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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

It's not surprising that so many people are pirating sports streams. My understanding is that many sports require paying multiple different parties just to watch all of a team's games. Maybe the service providers are too greedy.

The mention of UFOs is amusing. I'll admit that every time I hear about some UFO related story part of me really wishes it was real, just because it would be exciting to interact with aliens in our lifetime. Sadly it seems like UFO claims are usually hoaxes of some kind. Can you imagine actually having a UFO encounter and later having nobody else believe you? That would be quite devastating, I would imagine.

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Here's what you need to do at minimum to watch NBA games in the US:

- Buy a cable package and make sure it has both ESPN and TNT (different providers will include them in different subscription tiers, so you have to check).

- ESPN and TNT will each only broadcast a select number of primetime games, so for the rest you need NBA league pass. This may be offered as an add-on by your cable provider, or you may need to buy it directly from the NBA's own site (and use a separate app for those games).

- However your local or regional teams' games won't be available on League Pass, so you have to figure out which company has bought local rights for that particular team (e.g. Bally Sports for Knicks games in the NY area) and pay for that channel as well.

- Sometimes that regional network and your cable provider will be unable to strike a deal. If that happens - too bad, you literally cannot watch home games of your local team legally.

The situation in the NFL is even worse.

So yeah, it's no surprise that a large number of fans who would otherwise have paid for games choose to just stream them illegally with one click.

The NFL is at least merciful to fans of local market teams. If you live close enough to where your favorite team is based, you can watch most games for free, over the air, or with a basic TV subscription. It's unfortunate for the NBA or MLB fans that they need to figure out what local cable channel has the rights to their team.

The real pain is if you're a fan of an out of market NFL team, in which case...

- Cable with ESPN for MNF (if your local team is playing, this should be free on ABC) - Prime for TNF (iirc the local market gets this on fox??) - NFL Sunday ticket

I think the only exceptions this year were the two games exclusive to peacock, and the London games. I don't know if they show the London game for free to the local market.

The problem there is that most of the OTA broadcasts are in glorious 720p.

This is literally not true. OTA broadcasts are in HD and look great.

720p is HD in broadcasting terms.

Tru enough. Of course God 720p can look better than bad 1080p (overcompressed stream). And one's vision and distance from the display.

In my living room I barely notice the difference between fhd/1080p and qhd/4k on a 65" screen at 10' distance.

I just checked. my local ABC and FOX are 720p, but NBC and CBS are 1080i

Idk why, but this hasn't really seemed bad to me. Maybe my TV has been upscaling and that's why I don't notice?

Reading around it's unclear if they broadcast above 720p anywhere, even over cable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Company . Maybe the cable companies upscale?

Whatever the case may be, I'd rather have 720p for free than have to pay.

OTA broadcasts look fantastic compared to the streaming counterparts likely due to the bitrate. It is extremely noticeable.

source: I used to be a cord-cutter

Even if you pay for all the services, it can be annoying to find where the game is, assuming it's not blacked out.

The pirate streams are great because you can just click on the game you want and watch it. You don't have to flip between three channels, wait for commercials, wait for other games to end, etc.

The leagues and/or teams are too greedy is more like it. You used to be able to watch sports on broadcast (antenna) TV, for free. Then cable channels started bidding up sports contracts, to motivate subscriptions. Then, more recently, streaming services have gotten in on the game. To try to cater to all of them, the leagues (and teams, depending on the sport) have decided to slice and dice the rights, so that some games end up on one platform, and others on another.

Not for nothing, but at some point this has to stop. My suspicion is that the leagues will launch their own streaming platforms, and allow people to buy either subscriptions to their team, or to the full season, perhaps with postseason packages as well. It's what likely SHOULD happen if you want to avoid alienating the fanbases, though in my experience, sports fans seem to be very much in the "thank you mistress, may I have another?" camp.

The idea of being expected to subscribe to 4+ services just to watch all of your team's games is absurd, especially when they're services that you're otherwise not interested in. Of course people are pirating things.

