All season long, the Philadelphia Eagles were hounded by the doubters. One running back can’t win a Super Bowl, they said. Jalen Hurts doesn’t pass enough, they said. The Chiefs have it locked up, they said.
By the same token, there were plenty of side-eyes when Fox announced that Tubi, its ad-supported streaming service, would be offering a free stream—in 4K, no less—of the one of the world’s biggest sporting events. Did the little streamer have what it takes to deliver the Super Bowl in 4K without fumbling the ball?
Well, it turns out the Eagles did have what it takes and, from all accounts, so did Tubi.
While previous streams of the Super Bowl were plagued by buffering, stuttering, and those dreaded spinning beach balls, Tubi’s 4K (if upscaled) delivery of the big game went off more or less without a hitch.
Cord-cutters on Reddit, who are all too happy to pounce when they encounter poor streaming performance, found Tubi’s Super Bowl stream to be a “pleasant surprise,” with commenters praising the “clarity,” “good sound quality” (although that meant you could better hear Tom Brady be “as dull as he could be”), and the “awesome, great 4K picture.”
Not everyone gave Tubi’s Super Bowl stream a high-five, of course (“Tubi is trash,” one viewer grumbled), but for the most part, complaints over the stream were few and far between. Even more surprising, Tubi’s Super Bowl presentation reportedly had the shortest streaming delay of any of its competitors.
According to a survey by streaming provider Phenix (by way of Advanced Television), Tubi’s Super Bowl stream only lagged 26 seconds behind the real-time action. Coming in a distant second was the NFL+ stream with a 51-second lag, while Hulu + Live TV, YouTube TV, DirecTV, and Sling were all behind by more than a minute. The worst was Fubo, which stumbled badly with a 78-second lag, the survey said.
Of course, the crown jewel of lag-free sports viewing comes via an over-the-air antenna, which is the way my family watched the big game. Then again, we’re Plex DVR users, which meant we actually did experience a delay given that the Plex software has to buffer the stream. Maybe we would have been better off going with Tubi.
Tubi’s Super Bowl night stood in stark contrast to how other streamers have fared in previous years.
During last year’s Super Bowl, Paramount had some explaining to do following widespread complaints about its game time stream.
Paramount blamed the glitches on “an error due to a technical issue with one of our partners.”