Since the "delay" has been pervasive throughout the article series, the reason for the delay is two fold.
One, if you were right on the mark time-wise, and there was a network glitch, you'd have no buffer, so you'd have no picture until the glitch resolved itself.
Secondly, it takes a lot of work to go from a satellite or fiber or even an antenna in some areas (like my DMA where a fiber connect wasn't plausible) to being encoded in H.264/265 to being spread to hundreds, if not thousands of servers in synchronization until the video was available to all users, as it streams live to tens of thousands of viewers.
Longer buffers mean more resiliency to the myriad collection of things that can happen anywhere along the line in a very imperfect system.
So THAT'S why there's a delay with live. I've had a delay with most live tv, particularly sports, for over a decade now since I've streamed a lot of it.
So far, 0.0 instances of feeling FOMO if folks in a different house started cheering or groaning 30 seconds before I did.
Streaming services wise, we're down realistically to youtube, sling and hulu. Fubo is weird, has an odd channel lineup and isn't cheap, so that isn't going to last, and directv anything svcks. Sorry for the technical term.
Sling has endless technical issues and is one of the few streaming services that glitches and glorks regularly. Youtube tv has been smooth, and the 1080 and 60fps that Sling doesn't have (unless they upgraded recently) are crucial for sports and action flicks IMO.
But like the author, I used them for a while, because Blue is all I need outside of football season, and when it was $30 that was way better than $65 for ytv.
Now that they're 35, and I need Blue and Orange to get NFL games and that's at $50+, youtube tv is a no brainer.
However, I'm thinking that during this season or the next we'll end up with being able to stream most sports content from within the native streaming service for the network covering the game. For example, Paramount+ having NFL games in-market.
ESPN/Sunday Night Football is the stubborn one that doesn't seem to want to find itself on ESPN3 or some other streaming channel.
Honestly, once sports (in my case, NFL specifically) are 100% streamable at a fair price, I probably won't need a linear tv "live" service at all anymore.
Except for some NFL action, that's practically the case right now.