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Comment by loso | Hacker News Reader

The author doesn't like live sports so the people who do like sports are suckers according to the article. Well I will take on that mantle because I cut the cord for five years while living in NYC and the sports situation is abysmal when you do that. Trying to find streams over the internet on Sunday is a horrible ordeal and during the NBA season is 10x worse.

I watch about 5 broadcast shows throughout the year. One is gone now since Breaking Bad is off the air. The only other thing I use my TV for is CNBC/Bloomberg and sports. Cutting the cord is just a horrible situation when that is the case.

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You can get a VPN service that has international routes and subscribe to international versions of services like NBA League Pass and NFL Game Pass. The major sports leagues negotiate deals with U.S. TV providers that prevent the leagues from streaming directly to customers without a cable/satellite subscription, but they are able to sell streaming subscriptions to international customers.

I may or may not do this with the NBA and it works well enough. For the NFL, I'm generally happy with the games that I can pick up with my HD antenna on my TV, so I haven't tried their service.

You have to pay a few bucks a month for the VPN, but I like having a VPN service available anyway, so it's not a big concern for me and you're still saving substantial money over cable.

The people who start a company that bundles VPN + international services into a simple "Chromecast" device will be billionaires... or sued because of some legal issue.

My Chromecast works fine* with my VPN, I use it to watch Netflix in Greece.

* With a router that can intercept DNS requests.

There's a solution to this problem... I got it! I'll rent a room and put a bunch of giant TVs on the walls so it's even better than home. You'll be able to watch 5 or more games all at the same time. To make things better, I'll stock a local selection of the best beers and drinks. I'll even serve you better food like fresh french fries and chicken wings, not that crappy bag of potato chips you get at the store. In fact, you won't even have to get up to go get your drink, I'll hire some young college girls to do that for you...

If the food you get at the pub is better than your food at home you are doing it wrong.

Hmm, I would say it really depends. Fried foods are much easier to pull off in a commercial kitchen with a dedicated fryer, for example. If the weather is bad, grilling at home may not be an option but may still be in a restaurant kitchen. Et cetera.

So your solution to an expensive cable bill (which allows me to watch many sports from the comfort of my home) is to go to a bar, for hours, multiple times per week and pay for deliberately overpriced food and drink?

Are you cord cutting for economic reasons, or are you just opposed to cable companies in general? If it's the former, I think you need to rethink your plan.

When I was a student in Edinburgh in our last flat we decided to pay GBP 30/month for the "usual" cable channels and something like 5mbps internet (as at about 2005-7), and made the conscious decision to avoid pay the extra 10 pounds per month because we can always go to the pub to watch the SPL or the Premiership.

Thing is, we'd go to the pub every other week and shell out 3 pounds per pint each time, stay for 2-3 games (sometimes more as La Liga is often on later) which between 3 of us would usually top out at around 20-25 quid each saturday.

I'm not sure how the US works, but even if you're a "sparkling water, please" person it's likely that paying a little extra for the sports channels is works out cheaper than going to the pub.

Why can't they a la carte the sports already? They're broadcasting nearly every sporting event imaginable nowadays but it's still such a hassle to watch as a cordcutter.

The main reason is that it would be prohibitively expensive. The article covers this at a high level but doesn't go into details. The reason you pay $80 for a bundle is because channels like ESPN, HBO etc are expensive. Other channels like CMT, DIY etc are cheap. Bundles lets cable companies hide these costs and pass along the costs to the user. Would you pay $40/month to just add ESPN. probably not, you'd rather get $60 and get 120 channels.

I stream all of my sports every weekend. I love football and soccer however, I refuse to get cable and then pay a premium just to get ESPNU and the NFL network. Email me and I can give you a list of sites that broadcast every game; the quality isn't HD but it is very watchable.

Maybe its me getting older but the hassle just became not worth it. Finding sites that would be good for a couple of weeks then fall off in quality later on down the line was the norm. And my favorite, watching a big Boxing or UFC event with a clear stream until the main event comes on and everyone else decides to jump on and kill the server.

I did it for five years and now that I have cable again I don't think I'm going back.

I have cable and since I still can't watch all my teams, I resort to the illegal stream sites (almost every day once NBA season starts) and quality is just godawful. I'm sure we've all had that experience opening multiple tabs just to find the stream with the best quality only for it to go down a minute later.

I use my chromecast to put it on my TV but even then, I don't regret paying for cable whatsoever.

same. i've been able to find almost any live sports stream I wanted for the last 4 years.

Well, yeah. Of course you can save a bunch of money by just refusing to pay for stuff, and finding illegal ways to get it for free. You can also save money by sneaking in the back door of a movie theater. The point of this article is that one kind of honest consumer is subsidizing another.

I don't see him saying that people who like sports are suckers. Rather, they're just screwed, since they don't have the alternatives for the things they like that the author has for the things he likes. This situation is great for him, since the sports watchers help pay for the stuff he likes, but not good for them.

I know the tone was sarcastic to make a point but that is how the article came off. Especially the paragraph talking about the NFL concussions.

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