YouTube TV Lets You Reduce Broadcast Delay to Help With Spoilers

For sports fans watching a close game, there are few things more annoying than your buddy texting you the final results before you’ve seen them. It’s a spoiler, of course, and if you are confused at how this can happen, I’m going to assume you’ve never used a streaming TV product.

Streaming TV services are almost always on a weird delay compared to a local broadcast or traditional cable offering. Subscribing to something like YouTube TV or Fubo TV means your feed is likely behind other more traditional TV services and that can lead to the situation I described above. In fact, it happened last weekend between my mom and I during the Oregon-Washington game, where I kept shouting happenings of the game to her through text, but her Fubo TV stream was up to a minute or so behind what I was saying.

For YouTube TV subscribers, this could soon be a thing of the past. YouTube TV announced it has added a new feature called Broadcast Delay that lets users turn off the typical delay for a short 48-hour period. When activated, you should experience a lower broadcast delay with less buffer and closer to real-time happenings.

It should be noted that with this feature turned on, it really will only last for 48 hours before it turns off and then you would have to activate it again. It could also lead to playback interruption if your internet can’t keep up properly with the feed. You can always manually turn it back to “Default” if you run into issues.

So far, some folks on reddit are suggesting significant decreases in latency from 30 seconds down to like 10 or 12 seconds. A 20-second difference is pretty big, especially when we’re talking about the final seconds of a football or basketball game.

Here’s how to turn on YouTube TV’s new Broadcast Delay:

1. Just select the three dot more menu
2. Select “Broadcast Delay”
3. Select “Decrease for 48 hours” or “Default”

Let us know how it goes.

// reddit