NBC Sports Reviews

by Dare Master Super Truth

I’m an avid race fan and haven’t missed a season of Supercross or motocross in years - till NBC sports took over with their “gold package”. Now I’m limited to streaming the race coverage from my cell phone/iPad which isn’t the greatest for streaming a live event because the picture constantly gets pixilated. Our smart TVs don’t have the option to download the sports gold app because it isn’t compatible with most smart TVs- answer I got was “go buy an Apple TV” so I could stream. I’ve still yet to find what additional coverage they offer other than qualifiers, and commercial breaks are typically a 5-10min break in coverage where you get a LIVE Birdseye view of the inside of the stadium with nothing else. At least when it wasn’t a “premium package” you had something to watch and we’d much rather view commercials than staring at a basically blank screen. I’ve experienced so much frustration with this horrible app and wish NBC would stop ruining the race coverage with their “premier app” that severely limits people’s viewing capabilities.

I’d give ZERO stars if I had the option.

by Oscarboobird

Like so many other reviewers, I too am a cable cutter, and someone who has watched the Olympics ever since I was also that little 4 year old performing camel spins on the ice rink her dad built on the back patio every winter with dreams of Peggy Fleming, the 7 year old blazing down the mountains dreaming of Jean Claude Killi, the high school student cheering on Mark Spitz because one of his swim teammates attended my own school, and so on. The Olympics belongs to EVERYONE, not just cable subscribers! NBCSports claims to give you full access...but does NOT tell you it's for a supposed 30 minute free trial per day, that's broadcasting 12 minutes of commercials. NBC bought the rights years ago - and standard broadcasts deliver content with the endless commercials to pay for the licensing. I'd put up with the commercials gladly, if I got to watch an entire curling match start to finish, a whole hockey game, a complete qualifying series for luge and skeleton and bobsled, the entire race for all the alpine skiers from gold medal to last place finishers - which is EXACTLY what those cable subscribers get. The enhanced coverage is very well done - but the teaser time limited amount is INFURIATING!!! My very cheapskate self would consent to paying for NBCSports , if it actually allowed me to watch even the standard coverage,nor the full live streams and replays. I plan to delete this thing as soon as the Olympics are over...infuriating!

by Phole314

Forced to watch commercials, forced to scroll past things I don’t want, forced to scroll one day at a time (it takes me about 20 taps to get to the content I paid for), forced to remember where I stopped watching a replay (and then forced to watch a commercial again before I can skip to where I left off), and forced to restart/re-enter credentials/re-activate my device/select all the pictures with traffic lights in them/check my email for an activation link...my dinner got cold guys, I don’t have the time, and I’m questioning if it’s worth paying for. Once I get in, it’s good; but I have to do 100% of the work - you could have basically given me a long sorted list of text links and it would be about the same mental effort. If any of your UI/UX / customer research / app design / product managers / MBA’s have LinkedIn profiles, I would suggest seriously considering whether you should list the NBC Sports app as part of your work history. If your resume ever came across my desk and you listed NBCSports, I will have a lot of questions for you as to why you think any of this is focused on your user. And don’t get me started about how I have to pay for 3 different kinds of TV if I want to make sure I can watch all of the sport you offer. I mean, I just don’t need sports this bad.

by Upset Supercross Fan

I have been a Supercross/Motocross fan for a very long time. I wasn’t thrilled about having to pay $75 for NBC Gold in order to see qualifying and all the races live. However, I talked myself through it and was ready to buy. I am very happy I did not! I decided to stream through the NBC Sports app for the first 2 rounds of the 2019 Supercross season. NBCSports has a great layout and easy to navigate. So many good things to say about...oh wait...it doesn’t stream without continually shutting down due to app errors?!?! Isn’t that the primary function?!?! I tried on 3 different streaming devices and verified internet connections to rule out the “user error” tag. Then I read the reviews on NBC Sports and NBC Gold apps. Streaming, streaming, streaming!!! I feel for all the people who paid $75 and are dealing with streaming issues. I hope that NBC will stand behind their products and refund their $$ until they fix their apps. I have steamed Supercross the last 2 years through Fox Sports app and never had issues. This could be such a great app. I really do like NBCSports layout. But if it doesn’t seamlessly do the job it was designed to do, it’s just a fancy background app. If you want my $75 NBC.. fix your app streaming issues!!

