Game 7 in the NBA playoffs: a chance to kick back, enjoy the drama of a winner-takes-all shootout between basketball’s big beasts, and … switch over from your regular TV provider to Amazon Prime? The excitement drains from the occasion at the first touch of the remote. Amazon no doubt imagined it had landed a real coup when the Eastern Conference semi-final series between Detroit and Cleveland extended to its maximum length, thereby handing the retail giant’s streaming arm, Prime Video, the right to air a Game 7 in the first season of its partnership with the NBA. In the event, Sunday’s game was a dud: a blowout win for the Cavs, playing on the road, that had all the electricity and charm of a stint in the doctor’s waiting room. Fortunately for viewers, Prime Video did its best to match the moment by producing a broadcast that was every bit as dull and juiceless as events on the court.

The pre-tipoff highlight was an interview with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, on the occasion of his coronation as this season’s MVP, in which the Oklahoma City star appeared to be speaking from a movie theater for some reason. Blake Griffin, the house beefcake on Prime Video’s studio set, chided ESPN insider Shams Charania for leaking this year’s MVP announcement hours earlier: “It’s Sunday, Shams – go to brunch, you nerd.” If Hillary had won and Shams had kept his trap shut, we’d all be at brunch! The game got under way, and things did not improve. During the half-time show, Dirk Nowitzki rambled Germanly about various topics, while fellow former MVP Steve Nash delivered lines like “That decisiveness in isolation is so important” with all the conviction of a hostage recording a ransom video. Host Taylor Rooks tried valiantly to compensate for the lack of chemistry on set by laughing at even the slightest hint of a joke from any of her panellists. Awkward laughter delivered over dead air on a platform it feels like a punishment to access: that’s the Prime Video NBA playoffs guarantee.

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These have been a difficult debut playoffs for Prime as it muscles in on the broadcast territory once ruled by what the media analysts call “linear TV”. The feed dropped out for several minutes during overtime in the play-in game between the Hornets and the Heat; buffering, the nightmare we all thought we outlived in 2006, has plagued the stream in several games; and video has frequently been mistimed with audio, producing delays and mismatches. There’s primetime, which is when the bulk of these playoffs are taking place, and then there’s Prime Video time, which comes in around three seconds later. The audio itself in many games has often, in my experience at least, been strangely soft, requiring a trip all the way to the top of the volume scale to hear what the analysts and announcers are saying.

Compounding these technical difficulties has been the absence of any sense of occasion or big game feel on the Prime Video set. Inside the NBA, the program that anchored basketball coverage on TNT for many years before this season moving to ESPN, has become the pre-eminent talkshow in sports thanks to the alchemy of its stars, and the special qualities that each brings to the screen. The righteous fury of Charles Barkley, the bowtied jollity of Ernie Johnson, Kenny Smith’s calm assurance, Shaq’s dad mumble and roomy suits: each is critical to the show’s virtuosity and success. Shaq and Barkley, in particular, spar and talk over the top of each other so frequently they have developed a kind of harmonic verbal jazz that is now the show’s stylistic signature. And though the migration to ESPN has not been an entirely happy experience, the quad’s chemistry has thankfully survived the move.

Over on Amazon the contrast could not be more stark: the Prime Video playoffs have felt more like an extended quarterly corporate budget meeting than the pinnacle event in professional basketball. Nash and Nowitzki are Prime’s two heavy hitters, but even though they played together they often interact as if they’re vague acquaintances who’ve just bumped into each other at dinner; it’s all a bit too polite, a bit too safe, to make for compelling TV. Prime Video has exited the playoffs, the remainder of which will be shown on ABC/ESPN and NBC/Peacock. But the effect of Amazon’s shuddering experiment in anti-TV lingers.

For fans there is, of course, a real fragmentation to the viewing experience now that playoff basketball is parceled out across a number of platforms and viewing portals. Under the terms of the NBA’s new 11-year, $77bn media deal, live basketball is spread across NBC, Peacock, ESPN/ABC and Prime Video – a patchwork that includes broadcast TV, cable and streamers. This inevitably causes some disruption to the experience of watching live sport as we’ve become accustomed to it in the eras of channel surfing and multi-view, as an event in conversation with many others. For those of us with Prime Video and functioning fingers, that’s not exactly the end of the world – we all have the ability to handle the remote and press the right buttons to find what we’re looking for – but siloing premium live sports on streaming services does tend to make the viewing experience more static, more clunky, less zappy and less fun.

There’s also the question of access to consider. Instead of liberating us from the cable bundle, TV’s streaming era has ended up delivering us into a world where we all need to sign up for a retail goods delivery service to enjoy postseason basketball. To view the cream of the NBA in battle on the big screen from the comfort of your own home, you must first ensure you have a subscription for next-day delivery of toilet paper. On its own, $14.99 a month (the price of an Amazon Prime subscription) may not seem like much to pay for access to premium live sport – but that’s only one platform, and the costs of maintaining connection across all the different TV and streaming services that sports now live on are only multiplying (Amazon allows users to subscribe to streaming alone but structures it so that it’s most cost effective to pay for an entire Prime shipping subscription). Though precise figures are hard to come by, the most reliable estimates suggest that Amazon Prime has about 200 million customers in the US. On that basis it’s fair to assume that most basketball fans have Prime Video. But not all of them do – and not all neighborhood bars are prepared to pay the higher fees required to stream Prime in a commercial venue. At a time when the league is confronting a tanking epidemic and plagued by anxieties over its own product’s watchability, ripping a sizeable chunk of the postseason off normie TV and parking it on a streaming platform does not seem like the wisest strategy to allay those concerns and guarantee the sport’s long-term growth.

The NBA claims viewership is up across the board for the regular season and the playoffs – but data in the streaming era is notoriously chaotic and unreliable, so it’s anyone’s guess what the figures actually reveal. Ultimately the objective truth is probably less important than the semblance of growth, which is what the NBA and other big leagues need to keep attracting money. Appearance matters more than reality, the narrative more than the substance; the real audience for the NBA’s hosannas about market growth is not the fan on the couch but the underwriter in the corporate box. Viewership, popularity, even the public itself now seem increasingly incidental to professional sports, whose mega media deals are cooked up on the back of opaque datasets for the ultimate benefit of a tiny class of owners and investors. With each passing year televised sport becomes more and more like the unreal economy of venture capital, in which inscrutable claims about market size mix with a general contempt for the target public, and investment capital takes on a speculative character, unmoored from any objective metric of performance or even the need to show a profit.

The shackling of this year’s NBA playoffs to Prime Video has coincided with the emergence of a number of exotic new insults to the broader sports-loving public, most notoriously the extortionate pricing of tickets for the approaching World Cup. This weekend 40 dishonorables from the worlds of swimming, athletics and weightlifting will convene in Las Vegas for the inaugural drug-assisted Enhanced Games. The event will take place before “2,500 invite-only spectators” in a custom-built competition complex, according to organizers. The idea of a public sporting event restricting spectator entry to invitees in the way that a private club may seems shocking at first, but on closer inspection it’s no more than a signal confirming professional sport’s general direction of travel.

Once a gathering ground for the poor and disadvantaged, live sport – whether experienced in person or on screen – increasingly feels like an exclusive privilege for the global elite. Eventually it won’t even be enough to pay to gain access to it. In a sense, there’s something truly forward-looking about Prime Video’s janky first attempt at covering the NBA playoffs: Amazon has given us a broadcast so powerfully alienating it effectively anticipates sport’s viewerless future. Let’s appreciate it, then, while we still can – before professional sport slips behind the curtain of wealth and celebrity for good.