CFL commissioner Stewart Johnston isn’t going to waste time buffering when it comes to the first major challenge of his tenure.
On Thursday, the former Bell Media executive took responsibility for the technological issues that have plagued the league’s website and streaming platform throughout the preseason, promising to address the problem.
“If we’re going to live up to our reputation as a major professional league, we can’t have issues like that happen,” Johnston told 620 CKRM’s Rider Nation Pre-Game Show. “We are digging into the CRM of the website, working with our stats partner. I think last year you saw stats become a lot more stable than they were two years ago. That has to continue to improve, it has to be better. We can’t have our website going down. We just can’t.”
Technical issues on the website first became a point of contention during the CFL Draft on April 29, when the league’s official pick tracker crashed for almost the entirety of the event. That foreshadowed even larger problems during the preseason when the league’s streaming service, CFL+, struggled to support the amount of fans attempting to view games live and stopped working for many.
The CFL was forced to issue a statement on the problem and eventually pivoted to streaming on YouTube. While service reliability improved slightly in the final week of preseason action, issues persisted and forced more temporary solutions.
“We knew that moving it to YouTube would fix the problem that we were seeing on the back end, so it was a mitigation strategy. It’s great to have a mitigation strategy. We prefer not to have to use it,” Johnston explained.
“We’ve got the right IT folks on it. We’re looking at some of the back coding that’s going to be well beyond my technical knowledge that was impacted and make sure we address that going forward.”
CFL+ was launched as the league’s official streaming service in 2023. The platform is free of charge and serves as the primary broadcast platform for international viewers during the season, as well as hosting American audiences for games not carried by CBS Sports Network.
Canadian fans only utilize the platform during the preseason, when the league streams the in-stadium feeds from the seven exhibition games not broadcast by TSN. Those games tend to happen either simultaneously or in quick succession, which led to the technical issues.
“It’s great that preseason games are attracting that much attention,” Johnston acknowledged. “Of course, one of the things that overload the site is it’s all games happening at the same time. None or only one of those games is broadcast on linear so the only place to see them is on CFL+. And, of course, that’s what makes it so important that our website is working.”
The CFL is no stranger to frustrating technical challenges. In 2023, the league rolled out a revamped stats system that struggled to get off the ground and regularly crashed for weeks, with some problems persisting into the following year. Genius Sports, the CFL’s data and technology partner, was responsible for those challenges and also helped set up streaming on CFL+ as part of their responsibilities.
The repeated hiccups of the past few years have left fans disenchanted with the CFL’s technological offerings, believing them to be unreliable. Johnston knows that is a perception he has to change, promising that the work is already being done to ensure this never happens again.
“I think you’re going to see us look at quite an overhaul of the website,” he insisted. “We worked hard over the last seven days and 14 days, hoping that this weekend we’ve worked out a lot of the bugs. A lot of testing has been done, and we’ve got to continue that improvement until it’s a foolproof system.”
Until then, the CFL will continue to be burdened with an analog reputation in the digital age.
The post ‘It has to be better’: CFL commissioner Stewart Johnston promises ‘overhaul’ of website after preseason streaming debacle appeared first on 3DownNation.