'I know that there are issues': Tving CEO vows to improve after baseball broadcast errors

Streaming service Tving CEO Choi Ju-hee promised to improve on Tuesday after its entrance into the baseball broadcasting world was plagued by errors over the weekend.

Streaming service Tving CEO Choi Ju-hee speaks during a briefing about Tving’s KBO broadcasting service at CJ ENM headquarters in western Seoul on Tuesday. [NEWS1]

Streaming service Tving CEO Choi Ju-hee promised to improve on Tuesday after its entrance into the baseball broadcasting world was plagued by errors over the weekend.

Tving, which paid a record 135 billion won ($101 million) for KBO’s wired and wireless broadcasting rights for the next three seasons, faced significant criticism from fans over the weekend for a long list of sins including patchy and low-quality broadcasts, a game shown without any sound, naming players incorrectly, covering league sponsor Shinhan Bank’s logo, failing to upload timely highlight videos and, the biggest sin of all, errors in graphics that suggest the powers that be might not actually understand the game.

One such mistake that immediately went viral was an error in the graphics that saw Tving mark “safe” as “save,” apparently not understanding the English term that is also used in Korean baseball.

Other rookie errors included using players’ jersey numbers as their batting numbers — in baseball, batters are referred to by their place in the batting lineup, not by their jersey number — and, in one particularly confusing instance, reportedly using the names of NC Dinos’ players during a game between the Kiwoom Heroes and Doosan Bears.

A graphic on the Tving broadcast of a game between the Samsung Lions and Hanwha Eagles incorrectly labels a Hanwha player as ″save″ not ″safe″ at third base in an image posted on social media on Sunday. The English term ″safe″ is used in Korean baseball. [SCREEN CAPTURE]

The list goes on. Sunday’s game between the Samsung Lions and Hanwha Eagles was reportedly broadcast at least in part without any sound, and fans had to wait about four hours for highlights reels to be uploaded after the games, a process that was handled within 30 minutes by a Naver AI system under the former contract.

“This week, we monitored many news articles and fans’ criticism all day and night,” Choi said during a briefing session on Tuesday at CJ ENM headquarters in western Seoul. “We are well aware of the insufficient aspects. We feel a bigger sense of responsibility through this.

“We are taking action to address the issues that can be taken care of immediately. But I know that there are issues left. We are actively trying to find measures to improve those.”

Tving on Tuesday also announced a range of new features they intend to introduce to improve the KBO viewing experience, including the ability to rewind live games to specific moments to rewatch anything that was missed the first time around.

The 2024 KBO season begins on March 23.

Tving Chief Product Offficer Chun Taek-soo said Tuesday that Tving will work to allow fans to watch multiple games at the same time from June, when the league starts to become more competitive.

Another feature Tving will showcase on April 8 is an audio mode through which users can listen to KBO commentary without watching the games.

“This audio mode will be one way to enjoy baseball in instances where you cannot look at a screen because you are moving, you are taking a shower and you want to listen to commentary, you are at work and you want to know how the game is going or when you have to save data,” Chun said.

The 2024 KBO season will start on March 23 with all 10 teams playing their first games of the season at 2 p.m. Tving is in charge of digital broadcasting within Korea, but games will still also be aired on television.

BY PAIK JI-HWAN, JIM BULLEY [paik.jihwan@joongang.co.kr]