For one thing, many football fans curious to watch ESPN’s Storm and NFL Network’s Kramer call the Rams’ 38-31 win couldn’t find it.
WEEK 4 PICKS: Straight up | Against the spread
Some viewers were so frustrated by the online scavenger hunt that they gave up and turned back to the TV broadcast.
Once I did get their feed, I enjoyed listening to Storm and Kremer do their stuff. I thought Kremer was the stronger of the two. Storm seemed a little uncertain on a few big play-by-play calls. It shouldn’t have been a big surprise to anybody that they pulled it off. Both have covered the NFL for decades. They’re two of the top sports TV journalists in the field. They proved it again Thursday night.
But the technical difficulties continued to hurt the viewing experience at home.
MORE: Vikings-Rams, blow by blow, as it unfolded
My game stream repeatedly froze or skipped. One second it was clear as a bell. The next, it was stuttering.
At another point, the feed suddenly switched back to Aikman and Buck from Storm and Kremer. I thought I hit a wrong button. Instead, it was a glitch.
It was too bad because the Rams-Vikings shootout was exactly the kind of exciting barn-burner that “Thursday Night Football” needs to draw viewers.
Unlike Buck and Aikman, Storm and Kremer were not at the LA Memorial Coliseum. Instead, they called the game remotely from a studio on the East Coast. Sorry, that’s not good enough. You didn’t see them on the screen.
But still we’re talking about the second company after Apple to achieve a market cap of $1 trillion, according to CNBC, and with a founder, Jeff Bezos, who’s incidentally the world’s richest man.
It’s called television.
