Yesterday's live Superbowl stream by NBC, intended in part to be an ad for Comcast/NBC's Internet innovation and their TV Everywhere platform, wound up being the perfect ad for traditional television. Many folks, including many TV technology beat writers, wound up being frustrated with the inconsistent quality of the stream, arguing that it almost seems like NBC would have rather you watch the game via traditional television.

Others argued that a number of design elements for the stream weren't particularly well thought out, like the fact that those struggling to get a stable stream were having the score spoiled for them repeatedly:

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"The most maddening part was that, even if you stayed off Twitter, and were lucky enough not to have neighbors within earshot, you still would have to contend with spoilers from NBC itself," Oremus wrote at Slate.com. "For unfathomable reasons, the NBC Sports Live Extra web site maintained a scoreboard widget at the top of the screen that stayed live even when the stream fell far behind. It is hard to overstate just how thoughtless and stupid this was on NBC's part."

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Streaming live events at scale is certainly possible in 2015, though you do wonder how much effort and money Comcast and NBC wanted to sink into a venture only to have it illustrate the slowly fading relevance of traditional television. For what it's worth, my experience as a cord cutter watching a chunk of the game on Verizon's NFL Mobile app (over Wi-Fi) wasn't much better -- and Verizon has every incentive to offer a compelling experience.