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Comment by sbarre | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure that's "UK" specific but probably more office/company/leadership specific..

I don't live in the UK..

For the 2018 World Cup my department repurposed several meeting room TVs to stream matches and folks could gather in those rooms to work while watching the games.

Work still got done on time.

At the same time, a friend who worked down the street forwarded me an all-team memo from his boss that warned employee sick day requests would be "extra scrutinized" during the World Cup. So yeah.. Leadership.

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During the last Winter Olympics, IT asked people to please watch on a projector or a common screen in the office, since it took such a toll on the network when everyone had their separate stream.

Huh TIL people still watch the Olympics. :-P

Brave from an F1 fan.

Haha fair (but creepy since I guess you had to go crawl my comments or my Twitter to figure that out)

At a previous job I held a decade ago the network team purchased several TV tuner cards & a DirecTV subscription. They then set up IP multicast, gave the Helpdesk the DirecTV remotes, and set up a Wiki page with instructions on how to watch & a schedule of upcoming special events.

In preparation of Ind vs Pak World Cup semi-final in 2011, about 125 people had applied for a leave (me included!) in a 150-person company I used to work in. The management eventually decided to stream the match in office.

All leave applications were cancelled :)

My previous job just had the sports playing on the displays around the office. If you couldn’t see one from your desk, IT would wheel over a portable meeting TV with sport on it for you. If it was a notable event, and you didn’t even want to pretend you were working, there’d be a stream in one of the auditoriums with audio.

They had to pay a pretty hefty license for the whole headcount of the office, and they whole thing started because one team leader wanted to watch EPL. It was a pretty great place to work tbh.

At almost all of my previous jobs we were allowed to either watch World Cup games at the workplace, or go home during the game if we weren't interested. It felt fair to everyone, and work still got done. It helps that the countries where this happened were Germany, Brazil and Argentina.

2018 World Cup...the owner's son at the place I was working at was going through a stage where he "liked soccer" (we are in the US), and in some sort of attempt to look cool or something, he streamed the games in the lunch room on projectors, at the collaboration table TV's, and they allowed employees to stream the game at their desks.

After the first day, the rest of the company complained enough about the speed of the internet that we had to block it on the firewall.

> the rest of the company complained enough about the speed of the internet

That’s why you stream it to only one conference room (or a small number). By making it explicitly approved for those rooms, you can limit the people who are doing it more clandestinely. Then you only take the bandwidth hit for a smaller number of streams.

Even if you don’t want to encourage it, the better managers would accept that it’s going to happen and then try to minimize the impact.

Exactly.. Just think of it as an all-hands meeting but where people actually care about the outcome!

Worked at a place where the boss made everyone uninstall iTunes when it first came out because he considered it distracting to listen to music all day.

Was it also an open-plan office? Lol

You know it.

The US often has the same issue with the first couple of rounds of the NCAA mens basketball tournament. There are 32 games over the first two days (Thursday and Friday) starting at noon. The internet at work has always gotten slower on those days.

The CBS online stream even has a “boss mode” with a fake spreadsheet.

At Blue Shield of CA, they used a web filter to block all websites that were for "Entertainment purposes" (back in 2015). Even music streaming wasn't allowed across the whole company. We ultimately just streamed music/things on our phones, etc but it was one of the more absurd IT policies for a company of grown adults.

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