by RegListner

I have been happily subscribing to NBC Sports Gold for the Pro Motocross races for a few years now, with no complaints. So happy with it that I bought an AppleTV (4Gen) so that I could download NBCSports , that wasn’t available through the Samsung Smart TV App Store, so that I could watch the SuperCross and Pro Motocross (subscription) on my tv rather that connecting my laptop to the tv to stream. Well, three races into having this AppleTV and everything works better than I could have expected except for NBC Gold. Oh wait, is it because you killed the Gold app and waited two weeks to send an email outlining the change? Maybe I missed the first one? Switch to NBC Sports app and login to my Gold profile, still doesn’t work. Maybe it’s me? Contact support, “Have you tried restarting the Apple TV or deleting and reinstalling NBCSports ?” How about yes, that’s why I’m now reaching out to you because the layman troubleshooting didn’t work, I need real support. “Well, all is fine here, why don’t you just return your AppleTV and get a Fire Stick. They seem to work much better.”

Really? Does anyone give a **** about customer service? Are there still CSI scores? Does management know how poorly the product is being offered and supported?

by RealFootball81

NBC is a joke. Their coverage of the Premier League is shameful. Lets not forget sports are for fan enjoyment and for the regular working class person to enjoy , not to be exploited and squeezed for every cent possible. They are very much “american-izing” this game by making it persistently more and more costly. Pay a premium to watch 4 games blocked out of your favorite team. Then the website doesnt even consistently work so you miss parts of the game and in some instances, the end and crucial part of the game. Pay the extra premium and you cant even watch the games until on the west coast , 6 pm , when it airs from 4 am to 12 pm that day. Their excuse for this rate is all the extra garbage content like men in blazers and the side show called the fan fest. I feel sorry for the 2 robbies being caught up in the ridiculous side show antics. I dont feel sorry for kyle because he has no soul clearly. Rebecca, sigh. 65$ to watch games late and try to avoid spoilers all day, and to simply see 4 games of your team the block for more money, and to add insult to injury , the content freezes and cuts off at the designated end of game time regardless of how much of the game is left. Shameful quality and conduct ruining this sport in the US.

by Seth2357965478

Every time NBCSports updates I get some hope. But I’m rarely home so I depend on it to watch Stanley cup playoffs and I can always count on NBCSports to freeze multiple times during the game, which forces me to force quit and restart NBCSports , which is when NBCSports then forces me to watch an ad as if I hadn’t missed enough of the game. I’m getting 250mbps downloads and yet somehow I’m minutes behind in my games while streaming. It will also randomly skip a good 30 seconds backwards in a game leaving me that much more behind. The user interface is awful on Apple TV and makes it difficult to select what I want to watch. When selecting a game on my Apple TV they will first play an advertisement which promptly freezes. If I’m lucky, I can hit the play button and finish the ad, most of the time I’m not lucky. If there were any other way to watch the Stanley cup playoffs I would gladly delete NBCSports and never download it again.
Oh, and if that’s not bad enough, nearly once a week I’m told that I’m not paying for the content I’m attempting to stream and then I’m forced to log out and then back into NBCSports to get it to work.
Thanks for nothing NBC.

