24 Comments

https://eventvods.com/featured/lol is a website that has solved all of these problems for professional League of Legends. They embed the youtube videos of games in ways that hide the video progress bar and let you select games without seeing the scores. It's always surprised me that nobody has solved these problems for more conventional sports.

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Zombiegrub adds extra time to her YouTube sports casts (SC2) to avoid time based spoilers. I wonder if YouTube penalizes watch percentage on the videos though (which would disincentivize other people posting sports from doing the same to avoid spoilers).

Example here: https://youtu.be/Cd_J3NSvmZk?t=3503

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Rich Eisen frequently discusses how the ticker at the bottom ruined SportsCenter as you already have seen how the game ends so who cares now about the delivery of highlights.

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I hate to say it but I sometimes pirate games to get around some of these issues. I also have a TiVo that's sole purpose is to record OTA Steelers games. I've never been able to get around the stupid ticker at the bottom telling me scores of other games when I try to watch multiple games as once though.

I'm also very happy that almost no one in the US cares about MotoGP so I don't really have to worry about spoilers for that. (and to their credit, they created a link you can bookmark for their website that doesn't show race spoilers: https://www.motogp.com/en/videos/spoiler+free)

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Rant; I'm still miffed from a spoiler ~40 yrs ago. I'm watching (with my dad) the 1980 Olympic semi-final hockey game between USA and USSR. It's on tape delay on ABC. In between the second and third periods the local news caster appears on the screen. "Stunning upset as USA men's hockey, beat the Russians, details at six." It's hard to express the amount of sports joy that I lost.

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This might be your most important post ever. I did put up a literal barrier to hide the scorebar during football season when switching back and forth between 2 games that overlapped. A couple minutes with some cardboard and a utility knife was more than worth the time investment. Keep it on the same shelf as your TV and then flip it up when desired, at least if your TV is on a shelf and no one in the house minds a strip of cardboard laying in front of the TV.

And yes, it is impossible not to be thinking about whether there's enough time for a comeback. I was thrilled that youtube solved the long game or extra innings problem, automatically recording the entire game no matter how long it is (most of the time); it seems like it should be relatively easy also to have an option not to show the total length of game.

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Jul 21, 2022·edited Jul 21, 2022

Well written article, thank you for it. Your "Bonus Round: Hiding The Score Bar" is my biggest issue. When I am watching NFL games, I am very likely going to go back and watch at least one other game that is being played simultaneously at a later time (or watch the recap on YouTube) and I don't want the score spoiled for me. You mention that you considered putting a physical barrier on your TV to block it, and that is exactly what I have done (for my tablet, which is where I watch most of my sports). I have a folded piece of paper that I put up in front of it that blocks it. It constantly needs adjusting and I would very, very much prefer to not have to do that.

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Google Fiber tried to convince me to give up cable. I asked about watching TV and they said "Use YouTube TV!" And without more detail all I could think of was how my son is addicted to YouTube and will literally skip meals and sleep to watch it if we let him.

Is "YouTube TV" a decent way of watching network / broadcast / cable television?

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Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". The notion that information exists that you explicitly do not want to access is extremely alien to them.

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I have a related problem that I don’t even know how to formulate. My favorite team is depressingly bad. Often when I watch their games, they get blown out and I regret spending a few hours watching them. So I ask my wife (who doesn’t watch sports) whether the game will be worth watching. That’s it, just that one bit of information. If she says yes then I watch it. But this changes the experience, because a comeback is no longer as surprising.

Is there a way to avoid depressing games without spoilage? I mean this both in the information theoretical sense as well as the technical, practical sense.

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Amazing post. If they did this all I would sign up!

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