Just as sports fans have gotten used to high-definition broadcasts of their favorite events, the 4K revolution has started to quickly emerge and is poised to be on the verge of widspread adoption. DIRECTV announced it was going to show the San Francisco Giants vs Los Angeles Dodgers Sunday night baseball game last week as the first 4k broadcast of a potential 25 games during the 2016 season.
Get The Latest MLB Tech News In Your Inbox!
Unfortunately, as sometimes is the case with technology, the hype fell short due to technical difficulties.
The broadcast was supposed to mark the first 4K broadcast of a MLB game in the United States. Canada’s broadcaster SportsNet, which is based in Canada is already showing all 81 Toronto Blue Jays games at home this season with the 4K technology.
While DIRECTV confirmed that the broadcast didn’t occur, it seems there was not much communication to customers. Subscribers say that only a DIRECTV logo appeared at game time, but then 20 minutes following the scheduled start-time the channel was removed from the channel guide and the game never appeared.
@DIRECTV where did the 4K baseball game go? After seeing a logo for 20 mins the guide now says to be announced.
— paulmurray (@paulmurray) April 16, 2016
While many DIRECTV subscribers tweeted at the satellite provider’s official handle for an explanation, but @DIRECTV never publicly acknowledged the issue.
DIRECTV later sent out this statement discussing the problems that occurred during the 4K broadcast.
“While the 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.”
This bumpy test run likely won’t have a negative long term impact on sports broadcasts in 4K, but it does show potential pitfalls to fully onboarding the broadcast technology to mass audiences. With 4K technology continuing to become more popular in the mainstream markets, one would think it would be ideal for DIRECTV to fully have their 4k broadcasts ready to go by Week 1 of the NFL season in September.
The next 4K MLB broadcast scheduled for DIRECTV is the Boston Red Sox vs. New York Yankees game on Friday, April 29th.