After Prime Video struggled through an outage, an incredibly inopportune moment during Tuesday night’s Eastern Conference play-in game, Bill Simmons took the opportunity to blast the streamer for some of its issues with NBA coverage throughout the season.
During overtime of the Heat-Hornets game in Charlotte, Prime Video flashed to black before displaying a “technical difficulties” animation for several minutes. The company later explained that the mishap resulted from a “hardware failure” in the production truck.
Even NBA legend LeBron James took to social media to complain about it.
And in an episode of his podcast late Tuesday night, Simmons added to the pile-on. The Sports Guy joked that rather than giving Charlotte guard Coby White a new token that Prime Video seems to want to turn into a play-in tradition, the streamer should give White an apology for missing a key part of his team’s big win.
“They gave him some Amazon Prime award, some necklace with the plays on it. They should have given him an apology for the stream going out in overtime,” Simmons said.
Simmons’ guest, the longtime NBA analyst Kirk Goldsberry, was even harsher.
“They can send a tech bro to the moon, but they can’t f*cking broadcast a basketball game without ‘technical difficulties,'” he said. “I haven’t seen a technical difficulties slide on a basketball game since I was 12 years old, bro. And this is Amazon? Come on, guys.”
While Simmons later added that he believes Prime Video has brought out the best in lead game analyst Stan Van Gundy, he took aim at another recurring technical issue on the streamer’s broadcasts this season.
“The other thing with Amazon, the entire year, the audio has been a split-second ahead of the video, on half of the Amazon games we watch,” he added. “The three-pointer is halfway toward the basket, and it’s like, ‘BAANNNNG, it’s good,’ and you hear the crowd. The ball hasn’t even gone in yet. It’s like, how have we not figured this out? You guys have eight kajillion dollars.”
Some have complained about the audio sync issues dating back to Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football broadcasts over the years. But those complaints ratcheted up significantly after the far greater mistake during Tuesday’s outage.
Unfortunately, the rants and the jokes write themselves when a tech company as big as Amazon screws up a simple sports broadcast.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.