The speed of light compared to the size of the universe means that even if there is life out there they will not find out about use before we are gone. Even if they are going to all solar systems odds are against them finding us. Not to mention there is no reason to think they would survive a trip to us.

Says, so confidently, the member of a species who hasn't yet discovered a form of FTL travel.

The general assumption is that any visitor from outside the solar system has found a unique solution to this enormous problem beyond our current level of understanding.

Says confidently someone who has studied physics enough to get a basic understanding of relativity.

I'm not very good at physics, but I know enough to state confidently that FTL will never be possible. Anyone who has studied physics will agree with me: while there is a lot we don't know, every possible answer to them still needs to fit with what we already know and you can't explain several things we know while also allowing for FTL.

We still can't explain the big bang, yet here we are. Just because something can't be explained with our current models or understanding, doesn't mean it's forever impossible.

what we cannot explain must still obey the rules we have figured out. Much as you might wish otherwise.

I have one thought on FTL travel. Creation of a “naked singularity” by spinning a black hole fast enough to counter the forces holding it together. However the singularity will remain incompatible with our universe, and will then spread at the speed of causality popping, destroying everything in its path. But within that new universe, it might be possible.

The problem is not the current size of the universe is big, it is that it is expanding with time. Aliens will still have to contend with the same physics laws because they are universal (in the tight meaning of universal here). We can actually model the recession velocity of emitted photon from a source (will be higher that speed of light) depending on our universe model.

To have aliens that are near enough so that they made contact with us ( through some signal not by abduction of humans) would mean they they very close on cosmological scale that they must be living within our detection capabilites. And with all our searches for life so far nearby we couldn't see a signal for unique civilization signature.

Is it possible that quantum entanglement could play a role here? Is travel actually necessary for information transfer? Obviously I know little to nothing about such things.

>Maybe the service providers are too greedy.

You have the issue correct, but not the cause. Greed? The rights to the sports are owned by different entities, sometimes locally. Should they just hand that over to Netflix or something? I feel like if they own the product, they should benefit from the media distribution.

They could get together, form and fund a new company that provided unified access to all games/teams, and then distribute revenue fairly to themselves from that. IIRC that is what the MLB did with BAMTech that was acquired by Disney at a valuation of $5B

I don't know enough about the subject but I'm happy to learn! Right now it seems they're not benefitting at all, since a significant number of people are just pirating their content.

It seems like ideally you'd have a bunch of rights owners organize to create a single distributor that caters to viewer's desires. Maybe provide a seasonal pass to watch every game of your favorite team regardless of where they're playing? My understanding is that some sports require you to buy subscriptions with multiple different services if you want to follow your favorite team. This is obviously regarded as more favorable by the rights holder since they think they'll be able to get more money if people subscribe to their service rather than partnering with a different organization.

I don't know if this is applicable to the domain of sports, but in other industries sometimes there are local distributors which were relevant in the era of PPV or TV, but which have largely become obsolete in the modern era. Usually these entities become middle-men that just happened to keep owning the rights to media distribution, but which no longer do anything to provide value.

They are not benefiting from the pirate streams. however anyone who does find them legally - which is likely the majority who watch - they benefit from.

>Should they just hand that over to Netflix or something?

Not necessarily netflix but you should be able to watch all games of a given team and league on a single site/service. Something like a league wide streaming site isn't impossible. You shouldn't have to subscribe to 5 different providers to watch all of you teams games.

> The rights to the sports are owned by different entities, sometimes locally. Should

Sure but that doesn't mean the game can't be shown locally AND on a streaming site that carries all the leagues games.

Apparently, they can make more money by splitting it up and selling exclusivity for certain games to certain entities. That, or the terms of the contracts were too long and they can't get out of a losing deal yet.

That was how NBA league pass used to work, I have watched my team for many seasons, modulo a decent VPN ;) With their recent change of CDN provider, I had to cancel my season subscription, which was a very reasonable $120 or so for all the games of all the teams, including the playoffs. Now I stream, and pay $0 :)

Even the music industry managed to solve this problem.

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