Your “live” World Cup broadcast isn’t actually live

Major live sporting events create communal moments as people across the city, country or even the world experience the same event at the same time.

Or yes?

You’re watching Sunday’s World Cup final, waiting for a goal, when you hear cheers from the apartment next door. Then your phone rings and a friend watching the game cheers. But the score remains 0-0 on your screen.

Seconds later you see it: Bad play, neat pass and goal. But for you, the excitement is less. You knew it was coming.

The FIFA World Cup is the latest major sporting event to focus on our out-of-sync world, where the channel or streaming service you choose can determine whether you see a big sporting moment a little earlier than others, or worse, a little later.

“For many years, live television meant that the signal went almost directly from the camera to the audience,” said Kenny Elcock, former vice president of technology for regional sports channel NESN.

“Today, live streams go through a much more complex process,” he wrote in an email. “Before you see a video, it’s captured, processed, compressed, encrypted, packaged, sent, stored, decoded, and finally displayed on the screen. Each step adds a bit of delay, and together those delays can add up.”

Wireless TV is the fastest. Mr. Elcock estimates that you typically see an event three to eight seconds after it happens.

Cable television involves additional equipment and steps to send the signal over optical networks. The delay creeps up, to five to 12 seconds, he said.

Satellite TV has to travel further, all the way to space and back. Plus, there’s more coding and processing involved. Now the delay can reach 15 to 30 seconds.

Streaming is different. “Streaming divides the video into thousands of small files called segments,” Mr Elcock said. That’s another delay and many more steps. The delay can reach 60 seconds or more.

Then there’s the buffering done by your smart TV, phone or computer. While watching a slightly older video, it downloads and retains a small amount of video. Without these buffers, a small glitch in the internet service could cause the image to freeze.

“If the Internet speed drops briefly, the player will continue to display the buffered video while more data arrives,” Elcock said. “The result is a smoother viewing experience, even if it means viewers are watching events a few seconds later.”

There are big differences when fans see the game, even between those using the same service. “One TV can create a 25-second buffer while another only eight seconds,” Mr Elcock said. “They both seem to be watching ‘live’. But neither really sees the exact same moment.”

As a result, fans in the same neighborhood or even in the same office or sports bar can see goals one minute apart.

The mismatch between TV services, or even individual TVs, can cause confusion at a venue with many of them, such as Latitude 39, a restaurant in Midtown that showed games from the tournament.

“On one side of the bar people were screaming for a goal and on the other side they weren’t having it,” said Nordine Achbani, the owner.

“It took us a while to figure out how to fix it,” he said. A bit of fiddling with switching to a different channel and back seemed to get everything back in sync.

Being in the stadium remains the only way to actually see the event truly live.

The next best thing is probably services that display target messages to your phone or other device – no video lag to worry about. Most likely, a fan who ignores the TV and just stares at a dedicated football or gambling app will find out about the goals faster than anyone not actually sitting in the stadium.

But that won’t be the case for most of us on Sunday, and cheering from the bar across the street could spoil a big goal by Lionel Messi or Mikel Oyarzabal, giving you the illusion that you’re watching ‘live’.