CFL commissioner Stewart Johnston understands why fans are frustrated with the league's website, most notably statistics, and streaming issues with its preseason broadcasts.
"If we're going to live up to our reputation as a major professional league, we can't have issues like that happen. We are digging into the CRM of the website, working with our stats partner. Last year you saw stats become a lot more stable than they were two years ago," Johnston told the Rider Broadcast Network
"That has to continue to improve -- it has to be better. We can't have our website going down -- we just can't. We've got the right IT folks on it. We're looking at some of the back coding that's going to be well beyond my technical knowledge that was impacted and make sure we address that going forward."
There were nine preseason games across the league this year, TSN broadcast two while the other seven were streamed through the league's website using its CFL+ platform. Although, the Calgary Stampeders versus Edmonton Elks game on Saturday, May 24 was moved to the CFL's YouTube channel.
"We knew that moving it to YouTube would fix a problem that we were seeing on the back end. It's great to have a mitigation strategy in place, we prefer not to have to use it. It's great that the preseason is attracting that much attention. One of the things that overloaded the site is all games happening at the same time," Johnston said.
"With only one of those games broadcast on linear, the only place to see them is on CFL+ and that's what makes it so important that our website is working. You're going to see us look at quite an overhaul of the website. We worked hard over the last seven to 14 days, hoping that we've worked out a lot of the bugs. A lot of testing has been done and we've got to continue that improvement until it's a foolproof system."
The Saskatchewan Roughriders travel to Hamilton to face the Tiger-Cats on Saturday. Catch the pre-game show with Teagan Witko, Justin Dunk and Wes Cates at 2 p.m. which includes exclusive interviews like the one with Johnston while Dave Thomas and Luc Mullinder have the game call at 5 p.m. You can hear everything on the 620 CKRM Co-operators Rider Broadcast Network.