P.S. All of the NHL announcers for NBC are horrid. Yes. All of them. #FirePierre

by Har8M

There are periods where you work and then an app update comes along and throws it all down the toilet again. As a customer all I want is a reliable way to watch the premier league and that is definitely not the case with your app. It's incredibly annoying to wake up early before the game only to realize NBCSports is not working and you miss a significant chunk of the beginning. Then there's also the issue with the advertisements popping up randomly in the middle of the game or NBCSports crashing and having to completely reload including the advertisements before I'm able to watch again. Been using NBCSports for years and I don't understand how you keep messing it up. A more understandable issue is the delay from live TV. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten texts from friends about immediate results and goals prior to me seeing them. Like I said this one is understandable since its a stream. Test it before releasing please to ensure proper functionality. And then there's the issue of the gold membership locking out certain games for an extra monthly fee. I might have purchased it if I had any confidence in NBCSports . At the time I'm writing this review, the average is 2.1 stars. Take the hint NBC Sports. Before exploiting fans, at least have a functional app. I'm currently streaming the game I want to watch using an illigitamate stream instead of yours. Hey at least no advertisements. 1 star!

by E-M-C-92

I’ve used NBCSports over the past 4 years and am highly disappointed how buggy it is. NBCSports will close out on you forcing you to restart NBCSports to watch the 30 second Honda ad over and over again. I’m always unable to watch a full segment of the game because I’m either being interrupted by the closing out of NBCSports or while watching the game it gets stuck in this 10 second loop. Even when you hit the live button it will refresh then go back to another 10 second loop of sports action forcing me to close out of NBCSports ; once again making me miss the action of the game because I’m forced to watch another 30 second ad. By the time it starts working again they’ve gone to commercials. Then you better hope NBCSports doesn’t get buggy on that part because you’ll be stuck in this constant loop of watching the game 3 minutes at a time, closing out of NBCSports , watch the same 30 second Honda ad over again, being stuck in the 10 second game action loop. The cycle never ends and it is frustrating especially when you want to watch your favorite sports team play. NBCSports is absolute garbage!

by Mtcupbeat

Really your only option to see any sport beyond figure skating as it seems NBC now wants you to buy into all of their paid channels. Miss the days of seeing a constant feed of Olympic sports on the local NBC channel, especially those that aren’t broadcast between the Olympic breaks. Disappointing to think of the many people missing out on all of the coverage. It is 2018 and it seems we’ve taken 20 steps backwards. NBCSports also inserts random ads right in the middle of competition without pausing the feed. I’ve missed so many final runs, big jumps, and more because of these interruptions. There seems to be about 5 ads they continuously interrupt, I can’t stand seeing the same ad over and over again. I know every business needs funding to operate, but figure out how to strategically place advertising without forcing viewers to miss key times in these events. The live feed also buffers about every 30-60 seconds, I have to hit play on my Apple TV remote for the hope it will start the feed again and I won’t miss anything. Often it will buffer in fast forward to catch up after pausing and again, I miss key times in events.

by Bonze227

Come on NBC, it’s 2019! Wake up from your slumber. I can’t imagine how any TV channel as big as this can have so many bad reviews, and yet nothing is being done to resolve any of these complaints. I have been watching the English premier league for years now. Waking up at 4am to watch the PL games on the weekend has been my ritual for quite some time. I even subscribed to NBC sports Gold so I don’t miss any of my games but it looks like these guys only care about the money and care less about their customers. How can you have a 2.1 rating and boast of being America’s biggest sports tv channel??? You are a joke and a huge disgrace.
The management team should wake up and stop ignoring all of these negative reviews. It means you have a lot of unhappy customers. Now I can’t sign in on my Roku app, even though my subscription is still very much active. The merge between the nbc sports app and the gold app is totally unnecessary. Rather than fixing one problem, you decided to merge two inferior products together. What a DISASTER of a company. I am utterly disappointed!!! That is why tv channels like FuboTV is going to sweep you off the market very soon. WAKE UP!!!

