Replying to Live streaming vs. post-event edits

This thought occurred to me as I was trying to watch the U.S. Open big air live stream on NS a few weeks ago. Although I had driven 45 minutes from home to get a good enough Internet connection to watch the stream, it kept glitching out on me and it turned out that I was only actually able to watch about 1 out of 3 jumps in the finals. Of course (lucky for me) I was able to hear Van Valin and Uncle Dipshit blathering the whole time.

My thought was this: live streams are great when they work well, but it seems that it takes a whole lot of money, equipment and paid employees to make a real, functioning live stream a reality. Even then, the performance of the stream ultimately depends on the user's Internet connection; if you've got a shitty connection, you're out of luck, plain and simple.

I'm not ripping on NS at all for doing streams this year and I'm super stoked to watch the Red Bull Playstreets this weekend (I can only hope it works better for me this time than the Open stream did). All I want to say is: Live streams are super expensive and labor-intensive. A really dope event edit, on the other hand, can be done with one guy with a camera and a computer, with no budget whatsoever. Personally, I would rather watch a well-done 3-minute edit with all the highlights from an event, in high-quality video, than spend two or three hours trying, and mostly failing, to watch an event in poorer quality video.