Tom Parsons, the TV editor at What Hi-Fi, started caring about broadcast delay during Euro 2020. He watched every match in 4K on BBC iPlayer, and his neighbours and a pub down the road kept cheering goals before he'd seen them. During the 2026 World Cup he borrowed a second, identical TV, set the two side by side and timed every way of watching he had at home. It's the clearest measurement we've found, and most of the TV numbers below come from it.
Delay matters even more for commentary than for pictures. When you listen to a fan commentating the match on your TV, two clocks are running: yours and the commentator's. If they drift apart, you either hear the goal before you see it or you see it and wait for the shout. Both ruin it.
Nothing you watch is live
The picture leaves the ground, goes through the broadcaster's gallery and an encoder, then a transmitter, and finally the decoder in your TV. Every step takes time. The BBC says it takes 7 to 8 seconds for something happening live to reach a TV fed by an aerial, and that's the quick route. A Selectra round-up for French viewers puts the hop from the pitch to the broadcaster's control room alone at one to two seconds.
Here is what Parsons measured, each figure counted from the aerial:
- BBC iPlayer: 23 seconds behind. Same result on the TV's own app, a Sky Stream box and an Apple TV 4K, and the 4K stream was no slower than HD.
- Sky Stream (Sky over broadband): 18 seconds behind.
- Sky Stream with Sky's new Real Time mode switched on: 5 seconds behind.
He no longer has a satellite dish, so Sky Q went untested, but Sky told him Real Time comes within three seconds of it. That would put satellite a couple of seconds behind the aerial. Selectra gives the same order in France: TNT first, then the TV decoder from your internet box (Orange, Free, SFR, Bouygues) a few seconds later, then streaming apps, which can run up to a minute late.
Why the internet version is slower
An aerial picks up a continuous signal. An internet stream gets cut into chunks a few seconds long, pushed through a content delivery network, and your player holds several chunks in reserve before it starts, so a wobbly connection doesn't freeze the picture. The BBC has explained the trade-off itself: if the chunks are too small the system runs inefficiently, and if they're too long the delay is unavoidable. Cloudflare, which runs one of those networks, puts standard HLS and DASH streaming at 10 seconds or more and their low-latency versions at closer to 5.
That buffer is there on purpose. YouTube's help page says it plainly: the lower the latency, the less read-ahead buffer the player has, and the more likely viewers are to see buffering.
Radio: FM is still the fastest thing you can buy
Analogue radio barely processes the sound at all, which is why a cheap FM set at the ground keeps up with the match. Digital radio doesn't. The BBC's time signal shows it well: the six pips are timed to arrive exactly on the hour on long wave, but on DAB, digital TV, satellite and the internet the encoding and decoding add a few seconds, and some devices buffer more on top. Put an FM radio and a DAB radio in the same kitchen on the same station and you'll hear the echo.
A radio station's app or web stream is chunked like video, so it belongs with the streaming apps, not with FM.
Twitch and YouTube watchalongs
A watchalong creator usually can't show the match. They talk over it, and you watch the game on your own screen. Their voice reaches you through the platform's video pipeline, with its own delay.
Twitch has cut its delay a long way. Its engineers wrote in 2021 that low-latency mode had brought the lag down to about 3 seconds, and to 1.5 seconds in some cases, and low latency is now on by default for most channels. YouTube gives creators three settings: ultra-low, where most viewers are under 5 seconds behind; low, where most are under 10; and normal, which has the biggest buffer and the best picture and comes with no figure at all.
Those seconds stack. Say the creator watches on an aerial, reacts to a goal, and streams on Twitch. If you're on an aerial too, you hear them celebrate about 3 seconds after you've seen the ball go in. On YouTube it's up to 5 or 10 seconds on the faster settings, more on normal. If the creator is watching on a streaming app, add another 20 seconds to all of that.
What we use, and what it changes
WeSpeakSports commentary is audio only, and it travels over WebRTC, the technology behind video calls in your browser. WebRTC doesn't cut the sound into chunks. It sends small packets as the words come out, and the listener's app keeps only a short buffer to smooth over the network. That's why a call feels like a conversation. The ITU's guideline for telephone networks, G.114, treats up to 150 milliseconds one way as fine for most uses and anything above 400 as unacceptable, and WebRTC was designed for exactly that kind of use. Cloudflare describes WebRTC streaming as sub-second.
So our part of the chain adds less than a second. The commentator's TV still sets the clock. If they watch on an aerial and so do you, their reaction lands within about a second of you seeing the moment, roughly what you'd get with them on the sofa next to you. For an internet commentary, that's as close to aerial TV as it gets.
Being fast has one side effect: it shows up a slow TV. If you're watching on iPlayer and your commentator is on an aerial, you'll hear the goal around 20 seconds before you see it. A slower platform would hide that mismatch by accident.
At a glance
| How you follow it | Delay behind the action |
|---|---|
| FM radio | practically none |
| DAB radio | a few seconds more than FM |
| Aerial TV (Freeview, TNT, DVB-T) | 7 to 8 seconds |
| Satellite | close to the aerial, a couple of seconds behind |
| TV through an internet box | a few seconds more than the aerial |
| Broadcaster streaming apps | 18 to 23 seconds more than the aerial in What Hi-Fi's test, up to a minute |
| Twitch watchalong | the creator's TV, plus about 3 seconds |
| YouTube watchalong | the creator's TV, plus up to 5 or 10 seconds, more on normal latency |
| WeSpeakSports commentary | the commentator's TV, plus under a second |
Commentators: watch on an aerial
If the match is on free-to-air TV, plug in an aerial. It's the fastest picture you can get at home, and satellite is next. If the game is only on a streaming service, look for a low-delay mode like Sky's Real Time and switch it on. Watching on a phone app or a web stream is the worst option: twenty seconds is a long time to spend describing a corner your listeners saw ages ago.
Say what you're watching on at kick-off, so listeners can match you. And if you're at the ground, you skip TV delay entirely. Then your commentary is about as close to live as FM.
Listeners: match your commentator
Watch on an aerial if you can, and mute the TV commentary. If your picture comes from a streaming app, choose a commentator who's watching the same way, or you'll hear every goal before you see it.