by Ray Of All

NBCSports claims it works with chromecast it doesn’t. No one at this company actually cares about the user experience. This is the only app that disconnects from my cast ever 10 minutes. In order to start watching the game again I have to disconnect my cast, closet out of NBCSports reconnect the cast and watch your ad all over again missing 2 minutes of the game. This is the only app that doesn’t stay connect to my chromecast. Keep in mind I have my chromecast hardwired into my router with Fiber optic internet. I have zero connectivity issues with anything. Yet NBCSports always losses the game when I am casting. So instead of being able to watch my team play on my 55” tv I have to watch it on my tiny 5” screen. They take weeks to respond to your email. In hopes you forget about the issue! And of course they made it so they are the only way to watch the premier league! Now they can charge whatever they want for a broken product! They claim to be sport fans but if this was true they would have an app that actually worked! With the amount of money they make it should be flawless! At the very least should always be improving!

by Ericmoze

As a big fan of ProFootballTalk (PFT) content I would check for new stories multiple times a day using their app. Initially when NBC took over everything was fine, but then they started consolidating a lot of different things together and with each change PFT got worse. At this point it’s essentially unusable.

First, you have to find it buried amongst all the things I don't care about. Once you do the navigation is painful:
* Only two story headlines visible at a time
* If you click to read any story, it doesn’t let you navigate back to where you were in the list. Instead it puts you at the beginning of the list.
* When trying to read a story the content is often cut off so you can’t read it all. So you have to navigate back to the list, find the story again, click to load it again, and pray you get it all
* When trying to scroll down to read a story it too easily navigates to the next story by accident
* When trying to swipe left/right from reading a story you get mixed results depending on what you’re swiping on. Sometime swiping the header works (sometimes not). Sometimes swiping the text works (sometimes not). Never does it work to swipe where there happens to be an image.
* Sometimes stories don’t load at all, even though my connection is excellent
* When scrolling the headlines, there are duplicates of the same story

At this point I barely use NBCSports anymore because of all these bugs, and instead wait until I’m on my laptop.

by Blah234561

I rate NBCSN due to the fact cable and satellite are high in price,just to watch my favorite sport. But it comes with the territory,I'm sure I speak for all F1 fans,that we want to see the live broadcasts of free practice 1-3,I'd also like to see all the qualifying sessions live and delayed. NBCSports is my biggest disappointment,I don't want to see the commercials when I'm watching the replay of race,I'm so tired of Verizon that I'm switching carriers,im so tired of Chevrolet commercials as well,I'll buy something else. NBCSports is saturated with commercials. And you cant fast forward them. I'd really rather not see any commercials on NBCSports when watching a replay,cuz I had to work and couldn't see the programs live. Also bring back Bob Varsha to commentate PLEASE along side Hobbs and Matchett,no offense but Diffy is boring,bland unexcitng, seems to not know anything of G1 nor racing in general,his research is an insult to the sport and fans. I'd also like to see all of the after race and weekly media buzz feed of F1 as well. Speed was so great at this,but now NBCSN HS the rights,but dont seem to care about F1.

by AgnesInAgony

I’m ok with paying a fee for service, just like I do for Netflix or HBO GO, but personally I feel NBC is going a little far to charge a fee per sport/interest. Just have the fee for all-access to content like other services, instead of being locked out of all content but still being able to visually see it all. I don’t think anyone at NBC actually uses NBCSports because long, long ago they would have desired to place the option to easily rewind/fast forward either in 15-30 second increments, or/and in using NBCSports on the phone or through the T.V. allow the viewer to see content while in NBC’s version of “scrolling” through content to find the spot you are looking for. Old School VHS players rewind easier. The viewer is forced to sign in over and over again so the least NBC could do is actually remember where the user is in their personal content in one channel when switching from different devices. Netflix will remember where you currently are in their content with a multitude of shows, NBC can make NBCSports remember where I am with my siphoned/filtered down content to one game on two personal devices. I appreciate that NBC has allowed me to watch Rugby in America, and I want to continue this relationship but possibly from your end (at NBC) continue to make the product work better for your users.

