I subscribe to MLB.com so that I can watch baseball games on my computer. The other night I was sitting on my sofa watching a game on my laptop when my wife sat down next to me with her laptop and turned on the same game. We were surprised to see that her reception was about 30 seconds behind mine; I was watching a player strike out while on her screen the pitcher hadn’t even thrown the ball yet. How can this be?
I wouldn’t be surprised if this was due to the famous Superbowl “Wardrobe Failure.”
Satellite transmission lag, DVR lag (even if you are watching “live”, the DVR is buffering video), various other lags, including potential censor lag mentioned by beowulff.
I don’t think you read the OP correctly. Sounds like both he and his wife are both watching a game online and yet they were seeing different views, separated by about 30 seconds in time. No one was watching a television.
Caching of content delivery
Internet video has some additional buffering going on to keep things smooth. If you ever look at computer network traffic it tends to come in bursts and has a lot of waves of activity on it. If you don’t buffer things up, the video will “stutter” during periods of high traffic.
And for a computer ignoramus, does this vary from computer to computer?
I suspect a big part of the difference that when you began watching, you had all your home’s download speed to yourself, but when she began watching, her download was competing with yours, so it took longer for the buffer to fill, or maybe the software made the buffer larger.
You could experiment, having her start a game before you, or both starting at the same time, and see if there’s a pattern.
A local bar I’ve been known to visit has a TV at either end of the room. Though tuned to the same channel, they are about 5 seconds out of sync. No computer involvement.
Any thoughts?
Broadcast, cable or satellite?
I would expect so if you had different video cards, processing speeds, etc.
I have noticed that satellite is delayed (compared to cable), I always assumed it was for the transmision to go to space and back.
Yes. There’s a cache on the server and there’s a cache on the local computer as well. Most video programs (Windows Media Player, etc) fill their local cache a certain amount before they start playing, and sometimes they determine how much to buffer based on how quickly they can fill up the cache initially. The programs may readjust their buffering if the get a data underflow error (meaning they run the cache empty and have to stop until more data comes in).
Two computers on the same network (like inside your house) probably won’t start playing the video at the exact same second just because of variations in the network delays as they initially buffer up the data.
My bet would be digital cable channel vs. analog cable channel. This lag is easy to observe switching back and forth between the two at home.
Hmmmm. I dunno. The beer is cold and reasonably priced. 
It would have to be cable or dish, though.
I do something similar. I will watch a game on TV, but listen to the local “radio” station via streaming audio on the Internet.
The audio from the net is usually 30+ seconds behind the feed on the TV. So, I pause the DVR on the TV and attempt to sync the two signals.
While this works, after about 1/2 hour they are two or three seconds apart again (either way) and I have to adjust. So many variables involved that would prohibit 100% accuracy…
We have Verizon FIOS with multiple boxes in the house. One feed coming into the house. Depending on the channel playing, the broadcast may be in sync completely, just barely out of sync or up to a 3 second difference when playing the same program in different rooms. The network stations tend to be the worse while various cable stations tend to line up better. When we had Charter cable it was the same. Different receiver boxes getting the exact same feed play at a different cycle. Very annoying.
At a previous residence I had TWC. The TV in the living room was connected to the DVR and the TV in the bedroom was connected directly to the cable jack in the wall. Occasionally when I was doing housework I would have both sets tuned to the same station and there was a noticeable lag between them.
Another thing to consider is that for any given video streamed over IP, no two client devices watching that stream are necessarily connected to the same server. It’s possible that MLB.com has its load balanced across multiple datacenters, probably geographically dispersed, so you could have been picking up your stream from New York* while your wife was streaming from LA*. Naturally all of those servers (even if they’re all in a single datacenter) are going to introduce varying degrees of lag depending on their load, buffering, how many hops separate them from the primary feed, etc.
(* Hypothetically speaking, of course. I don’t know the details of MLB.com’s network topology.)
I work at a news-talk radio station. As such, we have a delay system inline to catch “dirty words” from callers. It has also become useful when we carry the Carolina Panthers football games. We can dial in the exact delay time from the video feed so you can watch the game on tv and listen to the game on our station. This is only useful for the Time Warner cable feed, but it’s better than nothing. YMMV