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Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

$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/...

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.

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.

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