Super Bowl Streams Have a Frustrating Delay. Try This Easy-to-Use, $20 Antenna to Avoid the Lag.

Streaming lag is due to numerous factors — many of which you can’t control.

For starters, streaming platforms run on a protocol that was not originally intended to support live video. “The dominant streaming protocol is HLS, which stands for HTTP Live Streaming,” said Jed Corenthal, who previously served as chief marketing officer at Phenix, in a phone interview. But HLS was released in 2009, and not for delivering streams in real-time.

Relaying live video over HLS is not exactly a streamlined (pun intended) process. “There are a number of pieces to the workflow, like encoding, transcoding, and content delivery,” Corenthal said. “The way that video is actually delivered, it’s broken up into what’s referred to as chunks. Those chunks have to then be reassembled at the other end. All of that adds to your latency.”

If your plan to avoid Super Bowl spoilers is to only text with that one friend who’s watching the game on the same streaming platform as you, that still may not work. That’s because streaming services are also susceptible to something called drift, Corenthal said, which refers to the amount of time between a streaming service’s fastest feed and its slowest feed. In its 2025 Super Bowl streaming survey, Phenix found that every streaming service delivered inconsistent speeds across their customer base. For instance, while one person watching Fubo might have experienced a 45-second lag behind the on-field action, another person, also watching Fubo, might have simultaneously experienced a lag of more than 100 seconds. So if your plan to avoid Super Bowl spoilers is to only text with that one friend who’s watching the game on the same streaming platform as you, that still may not work.

Meanwhile, your at-home video setup contains variables that also increase lag time. According to Adrienne, these include the quality of your internet service provider, what kind of Wi-Fi plan you have, which streaming media player and service you use, and how many other devices are simultaneously running on your Wi-Fi network. Though you may be able to mitigate one or two of these factors, like turning off all other Wi-Fi-enabled devices, an OTA signal never has to contend with them in the first place.