Five nines, Live Tennis, and Trust

I don't have a TV so when I want to watch some sports event, I usually go to my local pub to watch and have a few beers until I have satisfied my thurst for sports. Being somewhat of a tennis nut, Wimbleton is a definite event that I enjoy watching. Unfortunately, in Seattle, the final started at 6am - not really a time for a trip to the pub. So instead, I went online to NBCsports and was pleased that they were "live-casting" the game over the Internet. While the resolution was not great, it was adequate given the circumstances.

That is, until during the final set the browser starting showing an ominous "reconnecting" black rectangle in the middle of the image. It would then repeat the previous 10 seconds of the match, show "reconnecting", and then show the same 10 seconds again; kind of like the movie "Groundhog Day". Eventually, the browser went black with a notice of technical failure and a suggestion to try again later.

I think we as humans watch live sports because we want to imagine ourselves at the event itself and "liveness" gives an approximation of this. Even when the event is delayed by a small amount of time, as the browser seems to do to properly buffer the data, is still seems "live." But when the whole thing collapses we are annoyed and frustrated. The "technical difficulty" was eventually resolved but I missed 30 minutes of the longest fifth set in finals history. Worse, the sense of liveness was totally destroyed and I pretty much gave up, thinking to myself: "I'll watch the rest later."

Five nines is the way people like to talk about the level of reliably - five nines means that 99.999 pecent of the time a service is up. To recover "five nines of reliability" after a 30 minute technical failure would seem to imply that the service now needs to go uninterupted for the next 5+ years. Few services are five nines but the goal is there because the utility of a service is tied our degree of trust that it will reliably function. TV, for example, is much more reliable then "Internet TV."

Other items in our life are surprisingly reliable. Cars are a good example. Even in those cases, we often choose a car maker based on the level of reliability that the manufacturer has demonstrated. This is a good indication of how much we value reliability. The struggling US automakers did not seem to have taken seriously enough this expectation and when the Japanese attained a level of quality that sufficiently surpassed the US makers, many Americans switched and never went back.

In my opinion, until "live Internet broadcasts" attain a significantly higher level or reliability, they will not attract much of an audience. This problem plagues many "utility" aspects of Computer-based services. The company that takes five nines seriously might expect to reap significant benefits.