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Comment by petepete | Hacker News Reader

If I could do without sports and HBO stuff (Westworld, Game of Thrones), I too would cancel Sky.

Have you considered Now TV? You get sky channels in bundles, live + catch up, online or with a (very cheap) modified Roku box. The entertainment (http://www.nowtv.com/entertainment) package includes Sky Atlantic for £6.99/mo, and sports (http://www.nowtv.com/sports) you can choose £6.99/day, £10.99/wk or £33.99/mo.

We did this - Cancelled Sky in favour of Netflix + Now TV's Entertainment bundle.

Not looked back, despite the many, many calls from Sky.

Sky's main mechanism for customer retention appears to be call center staff basically pleading to have you stay - a few years back when the bought the ISP I was using the quality of service collapsed and I cancelled the account and they kept dropping the price and wouldn't go away until I said I didn't want their service at any price (even free).

At least with sports, football in particular, there's something interesting happening here in europe: DAZN is a legal streaming service that allows you to watch Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Ligue 1 and a bunch of other sports live and on demand for 10 €. All officially licensed. Of course I still need my Sky subscription for Bundesliga and Champions League but Sky is slowly running out of arguments.

I hadn't heard of DAZN, I'll have to look into this. Thank you.

Edit: From their website: "DAZN is currently available in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Japan."

So you subscribe to BT too for UCL? Not being able to watch ANY Champions League games live was ever so slightly annoying, and I dislike BT so am not going to subscribe. It's amazing how much the viewing figures were impacted by BT gaining all the rights, only a handful of people watch most matches (legally).

Sorry, I didn't realize that access to DAZN is that limited. I'm from Germany and as a huge football fan a Sky subscription is a given - I need it for Bundesliga and Champions League. There's no way that I'll deal with shitty, ad-ridden illegal streaming sites in video quality. Sky used to show Premier League in Germany for years, but this season the rights to DAZN. It's a huge blow for Sky, particularly since they lost La Liga a few years ago as well.

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