EU Parliament Wants Pirated Sports Streams Taken Down Within 30 Minutes

I am in no way condoning sports piracy, or any other sort of piracy, but watching sports has become so incredibly difficult using legal means as to be virtually impossible.

I am a foreigner in my country of residence, I only own an Android smart TV (Philips, and with minor side-loading patches, all ads and nonsense are removed).

I used to run a media PC as my TV because local media options are so bad, and I cannot get "cable" because the TV corner, and telekoms corner of my apartment are opposite.

By now, it is impossible to watch MotoGP, or Formula 1 on a SmartTV using any kind of app in either my host, or home language - my choices are streaming with DRM via custom apps on some platforms (Apple iPad, desktop browser with DRM plugins), or to subscribe for €50/month to a nonsense cable package I won't use.

I maintained the desktop PC and fought with VPNs (and, the arms-race of anti-vpn, with DNS tricking from the stream host) to get a stream (Eurosport, if I recall) for a while, but at some point the VPN detection was reliable enough that I couldn't watch UK Eurosports, just EU Eurosport which didn't show the same streams.

In the end, I'm 18+ months out of any kind of motorsports, and completely lost the interest after a lifetime of being enthralled. They are killing these sports for internet audiences.

In my experience with trying to watch sports streams in Germany the experience of paying for it is usually worse than using some random IPTV provider.

Until last year Eurosport had a horrible app where instead of watching the segments you want you had half an hour of the previous event in there just because something ran longer and it was cut at pre-determined times.

For F1 it's even worse as F1 TV (the official streaming service of the F1) is now not available in Germany any more and has been replaced by a Sky Sport subscription that costs three times more per year than before. As someone who prefers to watch Sky UK's F1 coverage there's really no way around paying for pirated streams from some random IPTV provider every month. Funnily enough the official F1 TV service was mostly unusable or down during the race weekends while the pirated streams were working well and with faster loading times.

FYI, the guy behind a resolution is a Bulgarian MEP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Dzhambazki

I doubt that any of the resolution text can be his original writing.

Problem with music/video piracy was mostly resolved by providing reasonably priced usable services. Maybe instead of lobbying for quick takedowns, someone should put effort into providing services people would rather be using instead of bothering with finding pirated content.

I renovated vacation house and live in it for some time. It is in nature, no cable providers. Also, as I got older, I watched sports less and less, and now I follow only one sport team FC Barcelona, and sometimes I watch national team games, but not always.

So my options are non existent. No cable service (btw, I do not own TV for more than 5 years now, not here nor in my flat in the city), I can't subscribe to any online sport streaming like Fox or Sky from my country. And if I could, would I pay XX eur to watch 2-3 games per month and nothing else?

It is dumb that we do not have pay per game streaming services.

I think they need to look at the source and the keywords here content diversity and cost, does everyone in EU can access provider service? Can they pay a reasonable cost in their region? Does the quality of service in EU standards? By no means i am justifying pirating but those precautions will force service providers hands to be reasonable. Not a sprots fan but many streaming contents gets reduced if you go from western to eastern EU, i hope someone in parliament will become stargate fan, so he can understand access issues. In Czechia there is no way to stream stargate serials, there was a stargatecommand website they have immediatly refunded and closed my account when they found out i am not US resident.

I think what's often missing from these discussions is the cost of the professional sports( excluding maybe chess). Football is probably the best example,where clubs spend astronomical amounts of money on players. Right now it's probably cheaper to get NASA to send a few people to the space station than to get 2 full football teams. And this gets more and more expensive with each additional layer before it even reaches the end consumer.

To me, the big sports industry ( F1, Football, Basketball,etc.) is where the film/music industry was 10-15 years ago,when every monkey in the world did Emule and Torrents and then along came Netflix and Amazons of this world and now we pay pennies for it.

One merely has to wonder what other content will find itself behind a no court order thirty minute window all on the word of designated groups with an interest.

So how much investiture into sporting facilities do EU countries end up fronting? Is it as bad as the US? Do they get any funds locally for sports broadcasting involving local teams? I will by default assume their is monetary relationships between politicians either direct or friends and family arrangements but I am not clear on how localities benefit.

The entertainment industry, be it sports, music, or movie and television, had an outsized influence of politics and policy and that itself needs reigned in.

I don’t think any of us can condone piracy, but I think like has often been the case the EU is scoring an own goal here.

The problem is that big companies with streaming services will be able to support this, but any new up and coming streaming service will not. This means that potential EU based startups in this space will have yet another reason to avoid the EU and instead go somewhere else.

I think there needs to be some kind of middle ground where a company shows best effort within their current capabilities financially.

It’s just too easy to pirate everything. I had a billing dispute with Comcast over a decade ago and all they get from me now is money for internet.

This seems beyond stupid. The sits that hosts these places will not be in the EU, and nobody streams it over youtube because it won't give you any money and will just get you banned.

The EU needs to enforce anti-monopoly rules and demand that any copyrighted song, book, music, movie and so forth be universally licensed for a fixed fee only to anybody will to pay that fee. Music piracy essentially ended because it is easier to subscribe to a streaming service that has mostly everything and sports/movie piracy will end the same way.

Unfortunately the industry is too stupid, too short sighted to understand it.

We are talking $profits$ here people, more important than child pornography or online harrasment.

This is a very good example of lobbying and morally corrupted institutions!

And child pornography content hosters are given 24 hours to remove it...

Jesus...

Oh well, less shitty entertainment for people.

(Please suggest a better word than "shitty")

These companies seem to have been digging their own graves for the past decade or so.

Their old school methods are not adequate, their customer base is shrinking, they can't seem to be able to even copy other companies' monetization strategies. At least try to do what Riot Games is doing with League of Legends or something.

I haven't watched a Hollywood movie in years, I haven't watched any sports in over a decade.

And I see young people just not caring about them at all, preferring Youtube/Instagram/etc celebrities over old school celebrities, esports and small time stuff over big time events, and they certainly don't pay for cable TV (what the heck is that?).

These real sports companies will go the way of Blockbuster and Sears, imo.