It’s Thursday night and the Denver Nuggets are up by 27 points on the Sacramento Kings. At least, that’s what I see on my TV.
But something’s nagging at me. Are we really up by 27? Or am I stuck in the past? Is the real game already in the fourth quarter? Maybe it’s actually over and we lost?
See, I’ve been watching the Nuggets and the Colorado Avalanche on Altitude+, the team-owned streaming service. And Altitude+ has some quirks, along with some perks, that I’d like to share with you as the teams’ seasons hit high gear. The Nuggets are once again playing a marquee Christmas Day game, while the Avalanche are on an absolute heater this season.
How the app works — and doesn't
The Altitude+ app works a lot like other live streaming services. It costs $20 per month, and you can use most any smart device (for me, an iPhone and an Apple TV) to watch Altitude’s sports content. It also works in a regular web browser.
Here’s the part that works best: If the game is on, you can watch it in real-time. With the app in its second season, Kroenke Sports & Entertainment seems to have ironed out a lot of the kinks with the real-time viewing experience, even if the user interface is a little clunky. (It takes a lot of taps to do stuff.)
The real trouble comes with the app’s time-shifting features — pausing, rewinding and fast-forwarding. I was excited to see KSE had recently introduced these options, because I like to watch games on Dad Time: Start after the kids are down, skip through the commercials.
Watching games on delay is a time-honored tradition. There is a whole Seinfeld storyline about Jerry doing it with his VCR for a Mets game. I enjoy unplugging for a couple hours, trying to avoid all spoilers about the game — sadly, I even have phone modes that block texts from sports-enjoying friends — and then watching 48 minutes of pure basketball.
But as I’ve learned, time-shifting doesn’t really work with Altitude+. The app acts like it does. But it doesn’t. When I rewind the stream by more than a few minutes, things get loopy. Time loopy. The app might crash. It might stop responding. Or, my favorite, it might lose track of reality. It will tell me that I’m caught back up to real-time, only for me to look and see that, no, the Nuggets are not actually up by 27 on the Domantas Sabonis-less Kings. That was 15 minutes ago.
It’s an interesting user experience. When I watch Altitude+, I feel like I’m in a Christopher Nolan movie, maybe “Tenet” — lost in time, unsure what’s real, with Nikola Jokic as my only totem of reality.
Some apps are explicitly designed around the idea that sports should be watched on delay. Amazon’s Prime Video is the queen, offering the option to start games from the beginning, or even watch a series of highlights to get caught up to real-time.
KSE does not have Amazon’s technology, and Altitude+ is not that app. It’s almost explicitly designed to discourage time management. It loves spoilers, displaying the current score of the game at every single opportunity. I found myself squinting my eyes to avoid seeing the score while I tried to rewind the game. (Which, of course, doesn’t really work anyway.)
On the plus side, Altitude+ does have replays of the games, which work perfectly fine. But those replays take hours to post. Sometimes, the app claims the replay is available, only to display a cool message like: “Unable to initiate a key system supporting the required combinations.” So, those recorded games are only a good option for the truly patient among us.
If you’re curious, Altitude+ runs on a platform called ViewLift, which also powers other teams' offerings, including for the Washington Wizards.
In a statement, Kroenke senior vice president Matt Krol wrote that fan feedback like mine is valued.
“Since we debuted Altitude+ over a year ago, we have continually worked with our developer to bring the best experience to the fans. We value fan feedback to not only address issues, but also add new features like multiview, live stats, pause/rewind, chat and more. We will be rolling out more features soon, with the ultimate goal of continuing to provide a stable app and giving the fans the best viewing experience possible,” Krol wrote.
I had a revelation.
Here’s the thing. The Nuggets play 82 regular season games a year. So do the Avs. Most of those games are on Altitude. That’s a lot of sports.
Rather than taking another ride in the app’s infuriating time machine, I decided to live in the moment. Now, I’ll just turn the game on in the third quarter. If we’re winning, I get to imagine whatever marshmallow wizardry Jokic was doing. If we’re losing, I just assume we forgot how to play defense again. I do not need to watch 65.6 hours of regular-season basketball, excluding overtime.
And for this specific purpose — the viewing of what the Nuggets are up to in this specific moment — Altitude+ is just fine. It’s stable and it works, even with its quirks. Some light pausing and rewinding is OK, so long as you don’t get lost in the time streams. Instead of voyaging through time, I fold my laundry or stretch my bad knee.
And, to their credit, the Kroenkes haven’t embraced some of the more dastardly design choices of other media companies. ESPN’s new app, for example, will force you to watch commercials on a replay. (Delightfully, it also likes to crash while trying to force you to watch a commercial.) The contemptible Peacock is just as bad, inserting a 15-second ad before allowing you to watch a live game that, of course, is full of ads. (Peacock’s sports streams are also somehow glitchier than those on Altitude+.)
Altitude+ will also allow you to stream to two devices simultaneously with a monthly subscription, or four devices for a yearly one, which is more generous than some others. Supported platforms include Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV (the hardware device), web browsers, Roku, and iOS and Android mobile devices.
I also haven’t spoken to the quality of the content itself. It’s the Nuggets! It’s the Avs! Both teams are in their prime, and at $20 a month, Altitude+ is the cheapest way to watch them regularly.
The quality of the video feed itself is mostly good, and it’s also fun to watch games with hometown announcers. The Altitude crew strikes a nice balance of favoring our guys without being total homers — even if I wish they still had Katy Winge in the booth. You also get a bunch of related videos I haven’t watched, including sports talk shows and the enticingly titled “Denver Nuggets vs Sacramento Kings: It’s a Wonderful Life.” (That turned out to be a 37-second preview for said game.)
I don’t even mind the ads on Altitude. I’d rather hear for the 10,000th time from Joseph Ramos (he’s a doctor and a lawyer) than to see yet another gambling promo on the national channels. Altitude seems to be almost entirely free of those. I also like the assorted schticks — stuff like a “Cut of the Game” segment sponsored by a lawnmower manufacturer. That’s the power of regional broadcasting.
In conclusion: Altitude+ includes about as much Denver sports as you should reasonably watch, and it works, except when it doesn’t.
