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Comment by esharte | Hacker News Reader

If you lived in the UK, supported Tottenham and wanted to watch all their games in the 2021/22 season you had to:

Subscribe to Sky Sports (around £50-60 a month) for the Premier League games.

Subscribe to BT Sports (30 a month) for the Saturday early kick off Premier League games and the Europa Conference League games.

Subscribe to Amazon Prime for the 3 random weeks when they are showing the Premier League games instead of Sky.

Subscribe to Premier Sports (£12 a month) to see a Europa Conference League 2 legged qualifier.

And even then you couldn't see all the games legally in the UK because of the 3pm Saturday black out. You are forced to find a stream from another country where they are broadcasting the game.

Then when you are subscriped you get wall to wall gambling adverts during half time. For every other product you subscribe to, it is to avoid ads, but not television.

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If you watch Tottenham despite all that, you deserve the pain their football causes.

Jokes apart, is the BT Sports "early kick off games" completely different from the Sky Sports game you mentioned? That's ridiculous. I was in England in Summer 2019 for the cricket world cup, and was shocked at how difficult it was to watch the games on TV. Wimbledon was very easy though, so maybe Tennis is way more popular?

A lot of European countries have a list of events which must be freely available. I guessing Wimbledon is on that list in the UK.

Check out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ofcom_Code_on_Sports_and_Other...

heh. not sure if that's a internal joke from them... but they did wait until nobody is getting signal from airwaves to put in place rules limited to airwaves distribution. bloody marvelous.

I think most people got "signal from airwaves" in 1996.

Most people still do, although don't necessarily use it very much.

Does iPlayer over Wifi count as "signal from airwaves"?

How do? This list was drawn up in 1991 when pretty much everyone was still using signal from airwaves

Tennis is definitely not more popular.

It's odd that you seem to think popularity = it would be easier.

Soccer's popularity is what causes this issue because there is so much money to be made by splitting it up and selling to multiple companies rather than just one cheap, easy solution.

If Tennis attempted the same it would be so detrimental to its viewership it wouldn't be able to survive.

Unlike soccer which is so popular it can get away with it.

> Soccer's popularity is what causes this issue because there is so much money to be made by splitting it up and selling to multiple companies rather than just one cheap, easy solution.

The reason they are split up in the UK is to stop a single pay tv gaining a monopoly on the broadcasts like in the past. So even if sky wished to pay all of the monies for all the games they can’t, they are limited to a set number of game blocks they can purchase, so the other providers get a chance at showing some games too.

It was meant to be a “good thing” but turned into the mess we have today.

However IIRC this only covers the premier league, TV providers can bid for all the games in other leagues. But not really much of a football fan so I don’t follow the subject that closely.

It would have made more sense to make the broadcast non exclusive….

This is not about popularity though. Wimbledon is in a particular class of sporting events, known as the Crown Jewels, that are protected and must be shown on free to air terrestrial tv.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ofcom_Code_on_Sports_and_Oth...

> It's odd that you seem to think popularity = it would be easier.

Yeah, I can see how my line of thinking doesn't make sense. I was thinking popular -> can earn more from ads, less popular -> need subscribers, but there is no way tennis shows more ads than football

In India it'd be unthinkable to put cricket on paid channels, because the money is from putting ads wherever there's space

There are certain sporting events which are required to be broadcast free on terrestrial TV. Wimbledon and the FA cup final are the two that I can remember this applying to off the top of my head.

Infuriating. I was pissed because I couldn't easily watch "all games in a given league". You only want to watch your team, and you STILL have to pay for four services to get "most" of the games.

I'm not a football fan but that 3pm Saturday Blackout thing is so archaic:

"The football blackout is the rule that no Premier League, Football League or FA Cup matches be broadcast on live television on Saturday between 2:45pm and 5:15pm. Games may be played on that day and on that time, but they are forbidden to be televised – with Saturday televised kick-offs mostly occurring at 12:30pm or 5:30pm."

"This follows a rule set in place since the 1960s, when Burnley chairman Bob Lord successfully convinced fellow Football League chairmen that televised matches on Saturday afternoons would negatively impact the attendance of lower league games."

"He was convinced, for instance, that if Manchester United were to play Liverpool on Saturday at 3pm, fans of lower division teams would instead opt to watch the match on television instead of attend the match of the team they actually supported."

"As a result, the financial income of lower league football would be reduced."

"More than 40 years on, the rule is still in place. Foreign matches are also affected by the blackout – a broadcaster would not show the first 15 minutes of a match in La Liga that kicks off at 5pm UK time, for example."

Source: https://archive.is/DQwsk#selection-1539.0-1601.218

There are cheaper ways to hurt yourself than trying to watch Spurs.

Me: While this is amusing, come on, they're sixth in the Premier League, this is not in any way what a masochistic relationship with a sports team looks like.

Also me, Googling:

> Tottenham Hotspur's performance against Newcastle United on Sunday was so poor that the club is going to refund those that came out and showed support for the team.

So that result aside, they're not awful but for the money they've put into their team and their stadium (and the raised expectations that has brought) the return on that has been pretty poor domestically and in Europe

I'm in the UK. I wanted to watch the recent Masters golf tournament and it turns out it was on Sky Sports. They also had a deal for six months subscription at ~GBP18/month on a month to month streaming only contract. Fine I thought, I also enjoy F1 and 20/20 Cricket, I guess that's reasonable value for three sports I have a passing interest in.

Upon reaching the checkout it turns out I needed to pay another GBP6.99/month for something called "Boost" to allow me to watch in 1080p.

I gave up.

What is the 3pm saturday blackout?

No matches are televised in the UK on Saturday Afternoons between 3 and 5:30(?). Allegedly, it's to encourage people to attend games rather than watch them.

Not so much to encourage them to watch Premier League games (the ones that would otherwise be televised) but to encourage them to go to support their local team with hundreds or thousands of others.

In this way, at least, the motivation is pleasingly different from the US blackouts which are aimed at getting you to attend the home games of your big league team.

I don't understand why half the games are still played at 3pm on Saturday at all. Yes, it's a very convenient time, but if 60% of the games already get moved, why not move the others?

Games that happen at 3pm on Saturday are only allowed to be shown on TV to, uh, every country in the world except the UK. It is the stupidest holdover from Olden Times which has meant the fixture list is now fragmented across almost the entire week to accommodate broadcasters whilst attendances at those matches are still (modulo e.g. being a Monday night) "good".

https://www.football-stadiums.co.uk/articles/football-tv-bla...

The split in EPL matches amongst different providers is because of the EU trying to stop one company dominating the broadcast of matches. They were trying to introduce competition but they didn't really think of how it would affect the viewers.

Coming soon - Apple TV! They also bidding for Premier League...

MLS Season Pass on Apple TV has been great. Way better content, way better stream quality, and no blackouts. Such a better experience than the hodgepodge of OTA TV, ESPN, ESPN+, FS1, RSNs etc that it has been in previous seasons.

It’s been great in many ways, but the user interface is horrible. Why they show the scores on the thumbnail for replays is beyond me. Time shifting is all about not knowing the outcome beforehand. It’s as if this was created by people who don’t understand sport ball at all. But I don’t know what excuse they can use for burying the replays in the first place such that I found others on the web thinking the same as me—that only recaps are available for past matches.

On several platforms you can disable the "Show Sports Scores" setting. However it is ridiculous that setting doesn't exist everywhere they support Apple TV (for example... macOS).

The full replay thing is also silly, but they did change that recently. It's now a separate tile instead of a long press on the latest tvOS/macOS.

wait, uk still have the 3pm Saturday black out?

It's free to watch down the boozer mate.

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