by Bugsizzy

I read downloaded this to stream the Olympics . the layout is great where you can watch full replays of pretty much every event but the entire experience is ruined by incessant commercials and other bugs . The advertisements are literally often longer than the actual content. I just sat here watching probably 3 to 5 minutes of commercials that I could not fast forward through to see one minute of the event followed by another one minute of commercials. Also, NBCSports is buggy when it comes to returning to watch an event that you didn’t finish. It will often freeze when trying to resume where I left off, or simply start over at the beginning. When this happens the fast forward tool on the Roku version is horrible, taking several minutes to get back to wherever it was that I left off in the program, and when I finally get back to where I left off I am subject to watching probably five minutes of commercials right off the bat.

by Postmansmp

It’s a shame that a major broadcast company that has been such a big part of American sports and entertainment can’t figure out how to innovate at a high level in the new world of digital viewing... I’ve stopped keeping track of the frustrating things about NBCSports and just tried to deal with it in order to watch Premier League matches... the most recent frustration is that purchasing the NBC Sports Gold package for premier league only gets you the matches that are designated “gold”... in any other world it would give access to the “gold matches” in addition to the regular this app app matches... I was planning on being able to watch all the premier league matches without cable... but because of the way it’s set up, I had to have cable to watch the matches on the regular this app app... not very golden... also, if coverage of a match hasn’t started or has finished, then don’t have it in the selection line up... or at least list the start time and then pull it out of “Live & Upcoming” as soon as the coverage ends... just do better... start with listening to the viewers...

by Ajack17

App just updated 20 hours ago in time for the Olympics and is still very buggy with videos that don’t load, error messages and so forth, especially when trying to use Chromecast.

In addition, NBCSports can be vastly improved upon for the Olympics 2018 viewing by being much more versatile. Eg 1) It would be nice if videos that pertain to the host country, it’s people, it’s culture, history, the venue, etc could be viewable on NBCSports and separated out from the sports videos into a category of its own. Right now there are only two categories, sports and athletes, but I often like the ones about the host country even better.
2) I think it would be nice if we could view ANY event, including the opening and closing ceremonies, via video rather than only certain ones being viewable and these being viewable only after the event has aired on TV. Some of us don’t have TV viewing any more and won’t be able to watch the opening and closing ceremonies when NBC wants to air them.

by Subtropical_ken

I haven’t cut the cable yet so I can watch most nbc content on directv. But I did get the cycling pass to watch things others than the TDF and to watch it ad-free. No offense to the knowledgeable Aussie fellows who prattle on continually in the ad-free version but I was hoping for Bob Roll and Phil Liggett, et al. It seems stupid (and perhaps a bit misleading?) on nbc’s part to pay another set on commentators when they could just have other content or vignettes during the commercials. My hat is off to the aussies who can keep up a conversation for 3 to 4 hours though. I guess millennials like that stuff. The TV feed comes from the one source anyway and anyone can add commentary. We’ll see when the spring classics get here but I’m not sure I’ll be renewing this. As to NBCSports working, it does most of the time but sometimes goes walkabout or does not connect the first time. But if you are casting to a tv realize that google or Samsung are probably sending your content to their servers to spy on you. Or maybe google is piping it to China for free! 😏

by Dan K Man

NBCSports is definitely controversial. More 1 star ratings than 5? I’ll tell you why:

User error. User error. And probably some content. Many complaints reference the EPL and other soccer leagues - perhaps those packages do have issues but those aren’t the only sports. And why do I think most complaints come from those using only free coverage?

I got this for the PGA coverage. It’s flawless on my Roku. On my phone. On my tablet. On my desktop. Yes, even on my laptop. The features do exactly what they say they will and the extra golf coverage is a dream.

Back to the hate.

User Error 1: Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth... Did you know apps use the internet? Did you know streaming apps use A LOT of internet? 9/10 streaming issues on any platform are with the end user connection speed and not NBCSports performance. Make sure you have the juice...

User Error 2: Comprehension. Reading reviews quickly shows that people have unrealistic expectations and ideas of what NBCSports is supposed to do. Not saying every one who left a 1-star review can’t use their device but in my experience closer to 6/10 issues in platform steaming are user error.

If you read this far you probably want NBCSports and I’m here to say it works just fine for me.