issue watching the Miami Heat vs. Boston Celtics game on TNT, we’re aware of it & our team is working on a fix - thx so much for your patience!” the tweet from TeamYouTube read.
The TNT broadcast continued to have latency issues even after the game had ended which spilled over to the Emmy-award winning postgame show "Inside the NBA."
YouTube followed up with a tweet after midnight apologizing for disruption on other channels as well, but did not offer a solution.
Some fans also showed concern that YouTube TV’s blunder could spell bad news for its broadcast of the upcoming NFL season.
The streamer is debuting NFL Sunday Ticket on its platform after paying between $2 and $2.5 billion over the next seven years for the service that had previously been offered by DirecTV for the last three decades.
YouTube TV is charging top dollar for the service -- as much as $489 for a subscription to both Sunday Ticket and RedZone -- so its blunder during a marquee NBA playoff game could be a bad indication of how it handles high traffic on its service.
And the NFL trumps the NBA’s viewership. The average NFL regular season game garnered 16.7 million viewers last year across all broadcasters, while TNT averaged about 5.3 million viewers per game during the second round of the 2023 NBA playoffs.
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