I am not an IT professional, and certainly not of the caliber needed to maintain a website as well trafficked as the World Surf League’s. But I do know that, if you are about to run a major live event – your first in quite some time – necessary precautions and planning should be done to ensure the online viewing goes off without a hitch.
This is not what the WSL had in mind.
While queuing up Sunday’s Rumble at the Ranch (AKA Showdown at OK Kelly’s Corral, AKA Turn Fest) on the WSL’s website, I was kind of, sort of, maybe looking forward to watching some live surfing. Even if it was not the most exciting lineup or venue, it was something surfing related to fill a hole in my Sunday afternoon.
The beginning of the feed was fine – smooth and ad filled. No surprises there. But then, during Kelly’s opening round left hander, the stream froze as Kelly was free falling from a floater, aiming to make his way into the barrel. It was a move that the commentators had been teasing with excitement for the last few minutes and, since the rumble so far had been more of a light vibration, was something I had looked forward to seeing.
But instead, I stared at Slater frozen in free fall from the roof of the wave, with Error Code 232404 plastered across the screen.
By the time I had refreshed the feed AND watched all the ads for a second time, I had missed both the ending of KS’s ride and the subsequent replay. Nothing a YouTube search couldn’t fix, but the point of watching sports live is to see the event unfold in real time. Digging around the internet was an unnecessary step.
The stream was fine for a bit longer, until Carissa More was flying down a train fueled left on her backhand. She whipped her board off the top of the wave, landing just behind the barrel section, surely left for dead. But she was somehow able to will herself back into the barrel. Excitement! Thrills! Chills! Potential Spills! Did she make it out and complete the wave? I have no idea – the stream was again interrupted by Error Code 232404.
The two most exciting moments of the early round must have been too much for the video player to handle. Or maybe the WSL’s video team has something against lefts. Either way, this was bullshit.
Error Code 232404 appeared once again after the heat was over, freezing Joe Turpel’s face mid-conversation with Kelly. Turpel’s perma-twisted expression looked like he had just seen the ghost of PacSun’s past.
This would be 232404’s final appearance, as I closed the World Surf League window in my browser and fired up the much more consistent YouTube stream, which I discovered while searching for replays of the waves I had missed.
The Gnar Shreds You tried to get to the bottom of the faulty stream and reached out to the WSL’s IT team for comment. But the only response we received was the soothing sound of a 56k dialup modem. They must have been out to lunch with Surfline’s forecasting and IT teams celebrating mutual success.
It’s baffling that of the two places to watch this event, one was extremely buggy and the other was poorly advertised (at least from what I saw. Maybe it was buried at the bottom of a promo poster or tweet). Then again, everything about this event – the surfers, venue, and actual on wave surfing – was odd. So maybe the stream was just par for the course.
To the error code’s credit, it was the most thrilling part about the entire event. In a contest dominated by predictability, 232404 was the only one keeping me on my toes, uncertain of when they would strike next. It takes guts to steal waves from both a men’s and women’s world champion – so watching 232404 perform these acts so effortlessly was a sight to behold. While everyone else was happy with smooth, safe, boring surfing, Error Code was the only one whose efforts got me out of my seat.