Why livestreaming of UNLV games is hit or miss

By Mike Grimala (contact)

Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2022 | 2 a.m.

If you want to watch tonight’s UNLV’s basketball game against Air Force, you’ve got two options. The most reliable way is to head to the Thomas & Mack Center, buy a ticket and attend in person.

The other option is to watch via the Mountain West Network (MWN) — and hope for the best.

As the in-house streaming platform of the Mountain West Conference, the MWN is now in its 10th year of casting games, and it seems like the MWN’s live-event production has been coming under constant fire from fans for just as long.

The last time UNLV played a game available exclusively on the network was Jan. 20 at Air Force. The production was plagued with technical difficulties from tipoff, as the video would not stream more than one or two seconds without freezing completely. Social media flooded with complaints, and at halftime the game was pulled off the MWN and streamed directly through YouTube. With the Mountain West Network removed from the equation, the second half streamed without any further issues.

It wasn’t the first time UNLV fans have had to fight through a glitchy video stream to watch their team play, and it won’t be the last. So where should diehards direct their ire when they’re shut out of watching their favorite team? Does the blame for the choppy video feeds, intermittent outages and poor production quality lie with the Mountain West?

It’s not that simple.

That’s because MWN is not a centralized production. There is no MWN crew that hops from city to city throughout the season, setting up at each arena and broadcasting the games. On the contrary, the Mountain West Network is just the branded name of a collection of individual broadcasts; each university is responsible for producing its own event streams.

The history: The Mountain West Network actually began as a traditional regional cable channel, called the MTN, in 2006. That iteration was jointly owned by CBS and NBC, but when the conference realigned in 2011-12 cable providers dropped the channel and its network owners dissolved the organization. That forced the conference to devise another way to make its games available to viewers.

The result was the new, digital-only Mountain West Network. While a variety of entities combine to air most of the conference’s games (CBS, CBS Sports Network, FS1 and Stadium do the heavy lifting), the MWN streams the games that slip through the cracks and would otherwise not be on TV. The MWN was first made available via the web but is now also carried by secondary devices like smart TVs and streaming apps.

Erecting a broadcast company from the ground up was not exactly cost-effective, so the MWN settled on a model that shifted responsibility to the schools themselves. The league purchased streaming equipment, including cameras and other hardware, for every member university and empowered them to produce their own home games.

It seems obvious in retrospect that such an approach would lead to wildly divergent quality from game to game. The Mountain West has only upgraded the schools’ equipment once, in 2016, and since then it has been up to each school to maintain its equipment as it deems necessary.

Some schools, like Wyoming, have put time and money into the development of their streaming productions. The Cowboys’ most recent home game on the MWN — a battle for first place against Boise State on Feb. 3 — drew more than 25,000 viewers and went off without a single glitch. Production elements were professional, camerawork was appropriate and the commentary added to the atmosphere.

On the other end of the spectrum, the disastrous Jan. 20 game at Air Force was produced by AFA’s internal crew. UNLV’s home game against Whittier on Nov. 24, which also drew plenty of complaints from viewers, was a UNLV production.

Javan Hedlund, the Mountain West’s associate commissioner for external communications strategy, said the conference would love for every school to pour money into its streaming productions, but financial considerations vary.

“Every institution has taken a different approach since we last updated the equipment in 2016,” Hedlund said. “Some institutions have built control centers, some have bought production trucks. Some institutions have done nothing. Wyoming has a great control center now, a production center that is amazing, San Jose State just bought a production truck for events on campus. So every campus has invested differently.”

UNLV has spent nearly $100,000 over the past two years to improve its broadcast infrastructure. The school’s athletic department typically contracts seven to nine people to broadcast its MWN games in most sports, but the process is different for men’s basketball; because UNLV uses the same video feed that is run through the Thomas & Mack Center’s live scoreboard, only two additional crew members are brought in to produce those contests. Those workers make between $30 to $40 per hour.

That’s not a lot of staffing, and when something goes wrong on the fly it can be difficult to navigate on-site.

According to Brian Tripp, the Mountain West’s associate commissioner of broadcast production, the list of potential broadcast problems is lengthy. Tripp said UNLV’s Jan. 20 game at Air Force had major issues due to a problem with Brightcove, a livestreaming company that provides the video platform for MWN productions.

That’s just one of many potential complications that can crop up over the course of a live event, but Tripp knows where fans will place the blame when they’re unable to watch the game.

“It can be internet issues on campus, it can be a piece of equipment failing, it can be an internet issue in the city,” Tripp said. “We’ve seen that, where the internet goes down in an entire section of the city and it affects the stream. And then social media wants me and everyone I work with fired because Comcast had an issue with over half the city. I have to chuckle at it, and I get it. I’m a fan too.”

Tripp had a background in live television and sports before being hired to run the Mountain West Network in 2013, and he is the main troubleshooter for its livestreams. Tripp makes sure each MWN stream meets minimum standards and tries to stay on top of problems as they occur.

“I’m very cognizant of any issues that are happening,” Tripp said. “I have different web interfaces I can log into to see what’s going on on campus in terms of internet connection speed. Sometimes I can tell if something bad is going to happen before it happens. I am constantly monitoring. We have slack channels going. On a night with a bad broadcast, I will look at my phone and we’ll have 45 texts in a row as we try to help things out. We do the best we can with the technology that we have to work with. We have to realize we work in tech. It’s great until it’s not.”

Still, Tripp and Hedlund believe the Mountain West product stacks up to its competition.

While power conferences have their own networks backed by huge corporations, the Mountain West approach of outsourcing streaming productions to the universities is a common strategy among mid-major conferences.

Tripp said he would put the Mountain West’s streaming quality against any other comparable league.

“No question,” Tripp said. “If you look at the leagues that have TV deals, you’ve got the Pac-12 Network, the Big Ten Network, SEC Network and the ACC Network that’s coming online. Those are all supported by FOX or ESPN. The stuff they televise is professionally done. They’re bringing in TV crews and paying tens and tens and tens of thousands of dollars per game to do that. We feel that technology has put us in a place where we don’t have to spend that kind of money to put on a pretty good product.

“The Mountain West peers that don’t have networks — the American Athletic Conference, Conference USA, the Sun Belt — I’m in contact with many if not all of the people who run those networks. We’re all doing the same thing. I think overall we have some of the best broadcasts compared to those other networks, for sure. But I can’t compare myself to the SEC Network. They live in a different world.”

Tripp understands why UNLV fans might be especially exasperated whenever they look at the schedule and see that the next game will only be available on the Mountain West Network.

“Quite frankly I can think of three men’s basketball issues this year, and all three of them have unfortunately involved UNLV,” he said. “Honestly, that’s kind of bad luck. All three were very different issues, all on different campuses. That is bad luck in this case, and I feel terrible about it.”

When UNLV plays host to Air Force today, it will be up to a small crew of outside contractors to deliver a watchable product to a group of dedicated — and vocal — fans.

With all the intensity and pressure that comes from producing a live sporting event, they’re going to do their best.

Mike Grimala can be reached at 702-948-7844 or [email protected]. Follow Mike on Twitter at twitter.com/mikegrimala.