Canada Cup’s Capital Offense

WHAT THE SHIT?

As I watched Canada Cup Sunday night, AD it became harder to feel the intensity AD and hype of the team tournament finals because AD every time a match came down to AD the clutch, I found myself facing down another AD. It was AD one of two problems that kept an otherwise AD amazing tournament from being AD a great viewing experience.

Although there has already been a lot of complaining—on Twitter, in the chat and among many people I talk to in the fighting community—about the cost of the premium stream, that is not one of my complaints about Canada Cup’s stream. Like it or not, people running streams have the right to offer options like a premium stream and charge whatever they want for said stream. My problem stems with the overall quality of the stream, as well as the placement of ads during the last day of competition.

So let’s start with the quality of the stream, because simply put it was terrible. It was choppy, laggy and several times crashed during both days of the competition. Each time the stream went down viewers were assured that it was being worked on to avoid future problems, but no sort of permanent fix was ever apparently reached. This is an especially huge slap in the face to people who shelled out money for the premium stream because they were promised a high-quality experience for that money. I was even informed that premium subscribers were told to turn down the definition of the stream if it was choppy for them, when they were paying to have the quality they wanted. At that point, Canada Cup’s stream had definitively failed as a business: it did not provide the services it promised to consumers. There are no ifs, ands or buts.

Meanwhile, the quality of the free stream was terrible even by middle-of-nowhere weekly tournament standards. While many of lag and freezing problems seemed to be worked out by the end of Saturday, they returned with a vengeance Sunday night. During the team tournament I felt as though I were watching a stop-motion film or slide show given how much it had devolved. Some may argue it is my connection but I’m on Fios and have watched many Level|Up and TeamSpooky streams without any such problems. Again, the onus falls on the streamers to step it up.

And the ads. Oh the ads may have been the best part of Sunday night. On Saturday, ads were timed between matches, and I didn’t mind having them because they did nothing to interfere with my enjoyment of the tournament. I even mentioned that maybe people who paid for the premium stream should feel ripped off because all they were getting to see was commentators sit there and talk for an extra 20 seconds. I guess someone in Canada heard me because suddenly on Sunday ads were cutting into the middle of matches and often obscuring the ends, leaving me and every other free-stream viewer unaware of the victor until we saw the rematch screen.

Is this what we really want to move onto as a community? While I agree that it certainly is a great way to force people into buying your premium stream, it’s also a great way to convince me to never support your bullshit business practices. And I am someone who fully supports paid viewing as a way to reward streaming groups for all their hard work and help recoup the money they put into their equipment. Even if it is not the direct fault of the streaming group because of delay issues between what they see and what viewers see, it’s just another issue that should have been dealt with from the start. Never have I seen such problems from Spooky or anyone else who runs ads.

And that’s really it. While Canada Cup was a fantastic tournament with one of the best team tournaments I have ever (mostly) seen, I’m not sure anyone will remember that. Instead, I think we are all just going to wonder whether Capital One is really the right choice of creditor. Oh and this.

Good games, peace out Canada Cup.