Big Brother 23 looks and feels very different than previous seasons–mostly because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the mass cultural awakening following the death of George Floyd, and the subsequent pledge from CBS to ensure at least 50 percent of its reality show contestants are people of color. One thing that hasn’t changed is how the 24/7 live feeds that fans pay to watch keep getting blocked sporadically throughout the season. In fact, data reveals just how much of a pain the problem has been this year.
The Big Brother live feeds is a crucial component of the show. For the uninitiated, Big Brother is a reality TV competition in which a dozen or more people are isolated from the outside world and filmed 24/7 inside a “house.” Each week the contestants compete for power to eliminate one person from the game until there is one left. The result is a summer of nonstop social climbing, head-to-head battles, and captivating power struggles. Even though the show airs on CBS three nights a week, those episodes are only the edited and narrativized versions of what’s actually happening in the game–much like what a movie does to a novel. Big moments are often censored or watered down for the show and a lot of the plotting and strategizing is completely overlooked. Therefore the only way to get a solid understanding of the competition’s true momentum is to keep tabs on the “24/7” live stream of the house (even if that means getting updates via Twitter, podcasts or blogs).
The problem is that while CBS and Big Brother sell the “live feeds” as 24/7 access to the house, this has never really been the case. People who subscribe to the feeds quickly find out that a lot of the streaming content gets censored or blocked. Major weekly events like competitions and nomination ceremonies are completely cut. The feeds are also shut during the weekly live show, when one contestant gets the boot. Instead, fans are shown video streams of adoptable kittens and puppies at a California animal shelter (in the past there have been looping interview segments, trivia, clips of classic moments from past seasons, or just fish swimming in tanks). Subscribers generally expect these cuts. What irritates viewers more are the hundreds of additional shorter, seemingly random cuts in between the planned ones.
“It happens so often that fans now refer to the imagined camera operator behind the outages as ‘Skippy.'”
Lately it feels like the random cuts have been happening more often than usual. During these unscheduled, unexpected outages an animated title card with the message “WE’LL BE RIGHT BACK” appears on screen while the Big Brother theme song loops, ad nauseum. Sometimes these cuts make sense, like when contestants sing copyrighted material or talk about behind-the-scenes production secrets. Other times the cuts happen just before exciting moments, as if producers are saving the juicy footage for airing exclusively on the televised episodes. There are many instances in which the timing feels cheeky or sardonic, as though the camera operators are personally turned off by certain topics or antics. Other times, especially this year, the outages make no sense at all to people watching. Contestants can be mid-sentence and or action before feeds suddenly cut. All of this creates a very spasmodic viewing experience. It happens so often that fans now refer to the imagined camera operator behind the outages as “Skippy.”
Just how trigger-happy has “Skippy” been this year?
The case against Skippy has been pretty anecdotal. I wanted to see from a data perspective how often the Big Brother 23 live feeds are actually being hidden from paying subscribers. To answer this question I turned to a couple resources. First, Feeds Bot is a Twitter account that alerts followers whenever the Big Brother live feeds are cut. The bot also has a website where aggregate data about the season’s cuts is displayed. This data was helpful in getting a broad idea of the problem. However, I also wanted to collect my own data. So I devised a very unscientific experiment as well.
Combined, this data reveals a lot about this season’s cuts. Here’s what I found:
Feeds cut out 22 percent of the time; only 56 percent watchable
Source: Feeds Bot
For my experiment I tracked the the live feeds every day for a week between the hours of 5 p.m. Eastern and 8 p.m. Eastern, marking down the start and finish times of blockages, to the second. Some of these hours overlapped with planned events (competitions, ceremonies and the live show), but I also separately timed the full planned outages. Finally, I randomly selected three additional days and one-hour timeframes to add to the data.
The final results varied widely. On some days feeds were cut for 11 percent of the time and on other days they were cut 51 percent of the time. The median result between the 10 days recorded was 21 percent. When excluding the days with planned events that overlapped with the regular experiment, the median was 18 percent.
Those results are similar to Feeds Bot’s. According to Feeds Bot, the feeds have been down for about 22 percent of the season as of August 1, 2021. How does it know? I reached out to the bot’s creator. Apparently, the bot constantly receives images from the video stream and analyzes them for visual cues associated with the three major types of outages: the adoptable pets feeds, the “WE’LL BE RIGHT BACK” title card, and the night vision camera indicating that the houseguests are sleeping. The results are logged and published in a CSV file.
On top of the cuts, the contestants are also sleeping about 22 percent of the time, according to the bot. This means that just roughly 56 percent of the live stream shows the contestants actually doing anything.
Feeds are out 11 to 12 minutes per hour
Outage durations vary and can last anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours. On average the cuts I logged lasted one to three minutes. The longest one I logged, not including the planned special events, was 40 minutes. Interestingly, most cuts appear to be at least 30 seconds long. Out of the 123 cuts I recorded, only 10 were shorter than 30 seconds. This could mean there is some technical explanation for some of the cuts–a technical reason that lasts at least 30 seconds, like a camera change, recharge or load.
During my experiment the median total cut time per hour was 12 minutes. When excluding days in which planned outages overlapped with the experiment the result was 11 minutes.
Feeds cut every 7 minutes
Though outages only last a few minutes on average, the median time feeds stay up before being cut again is seven minutes, my data shows. That means viewers tend to see only seven minutes of live streaming content before their viewing gets interrupted. Many times when the feeds return, the camera is in a different room, or the contestants have moved on from whatever conversation or activity viewers were watching before the cut.
Planned cuts can take up to 4 hours
Source: Analysis
Every week the contestants compete in power and safety competitions. They also participate in various ceremonies that propel the game. These blocked events appear to have planned start times, but don’t appear to have designated stop times. The precise schedule is never revealed to subscribers (or contestants it seems) so when the events begin the feeds cut abruptly. On average these events lasted two and half hours during my experiment, with the longest lasting almost four hours. With about five such events a week (nominations, veto player draft, veto competition, veto ceremony, and the Wildcard competition), plus the live show, subscribers can expect around 15 hours a week of planned outages. They will just never know what time to expect them.
The problem is worse than ever
Source: Feeds Bot
This season’s outages certainly feel far more sporadic and frequent than previous seasons. Turns out that may indeed be the case. According to Feeds Bot, feeds were cut 21 percent of the time last year, 12 percent of the time the year before that and 15 percent the year before that. The Feeds Bot creator argues that this season’s average could level out eventually, since the first week of this year’s game was streamed on the feeds when the first week has traditionally been blocked to allow the contestants to settle in. This season’s weekly Wildcard competition is also expected to end soon, giving subscribers about three more hours a week of feeds (previous seasons have had similar events). As of now, though, this season has the highest percentage of downtime than recent ones, and subscribers are noticing.
This pales in comparison to the equally popular Big Brother Canada, which has gained a reputation for having much longer and more frequent outages than the US edition. Feeds Bot tracks those, too. Last year’s Canadian season saw a whopping 42 percent of the live feeds blocked, not including sleep time!
It’s very unclear why the unscheduled outages occur and why they may be occurring with more frequency and longer duration. Whether there is some internal logic behind the blockages or something more irreverent, fans may never know. What is clear is that people who subscribe to the Big Brother live feeds for “24/7″ “unfiltered access” to the game are actually only able to see a portion of what they’re paying for.