NESN360 app customers too often get more glitches than pitches

The Red Sox might make the playoffs. They probably won’t. But at least this can already be said for their 2024 edition: They’re an athletic, unified, and resilient team, which more often than not has made them fun to watch.

Which makes it even more frustrating that NESN — specifically its glitchy standalone NESN360 app — too often interferes with the enjoyment of watching them with its apparent indifference to the quality and reliability of the product.

The most egregious example occurred last Sunday, when NESN360 went on the fritz late in the Red Sox’ fairly important game with the Orioles.

In the bottom of the seventh inning, with the Red Sox trailing, 4-0, the broadcast began jumping back and forth to the first inning of an old game.

One second, Red Sox pitcher Bailey Horn was on the mound in Sunday’s live action, trying to hold off the Orioles in that seventh inning. A few seconds later, it would jump to the first inning of Friday’s game, with Orioles pitcher Corbin Burnes on the mound.

This continued to the point that it was impossible to watch, even if you had the game on as background noise, as I did.

After receiving a deluge of complaints on social media and via email, I reached out to a NESN spokesperson to ask if there was an explanation for what was happening.

This was the response: “We experienced hardware issues that affected some of our viewers. We apologize to our viewers that were impacted as we strive to ensure the best viewing experience for our fans.”

I shared this on social media and to those who had emailed. A few NESN viewers replied that this is the boilerplate answer that they get — specifically the part about ensuring “the best viewing experience for our fans” — whenever they have reached out to the network with a complaint.

So I reached out again, requesting a more detailed explanation of what went wrong, and noting that I was hearing from a lot of angry NESN360 subscribers.

I did not receive a response.

The issue did not occur on the linear broadcast (such as if you were watching on cable). While the broadcast overall comes with its own frustrations — it’s absurd how often the race to get to a commercial cuts off play-by-play voice Dave O’Brien as he tries to quickly wrap up an inning — the aforementioned which-game-are-we-watching-here? glitch was exclusive to NESN360.

And that is a huge part of the problem.

The app costs $29.99 a month. When it launched as MLB’s first direct-to-consumer app in 2022, allowing fans in a particular region to watch their local team’s games without needing cable or a streaming service, I wrote that I thought the price was reasonable.

I was wrong. It’s not. It’s steep, and at that price, NESN needs to do much more to satisfy subscribers than it is doing so far.

NESN can say it’s trying to provide the best viewing experience on NESN360. But last Sunday was the biggest example yet of the product telling us something else entirely.

Taste of the big leagues

Odd juxtaposition here, I know, but NESN is doing something cool during Monday’s Red Sox broadcast that deserves praise: It’s giving a couple of promising prospects from the Red Sox farm system — in this case, broadcasters, not ballplayers — an opportunity to get a taste of the big leagues.

As part of the Women’s Celebration Game at Fenway, Portland Sea Dogs broadcasters Emma Tiedemann and Rylee Pay will join O’Brien and analyst Kevin Youkilis in the booth for all nine innings.

Tiedemann, who has called Sea Dogs games since 2020, and Pay, who is in her second season, will call the fourth, fifth, and sixth innings.

Giardi deserves better

One last thought on WEEI’s lineup shakeup this past week. I would have liked to see the station find a prominent role for Mike Giardi. Giardi, who was let go by the NFL Network in March 2023, is well known locally from his time at NBC Sports Boston and New England Cable News. He has been working for Greg Bedard’s Boston Sports Journal and contributing to Rich Shertenlieb’s new morning show on WZLX. Giardi is worthy of a more prominent role in the market, and I’ve always enjoyed him as a host since his time at 1510 The Zone, when he’d sometimes team up with Bill Simmons and Michael Smith on a program that appealed to a much younger audience than what WEEI was doing in those days.