Why do pub TVs have a pint glass in the corner? | Hacker News Reader

Why do pub TVs have a pint glass in the corner?

lbc.co.uk

298 pointsgeorgecalm195 comments

I worked with Sky broadcast computing staff back in the day. Apparently they had some massively expensive plan for enforcement technology.

During one meeting someone said 'why not just put a glass in the corner of the streamed image to indicate it's licensed for a pub?'

Job done.

Simple solutions are often the best ones.

Out of curiosity, how (if at all) was that person rewarded for saving Millions for the company?

Hah, now you're being funny.

rewarded on a per month basis

Probably by getting to define the specification for it, so their outsourced successor could build it.

Sky? Well, he/she probably was fired.

I don't see how having inspectors driving from pub to pub could have saved millions.

"and why is it sometimes full, sometimes empty and sometimes in between?"

To prevent against someone purchasing a pint glass sticker and putting it on their TV.

Was it a difficult thing to get that image into the broadcast? I am wondering if there were some limitations to why it couldn't be some cycling set of symbols that would change every day / week / month as a means for identifying the subscription status. Because if I were an "enterprising publican" I would simply send someone over to where they had a subscription and take a look at what level the pint glass was, which is a lot more difficult than finding constantly changing stickers.

It is, the level of the pint glass changes every day, so the "enterprising publican" would have to send someone out everyday and change his sticker every day too. Sounds like quite a bit of effort.

And fundamentally, the visibility of the pint glass is not a "guilty / not guilty" switch. Even if something that looks like a pint glass is on display, no matter how well faked, it still comes down to whether Sky have a record of having sold a commercial subscription to the address at which it is observed.

So it's a useful indicator, but only one of many, and therefore doesn't have to be fully bulletproof.

Or just have the icon move slowly, or change from one to the another regularly through the day. That would foil the stickers.

Ah Isleworth, how I hated thee.

I can't hear you from all the way in the middle of fucking nowhere.

Then get down to the Coach & Horses and drink your sorrows away.

Simple solutions - reminds me of this great story I came across a long time ago (likely an urban myth):

A toothpaste factory had a problem: they sometimes shipped empty boxes, without the tube inside. This was due to the way the production line was set up, and people with experience in designing production lines will tell you how difficult it is to have everything happen with timings so precise that every single unit coming out of it is perfect 100% of the time. Small variations in the environment (which can’t be controlled in a cost-effective fashion) mean you must have quality assurance checks smartly distributed across the line so that customers all the way down the supermarket don’t get pissed off and buy someone else’s product instead.

Understanding how important that was, the CEO of the toothpaste factory got the top people in the company together and they decided to start a new project, in which they would hire an external engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem, as their engineering department was already too stretched to take on any extra effort.

The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated, RFP, third-parties selected, and six months (and $8 million) later they had a fantastic solution — on time, on budget, high quality and everyone in the project had a great time. They solved the problem by using some high-tech precision scales that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box weighing less than it should. The line would stop, and someone had to walk over and yank the defective box out of it, pressing another button when done.

A while later, the CEO decides to have a look at the ROI of the project: amazing results! No empty boxes ever shipped out of the factory after the scales were put in place. Very few customer complaints, and they were gaining market share. “That’s some money well spent!” - he says, before looking closely at the other statistics in the report.

It turns out, the number of defects picked up by the scales was 0 after three weeks of production use. It should’ve been picking up at least a dozen a day, so maybe there was something wrong with the report. He filed a bug against it, and after some investigation, the engineers come back saying the report was actually correct. The scales really weren’t picking up any defects, because all boxes that got to that point in the conveyor belt were good.

Puzzled, the CEO travels down to the factory, and walks up to the part of the line where the precision scales were installed. A few feet before it, there was a $20 desk fan, blowing the empty boxes out of the belt and into a bin.

“Oh, that — one of the guys put it there ’cause he was tired of walking over every time the bell rang”, says one of the workers.

Love that story. Will share it with my team!

Love it - a classic story, never gets old. :)

I know this is a tale of low-tech ingenuity and the knowledge from the field, but I like to take a slightly different moral from it:

There was a problem the field technician was able to solve, but he didn't because he didn't know it was such a grave problem or, most likely, he didn't have any stimulus to do it.

In this case, he simply wasn't aware of empty boxes or the problem didn't matter to him. So, lack of internal communication was costing the company, and it was easier to pay millions to contractors than to offer some money to the field workers to solve the problem.

Also, surely this was a urban myth, mostly because the expensive scales are needed not only to prevent empty tubes, but also to detect half-empty or quarter-empty tube, or barely below the legal limit.

It was surely an urban myth, because the CEO went to the factory.

I guess he was thinking outside the box... boom, boom. I thank you :-)

Surely the cost is not adding the image but in making sure there is a difference between glass and non-glass streams (adding additional frequencies and so on), which would have cost quite a bundle.

no It is so they can charge pubs more a lot more for showing Football (Soccer) games

You wouldn't need additional streams. Just include in a firmware update a check to see if the smart card in the set-top box has the pub flag set. If the card does have the flag set, show the proper overlay.

Why not just check by address? Inspector goes to the pub, sees the match going on TV then checks it in a list if the pub at this address has the right subscription.

