By Jason Snell

March 20, 2024 3:08 PM PT

MLB app will slow itself down, let your media stream catch up

When I wrote about Apple’s new Sports app, I heard from several people who pointed out that maybe Eddy Cue had done his job a little too well. Apple’s SVP of Services told me that he was prioritizing speed, right down to measuring the lag between the scoreboard at the Warriors game he was attending and the current score in the Sports app.

The problem with that lag is that while radio and TV broadcasts are often a fraction of a second behind live action, streaming radio and TV broadcasts tend to be far, far behind the action. So far behind that Apple Sports was indicating made baskets in NBA games while the team was still coming up the floor with the ball. (I experienced this myself when a friend texted me to give condolences about the Super Bowl about 30 seconds before Kansas City scored in overtime to win it.)

Streaming lag is real. So real, in fact, that I just discovered a new setting in the Major League Baseball app that I had never seen before. Under Notifications, there’s a setting for Delayed Gameday Notifications. “Turning this on will delay live Gameday notifications by 30 Sec.,” reads the legend under the setting.

This is hilarious, and absolutely necessary. Many times, I’ve had game audio playing for an MLB game, only to notice that the Gameday play-by-play was way ahead of the action. It’s… not great!

In the long run, it would be nice if MLB could use some more advanced technologies to ensure that its data feeds and media feeds were running at the same pace—maybe take a page from what Apple’s doing with podcast transcripts? But offering to delay the data by 30 seconds so that the media stream can catch up is a great first step.

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