It is the lifeblood of basketball addicts across the globe. Over 40 NBA games a week, available, depending on what you shell out, on your television, laptop, phone, tablet, essentially anywhere. It is the tree around which online basketball culture, considered the strongest of the major sports despite the significantly greater widespread popularity of football, thrives. It is League Pass and to be a modern hoops fan, you have to have it.
It's a product that would have seemed so futuristic as to be compared with a jetpack or interstellar travel (OK, maybe that's a bit much) 15 years ago. Watching live NBA games nearly anywhere on the planet, and not only that, but the random Bucks-Pistons game on a Tuesday in February? Preposterous. But it's not just a sign of how much the technology has changed, but how much the NBA has grown since a time when the league was 85 percent "what did Jordan do tonight?" There is a fervor in watching every game, not just your Thursday and Friday night primetime games, but the Raptors-Celtics early tilts, the Warriors-Clippers late night jaunts.
I'm not saying that people should bow down and kiss the NBA's feet for the service after laying down their, yes, $200. I'm simply pointing out that to even have the ability to watch these games shows the reach and impact of League Pass. Robert Occhialini, the Vice President of Products for NBA Digital describes it as a "truly global product, available in over 200 countries and territories."
And yet, it's also the most widely criticized product of the Big 3 due to consumer frustrations over streaming quality, a lack of HD broadcasts in some markets, and an ever-increasing pricing model that shows that no matter how much people criticize League Pass, the consumer base remains on the rise. Deadspin tore League Pass Broadband apart last season (link, NSFW), describing in painstaking detail all the ways that it fails. The problems have been particularly striking when compared to the rave reviews that MLB's MLB.TV platform have earned.
Scooter Vertino is the new General Manager of the NBA's League Pass product. And while fans are right to be skeptical until they see the product, Vertino and Occhialini say they've heard the criticisms, and have put forth the time and resources to make significant strides this year.
For starters, customer service has received a significant overhaul. "We've made a commitment to quality improvement in both customer service experience and responsiveness," Occhialini says. The two say there have been major strides in wait times in between tickets, an improvement select consumers have already experienced as they get set for the season.
"There's nothing more frustrating than to feel like you're on an island," Vertino says. "Customer service is our biggest priority, no question about it."
But the largest complaint has always been stream quality. The team at NBA and Turner's joint project say they have worked to find different ways to fix the repeated interruptions and quality issues that have plagued both broadband and mobile options, including different encodes, bit and frame rates, and a substantial time investment in testing. "We've also built a new comprehensive analytics product on our back end," Occhialini says. "The goal is to snuff out problems as they arise."
Occhialini is no stranger to the negative feedback. An avid Twitter user, he says he's poured over both customer feedback and public response to find targeted areas to improve. But beyond all the talk, there's got to be actual strides, soemthing that can be tricky given the relationship the NBA has to negotiate with its cable and internet providers.
For instance, one of the common misnomers both the Broadband and television package team deals with is over the availability of HD broadcasts. But what often gets lost is that the availability of HD streams comes on a provider-by-provider basis. DirecTV offers every game in HD for both its television and broadband streams. But some cable providers, most notably Comcast, will only provide a single game in HD. We're deep in first-world problems territory, but in a hyper-competitive streaming sports market, and for a league that prides itself on being so far out in front in the tech space, these issues matter.
But many of the smaller problems that fans and the Deadspin takedown focused on have been corrected. While League Pass Broadband increased to $199 this season, and the five-team package to $149, purchasing the package now includes availability on mobile and across all devices. The device list of native apps for the service is growing wildly too, as the NBA closed a deal last season to provide native apps for all Sony products which will include the PS4 along with the PS3, and their smart TVs. XBox One? Yep. Xbox 360? Yessir. Apple TV returns, along with all iOS devices. Apps will be available on Android as well, in both the Google Play and Amazon Kindle Fire stores (and the Kindle Fire TV). And Roku returns this season, good news for those who don't have cable subscriptions. Google's popular Chromecast device, however, will not have a native app available to stream from devices.
Popular additions from last season return to the broadband and mobile options, including the choice of which broadcast to listen to so you're not subjected to Sean Elliott or Tommy Heinsohn unless you're in the mood. Nationally televised-game archives also return, so you can go back and rewatch any game during the season all the way through. But there's no word on the availability of a streaming option for games broadcast on NBATV. It's a curious situation, as both Turner and ESPN provide streaming options for their games, and the remainder of the games are on League Pass. So the only games that are played in the NBA you cannot watch live are those on the NBA's channel itself (which is run by Turner).
Occhialini and Vertino both exude confidence in an improved customer experience from top to bottom, but refer to the improvements of what they feel is already a very strong product as "tweaks" rather than outright overhaul. But despite its problems, it's not clear that the service needs a complete overhaul from a user perspective. Most concerns that the broadband team can deal with have been put in place and there's a very clear sense of wanting to finally get ahead of emerging technologies, rather than constantly playing catch-up with the latest format and medium.
Skeptics will remain as the league launches its new edition later this month, and any issues long-time customers experience will be chalked up to the "same old League Pass." But to look at the whole program, there's reason to believe that League Pass will only continue to grow, as more and more fans find ways to follow the regular season most often derided for its meanginlessness with fervor and passion. The basketball lifeline continues to grow.
