Comment by ankit219 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ankit219 | Hacker News Reader

One of those cases where both sides are in the mud. La Liga is struggling with piracy of games for long. They have been trying to make money of their product (football essentially features two of the greatest players to play the game in last 10 years, only one now) but struggle due to their whacky ideas and no care about fans. Sample this: The timings of games are as early as 12PM (spanish siesta is at 4PM) and as late as 11 PM local time. They host 10 rounds every week, most in different slots to get more eyeballs. They have acted in bad faith in a sense too. Spanish law requires one of those 10 games to be free to air. They made sure that game is one held on Friday or Monday at 11 PM (teams' fans call it graveyard shift) and nothing on f2a tv on weekend.The ones listed are the ideas which made through while others like having one random game in US thankfully did not. Though, given their ineptitude, its a sure wonder how they managed to execute this so well.

Bars should not be streaming the games illegally either. But since the cable prices are too high, and nothing on free to air, they have to in order to attract crowds. There is no official streaming service - albeit not bundled with cable tv subscription - that people in these countries can make use of to watch games.

The path forward maybe what Formula1 did by introducing a streaming service which is not geo blocked. This way, I can watch a race at reasonable subscription from anywhere in the world. They also allow me a racer only feed, or the global feed, or a feed from a particular stand. I will definitely buy it if any official football league offers that too.

> La Liga is struggling with piracy of games for long. They have been trying to make money of their product but struggle due to their whacky ideas and no care about fans.

What are you talking about, La Liga is making billions of dollars [1][2]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobbymcmahon/2019/03/07/report-...

[2] https://www.laliga.es/en/news/laliga-grows-20-6-and-posts-re...

Compared to PL, it absolutely is. Specially when you factor in the fact that Ronaldo and Messi both played in the league till last season.

Compared to PL everyone strugles. But you can't possibly suggest LaLiga are strugling...

PL is also a far superior product, the a/v is better, there is considerably more drama and the lower league, The Championship is almost on par. Football wise, there is a big debate. Entertainment wise, the PL is far better.

It doesn’t matter how much they make, there is no justifiable reason to suggest that stealing their content is acceptable. It isn’t a social service or some essential like food or medicine where they are gouging people. Content too expensive? Don’t buy it.

Good thing no one steals their content then. Or do they not have it anymore when a private viewing license is used? This is simple greed. And greed may be good from a business perspective, but morally wrong. Society doesn't have to help them with it.

My key take away from your comment is F1 has non geo-fenced service. I just went on their website, and I'm blown away. You can select a cockpit to stream, you have a bunch of geeky data, all while you can watch the GP in it's traditional way. I might get back into F1 just for this.

This could be done with football too (albeit a little more limited, but still). That would actually be cool.

If only they spent all the money they used to identify the games on actual customer-beneficial things ...

It is still geo-fenced - its not available in the UK.

Is that a condition of Sky Sports' broadcast deal with F1?

Yes, Sky have exclusive live coverage (apart from the British GP) in the UK until 2024.

>I might get back into F1 just for this.

I wouldn't be so hasty, as the service has had some blackouts.

https://www.gpfans.com/en/articles/38904/f1-tv-offering-comp...

Yes and they actually refunded some percentage of the subscription fee for that, and sent a long email apologizing. I mean, I take it over many other services which just ignore the problems.

Disclaimer: Happy subscriber and an F1 fan.

I‘m sorry but you must be kidding. They are having an outage on the pro service every, at least(!), second race weekend. The service usually goes down right at the start of the race and all people get is a tweet on @F1Help twitter account saying „we are aware of the issue and working on it“. Canadian GP was available for some users from lap 50! All was fine until 2 minutes before the start of the race.

Yes, they refund and send nice emails but people don‘t want refunds - they want to see a race!

Just check that twitter account, it‘s hilarious. I have cancelled the subscription, it was so bad.

To add to that, every single time they claim their engineers are trying to identify and fix the problem. For months now. It‘s like they work only during race sessions. No post mortems, no description of what measures have been taken to resolve the problem.

It‘s not even possible to load the help chat sometimes. The website during those outages barely works. Can‘t log out, can‘t log in.

The mobile app is another garbage. People being advised to reinstall the app when having login problems. Also for months!

It‘s garbage. Which is shocking. There are so many paid tv services streaming hundreds of channels and not having any of those problem. For a powerhouse like Liberty Media and F1, this is ridiculous.

Sorry that wasn't my experience but I would also cancel it if I went through the same troubles. Maybe it's regional, maybe i'm just lucky. I just hope that I can keep watching the races one way or another and happy that I could until now, except for one.

