APBRmetrics

John Beattie · Joined: 26 Jan 2007 Posts: 45 Location: NYC

How long is the time delay for tv broadcasts of NBA games? I'd like to know for a stats project I'm working on. I.e. if you're at a game with a portable tv is the transmission nearly simultaneous with the live game in front of you or is there a delay of one or two seconds or longer?

And if there's a significant time delay would it vary by team or by network? For instance would there be a longer or shorter delay watching MSG vs. ABC vs. TNT vs. ESPN vs. NBA-TV? Or would, say, a large-market team tend to have a shorter delay than a smaller-market team? Or would cable vs. satellite vs. rabbit ears make an appreciable difference?

One thing I know is that at every *baseball* game I've ever been to with my *radio* there was no more than a fraction of a second of time delay, and I had presumed the same would apply to basketball tv broadcasts but I could be wrong.

Gary C · Joined: 14 Apr 2006 Posts: 48

I can't speak to differences in delay on different networks as they leave time for dumping profanity and such, but as for the "delay" between different types of signals (from the same source) I can comment.

Fastest, obviously, is over the air/rabbit ear.
Next is analog cable, if there still is such a thing.
Slower still is digital cable and digital satellite.
And slowest is HD, which within the category depends on whether the source is shot in HD, transmitted in HD, or both.

In sports bars that have HD on the bigger screens and regular feeds on smaller ones you can see the delay between digital satellite and HD in action, as the HD lags about two seconds behind. At a tense moment in a game that pretty much everybody in the place is watching, it can lead to some confusion as some folks react to something others are about to see.