This isn’t being pedantic, it’s obvious they meant they couldn’t stream it over the internet and had to watch it on scheduled cable. It’s not even semantics. People just need to fully read a sentence.
Unless the headline was being sarcastic, nowhere in the article does it explain how it was “nearly destroyed”. If the article author isn’t going to put any effort into writing it, why should anyone put any effort to reading it? Just the typical clickbait garbage.
Finally, an actual programming language. So long, Fortran.