F1TV has been horrible, in my experience.

We pay for it, but still use pirate streams if we want to watch an actual race live!

Liberty Media has also done a really good job with the F1 YouTube channel in recent years, providing an avenue for casual fans to keep up with the season.

Too bad the 2019 season is shaping up so poorly...

We almost got away with a real race last weekend ...

Liberty Media has indeed done well. I can now easily keep up with highlights and also purchase/stream races live which are affordable and available by race/entire season at reasonable prices.

World Rally Championship (WRC) is doing this too.

Cricket caught up too, ICC cricket world cup that occurs once every 4 years and this tournament is going on right now, ICC is now offering highlights packages on the official youtube accounts. There wasn't a way to purchase/watch highlights of games even if one wanted to pay for it before.

Even French open tennis had highlights packages available on their official youtube accounts.

Provide some basic stuff out for free, in interest of promoting the sport, consider it cost of user acquisition. And, then provide options to stream/additional access for a reasonable cost. Seems to work well for some sports, wonder when others will catch up.

I recently got back into F1. The viewing experience is amazing, so much better than what I remember from youth. Even if I do miss my favorite commentator.

And I love that I can watch the replay at my leisure on any device. That is amazing.

However ... would it kill them to remember where I stopped watching and continue the replay from there? I don’t always (ie never) have the patience to sit through a 2 hour race

Is the commentator Murray Walker by any chance :-)

Slovenian commentator in Slovenia. Did every race for some 20 years.

He truly is F1 to me. The experience just isn’t the same without him :D

Wow, that is cool to hear. We used to get the British coverage, so grew up with Murray Walker.

It is geofenced in countries where someone holds the rights to broadcast F1 (like New Zealand). No F1TV for us.

It is not 100% non-geo blocked considering F1 had contracts for exclusive coverage from earlier. But, once those contracts end, it will be available everywhere. (as far as I know UK is one where its not available due to deal with SKY)

The streaming also has some technical issues as they vastly underestimated the demand and the server could not take the load. Latest occurrence was at Canadian GP. I am not praising the service in the current state, but I strongly feel that is the way forward for sports broadcast. I have been an early adopter, and like the options I am provided (along with the influx of data I get) when the traditional TV streaming felt constraining and powerless.

> But since the cable prices are too high, and nothing on free to air, they have to in order to attract crowds.

Somehow I find it hard to believe a business can't afford cable. Even if it costs $200 / month, surely they ought to be able to cover that.

$200 is not that far off from what an individual would pay. Surely the rebroadcast rights that a bar would need are much, much higher than that, no?

I know pay-per-view typically works that way. I remember seeing the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight costed bars something like $30 x bar capacity to air.

Commercial licenses for standard cable are surprisingly reasonable per receiver (when compared to consumer) at $87.99 a month for DirecTV. Keep in mind many bars have 10+ receivers so they can show multiple events. If you scroll down, it gets ugly on specific sports packages. NFL Sunday Ticket tops out at $2680/year, compared to about $300 for consumer.

https://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/content/directv-for-business/...

Illegal in this case may not mean streaming from some random website, it may mean buying a regular cable subscription and rebroadcasting it to your bar.

You need special permission (and may need to pay extra) to "perform," copyrighted works for a larger audience, in the same way you can play music over a speaker for yourself, but not for a large group of people.

I was under the impression that a business would need to pay a screening fee for showing the game - I'd assume that illegally in this case doesn't mean via bitorrent but instead means playing content from a residential cable subscription to an audience.

I tend to side strongly with bars in most of these cases as broadcasters absolutely must be aware that bars frequently want to show sports games and they have failed to make licensing for this sort of showing reasonable from a logistical standpoint (sometimes wanting to charge a royalty based on how many distinct people watched any part of the game) that might actually be a reasonable fee in the end - but the cost of calculating the proper fee to pay outsizes the fee itself.

HBO has gone after bars showing GOT as well.

In Chicago, I've seen bars charge $30 a person for entry to see a PPV fight.

I, personally, have even less pity for HBO since, up here in Canada, you really have to pay serious cash to legally watch any exclusive shows - and two years ago you were just out of luck if you didn't have a cable package, unless you were getting your interwebs through Bell IIRC.

I feel no pity for content producers that disallow a reasonably priced (or any) access to their content and then cry foul at pirating. I similarly feel no pity for people who pirate old games that haven't been abandon-ware'd if they're available for a pittance on GOG. I value my time highly and trying to circumvent obstacles in my effort to give a content producer money is something I refuse to put any serious effort into.

