YouTube TV Crashed In The 4th Quarter Of Heat-Celtics And Kept Looping ‘The Little Mermaid’ Trailer Instead

The Miami Heat took Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals on the road against the Boston Celtics thanks to another heroic performance from Jimmy Butler, who scored 35 points and took over in the second half to lead Miami to a comeback win.

However, the final five minutes of the game were not able to be seen by fans who happen to be subscribers to YouTube TV (which happens to be the NBA’s lead presenting sponsor for the NBA Finals). The service had been having some issues throughout the night, buffering and skipping ahead, which was suboptimal but something that happens with streaming services. Then, during a timeout late in the fourth quarter, many viewers were greeted with the first 10 seconds of The Little Mermaid trailer on a loop, with exiting out of the app and restarting it only putting you right back into Little Mermaid hell.

Others were simply shown error messages, or had seen their feeds freeze up earlier in the night.

Naturally, this did not go over well with the many fans who are subscribers of the service, who were forced to watch the game via a box score or gamecast online. The only positive was it allowed NBA Twitter to do what it does best, getting off some jokes in the midst of their frustration with the service.

Given YouTube TV has marketed heavily to sports fans, it wasn’t a great look, with many pointing out that NFL Sunday Ticket is moving to the service next year and there are some serious concerns it will handle that well — particularly considering DirecTV had its own issues every year at launch.