Fans and supporters,
Saturday night we experienced an unfortunate outage in the broadcast transmission of our game against North Carolina FC. Local television viewers were unable to watch the final 36 minutes and stoppage time of arguably our best game of the season because of these issues.
I wanted to explain what we’ve learned in the past two days and how we hope to prevent this from happening in the future.
First, please understand that specifics of all USL team broadcasts are mandated by the USL, including the fact that we are required to use a league-selected third-party (Vista Worldlink) to transmit our signal to all the relevant parties. In our case, that includes WSTR Star-64, as well as ESPN+ and YouTube.
Saturday night, part of this USL-mandated process failed. A specific relay that sends the signal from Vista’s Florida facilities to USL teams’ local TV affiliates, including WSTR Star-64 here in Cincinnati, failed early in the second half. We were not the only USL team affected. In fact, Louisville City FC’s game was never shown on television at all because of this issue.
Because this specific part of the USL-defined process failed, WSTR stopped receiving the signal. That’s when you saw the technical difficulties screen come up. While the game was still streaming on ESPN+ and YouTube – the specific piece of the broadcast relay that supplies the television feeds failed.
Unfortunately, because this failure occurred at Vista and with their partner TATA, there was nothing we could do to fix the issue locally.
Both our staff and WSTR staff were working hard to find a way to air the remainder of the game. However, since the issue was out of both our control and WSTR’s control, there was nothing we could do to get the game on for our fans.
Since Saturday, we have demanded both answers and assurances to prevent this in the future. We’ve received answers and USL’s broadcast partners have accepted responsibility.
We are now working to install back-up plans so our fans do not have to suffer from something similar happening to our broadcasts in the future.
All of that said, I want to reiterate that this was a Vista Worldlink issue, not an FC Cincinnati or WSTR issue. Both groups did everything in their power to get the rest of the game back on. But because the means of our TV broadcasts are dictated by USL, we could not make a fix in this case.
We appreciate your continued support and understanding and hope we never have to explain something like this again.
Jeff Berding
President & General Manager