Last time I looked a UFC PPV fight was around 3,000 for a bar to show.

Spanish bars truly are a perfect example of a race to the bottom, when it comes to prices. Sure, the financial crisis hit the country really hard, but trying to attract customers by lowering prices is not the best strategy in the long term.

This is when 200 € / month hurt - because you already run on a very tiny profit margin.

Soccer / football is such a huge thing in Spain, people would understand if they need to pay a little extra for their drinks or food in bars that have decent infrastructure to broadcast the games. Yet somehow most bar owners are afraid to take the risk.

I know this, because I used to live there for many years, and keep going there to visit relatives many times a year.

We're talking about Spain. They recently emerged from a gruelling recession, their shadow economy makes up an estimated 20% of real GDP, and competition ran their profits into the ground. Even if small businesses have the cash, there's no incentive for them to spend it, and they're probably still in hoarding-cash mode.

This is Spain. No matter what, bars are always full here, and there is over 8 bars per streets at avarage.

Also, Soccer is the true religion here, not Christianity.

Add Soccer and bars and you get basically what truly the average Spaniard does love from the Pyrenees to the Gibraltar Strait.

they pay a lot more than that, couldn't find a Spain cost but examples for the UK they pay on average £20,000 per year[1] - the cost varies on the rateable value of the pub

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/football/the-set-pieces-blog/201...

Take this with a grain or two of salt, as I don't recall the source, but it seems plausible - I read somewhere that when it comes to businesses like bars, at least in the US, there is a normal rate applied to the cable package, and an additional rate applied 'per head' for the event in question. This may only be for pay-per-view events where multiple people can congregate at a single location which has paid the PPV fee, and not necessarily for widely broadcast events; I've seen sports bars charge cover for highly anticipated MMA matches.

How those rules are enforced is beyond me. Tangentially related, some of the legitimate, paid-for streams have been of pretty low quality, cutting out frequently. Not sure if it's because of draconian DRM or just excessive demand, but it would be interesting to find out.

For pay-per-view events there's usually a commercial PPV sales channel as well. Joe Hand Promotions handled it for the UFC up until this year (now it's all under ESPN+). JHP has some formula for determining cost, it's at least partially determined by venue capacity, hence the use of a cover charge.

I believe UFC still sells with a commercial formula for bars, I don't know if it's through JHP or not, but my understanding is that ESPN+ is for private consumers only

oh, I thought ESPN+ also was doing the commercial licenses. They might handle the delivery now, but yeah, it's Joe Hand still that does the negotiation.

Businesses can't simply pay for a residential subscription. They need to get a special subscription and often pay screening charges per event, it can often run as high as hundreds or thousands per event as it's based off your maximum capacity and not your actual attendance.

Don't know about Spain in particular, but usually the fees in European countries are calculated for each individual bar, based on size and location. E.g. in Germany for a package of the top two major German leagues and UEFA (and some international ones), you can expect EUR 100-200 for tiny pubs in rural areas and small towns, EUR 500 for mid-sized bars and pubs in mid-sized cities, and up to EUR 2000 for big bars in big cities, per month.

I don't follow the Formula1 but my father does, I would like to get him a subscription but all I can find on their website is a subscription for replays 7 days after a Grand Prix and nothing live besides stats.

Movistar+ has a F1 channel

This is the service:

https://f1tv.formula1.com/en/

It's not available in every country and it's been comically bad so far. Most races the streaming just fails and when it's not failing it routinely drops down to an incredibly low resolution for a few seconds. The replays usually work once the race is over though.

> The timings of games are as early as 12PM (spanish siesta is at 4PM) and as late as 11 PM local time.

No adult does "siesta" in Spain. Please, let's stop spreading this stereotype.

Soccer games usually start at 22:00 or 23:00 hours.

>(Spanish siesta is at 4PM)

That's ridiculous.

As a 40 year old Spaniard, I have never heard of this 4 PM siesta time.

32 yo here. People think, wrongly, all of Spain is like Andalucia with Flamenco and Sun everywhere.

Head to the North in the Atlantic, or better, I dare all of HN to head Burgos in Winter, you'll see how "sunny" will you feel.

Hint: it will chill-screw you all below 0 ºC.

It's funny how these thinking patterns repeat at all levels. I am from sunny Andalucia, and this flamenco and siesta stereotypes still sound like total rubbish.

They think Spain is under GMT, and not.

Dear Americans/Europeans: At 2PM we aren't under a siesta. We are just having lunch, that's why every shop is closed.

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