On a Monday evening earlier this month, a disgruntled customer turned to X to lodge a complaint about his streaming service. “Why does YouTube TV be buffering so damn much!!??!!??” wrote the user, appending his post with a face-palm emoji. “Very frustrating.” It’s a tradition of the modern age to call out companies on social media, be they airlines, restaurants, or television service providers. But this particular grievance was notable—and not just because it was issued by LeBron James and sent out to his nearly 53 million followers.

For YouTube TV, James’s post amounted to a second public relations headache in the span of about a week. On October 29, the service was upended by significant buffering issues, disrupting its presentation of NFL Sunday Ticket, the league’s package of out-of-market games. Those technical difficulties prompted scores of customers to log on to X to voice their outrage, including at least one NFL player. “You pay all this money for streaming services…just so they don’t work on the days you actually need them,” wrote Buffalo Bills defensive lineman DaQuan Jones.

In what is YouTube TV’s inaugural season as carrier of the Sunday Ticket package, that snafu was nothing short of a nightmare scenario—both for the tech giant and sports fans who are wary of a streaming-centric future. YouTube’s parent Google is reportedly shelling out $2 billion annually for Sunday Ticket, which had been carried by DirecTV for almost 30 years. The NFL’s seven-year deal with YouTube represented a watershed moment for live sports in the United States, where the most popular league is determined to lead its fans from the land of linear television to the new frontier of streaming.

Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner, said last year that the partnership with YouTube TV was “yet another example of us looking towards the future and building the next generation of NFL fans.” In May, the league announced that Peacock, the NBC-owned streamer, will have exclusive rights to a primetime playoff game in January. Both of those moves followed the NFL’s 11-year deal with Amazon, which became the home of Thursday Night Football last season. Given that an estimated 30% of viewers said they would watch this year’s Super Bowl through a streaming platform—a greater percentage than those polled who said they’d watch via broadcast or cable—the NFL is simply “fishing where the fishes are.”

But those have proven to be occasionally choppy waters, as streamers are more susceptible to freeze-ups and blurry pictures than their linear counterparts.

“Is watching it on streaming better? That’s the one nobody ever wants to ask,” said Bruce Leichtman, president of Leichtman Research Group, a firm that specializes in analysis of media and entertainment. “In 2023, it’s not a better experience. In 2024, it’s not a better experience. I think it’s an evolving experience.”

Any viewer—even, apparently, King James—has encountered the pitfalls of streaming. And when the NFL announced that it was migrating one of its signature products to YouTube TV, some of those fans worried that the dreaded “buffering icon of death” would become a staple of their Sunday afternoons. A well-publicized technical glitch during YouTube TV’s presentation of an NBA Eastern Conference Finals game last spring between the Miami Heat and Boston Celtics only heightened the anxiety of Sunday Ticket subscribers.

YouTube TV calmed those fears in the first seven weeks of the NFL season, earning plaudits for its smooth delivery of Sunday Ticket. Viewers praised the service for its sharp picture quality, as well as its multiview feature. And they breathed a sigh of relief at the lack of latency issues. But that changed on October 29, when subscribers flooded social media to lament the buffering issues that had stymied their viewing experience. It was the equivalent of a standout rookie quarterback tossing three interceptions and drawing scrutiny over his fitness for the job. YouTube TV has apparently bounced back from the rough outing with glitch-free delivery of Sunday Ticket the last two weeks. A spokesperson for YouTube TV said that the buffering issues from October 29 “have since been mitigated,” and that the company is “working to future-proof our systems in preparation for future events.”

In an email, an NFL spokesperson said that YouTube TV “fixed the issues and they didn’t come back that day.”

“They said there won’t be those issues going forward, and so far, there haven’t been,” the spokesperson told me.

Executives for both the company and the league have offered similar assurances.

Brent Lawton, the NFL’s VP of media strategy and business development, told Sports Business Journal earlier this month that the league was confident that YouTube TV would get Sunday Ticket back on track. In an interview with the same publication, Lori Conkling, YouTube’s global head of media and sports partnerships, said that the company has “done everything possible to ensure it does not happen again.”

Viewers will hope that’s the case. YouTube TV has drawn a reported 1.3 million subscribers for Sunday Ticket this season, a marginal uptick on the 1.2 million who previously subscribed to the service through DirecTV and an encouraging trend for Google. Morgan Stanley estimated last month that YouTube TV could lose an average of $1.27 billion annually on Sunday Ticket between now and 2029.

Leichtman said that Google’s acquisition of Sunday Ticket “is about differentiation” from its competitors in the streaming market, just as DirecTV was able to use the package to distinguish itself from rival Dish. “At its heart, Sunday Ticket is a niche service and has always been a niche service,” Leichtman said. “It never had more than two million subscribers when it was on satellite, and one-third of those were bars and restaurants.” (DirecTV remains the Sunday Ticket provider for bars and restaurants through a deal the company made with the NFL earlier this year.)

Google, with a valuation north of a trillion dollars, can likely endure those losses, particularly as it uses Sunday Ticket as a driver of subscriptions. Forty-one percent of this season’s subscribers are reportedly new to YouTube TV, which also added more than 300,000 customers in the first quarter of this year.

Those customers, however, expect a reliable service. If they don’t get it, companies can expect a roasting online—even from NBA legends.