In the UK pubs can be much more like their name actually implies - public houses. If the publican also resides on the premises, he may have a home subscription for his own personal use.

In that instance, he's perfectly entitled to have a home subscription to that address.

Interesting, but a picture of said pint glass would be appropriate for such an article.

Heres an example: http://up.metropol247.co.uk/davidlees/daybreak_sky_sports.pn...

Looks like a cup of coffee to me.

This is what I had in mind: http://factoryjoe.s3.amazonaws.com/emoticons/emoticon-0167-b...

But that's a mug, not a pint glass.

Also a mug with a poorly poured beer

Even with a pint in front of me, that icon reminds me of coffee.

I was talking about this to someone behind the bar once, and he also said that the reason they chose a pint glass over some other icon was that it made people more willing to buy a drink while watching the game. They'd occasionally glance at the pint glass and think "better have a pint".

Not sure whether this is true or not, but it wouldn't surprise me if it had this effect. It'd be interesting if someone else had heard this, or knew whether this was true.

Probably balls, to be honest, as while priming is a very real thing, the very real pint glasses inevitably within your field of vision are probably a far greater primer than an icon of one in the corner in the screen - so if there is any effect, it'd be very marginal.

Why would a cable company care if you bought more beer?

I don't agree with the OPs reasoning but its cyclical in theory: a pub is not going to buy a Sky subscription if it does not increase their sales.

Sky also add a number to the screen to help inspectors or to shut down streaming http://helpforum.sky.com/t5/Archived-Discussions/Strange-9-d...

Sky also add a number to the screen to help inspectors or to shut down streaming

I believe this is mostly to stop streaming.

For years and years, Sky have had issues with people buying multiple subscriptions to their sports packages, connecting the receivers to a bunch of servers, and then reselling access on commercial streaming sites!

The big difficulty they've then had is identifying who's behind the streaming site, and at the least, shutting down their stream.

The fun part is that - judging by the number of sites that remained in operation for a good chunk of time - it does appear possible to operate an essentially anonymous business on the internet.

I wonder how this is supposed to help Sky identify who the source is — it's a satellite broadcast, so they presumably can't overlay a different number on the screen for different subscribers?

Multiple channels displaying different codes, targeted to different groups of receivers.

Even with only two channels, I expect you could binary search it down to a single receiver over the course of a single season of matches.

Could you just program the receiver to overlay the numbers after receiving the unadulterated video from the satellite?

Could you just program the receiver to overlay the numbers after receiving the unadulterated video from the satellite?

I've been informed that some streaming services simply cut off the side of the screen where the Sky logo starts to appear.

Heh. Simple solutions!

I wonder if they also use something like Digimarc for a non-visible watermark? They could publicly credit the visible watermark as a distraction from the real technique.

That was actually my first thought when I saw the screenshot with the numbers near the top of the screen. Slice that part off, stream the rest.

A similar thing shows up on YouTube a lot, actually. People heavily crop uploads of copyrighted material to get around their content identification stuff.

You could, but modifying the receiver firmware then becomes an attractive target. A Sky STB is just an embedded Linux device, after all.

Doing the overlay in the smartcard would make it a harder target, if the smartcard has the processing power to do it.

If one were so inclined, I imagine it could be done with dedicated hardware specifically made for generating the overlay. May not be worth the cost though.

The smart card has nothing like the power required to process video - but it doesn't need to. The Sky receivers are fortified sufficiently to make changing the firmware a distinctly non-trivial operation.

That's exactly how it works. The numbers are hashed by the receiver and uniquely identify that particular viewing card, then displayed in a position selected by the channel operator, when triggered at a time of their choosing.

The number isn't in the broadcast signal, it's overlaid by the decoding box. It's going to be a number tied to the unique viewing card number (which is tied uniquely to a subscriber).

Ah, that makes more sense, thanks.

I wonder how easily the firmware can be downgraded (or downgraded) to remove that behaviour. Though as noted in the sibling thread, it's more likely easier to crop the video output.

It'd probably be much easier to just blur the area of the image where they put it to be honest, I've seen this on streams before, they just blur the bottom corner where the number would show up.

Although the position of the number is (obviously) under the control of the platform operator, so could appear anywhere, for any amount of time, if they were so minded.

I wouldn't like to bet against the number appearing right in the centre of the screen for a fraction of a second, if there were any particularly high-value programming being illegally streamed.

Distinctly non-trivial. The receiver software is cryptographically signed and is heavily integrated with the conditional access system securing the underlying broadcast.

I'm only aware of one time that a legitimate box was encouraged to run a lightly-patched version of the software, and that involved a JTAG-type attack on a specific model of set top box. I believe that lesson has been learned in current models.

In Germany, almost no one uses Sky, and those who do, almost completely run patched boxes. It’s even easy to use one single subscription on thousands of boxes at the same time.

(2012)

That's what I would have thought but would mean the Sky rep in the link is flat-out lying. As mentioned below, it could help isolate groups of subscriptions and allow progressively tracking down individuals. He only claims that it's not tied to an individual subscription.

Sky rep lies about basis of security feature? Could be.

I like it how they say "it will not affect your viewing experience in any way" - well, except you have a 9 digit number on your screen.

I'll give them this, it is pretty subtle: https://i.imgur.com/v2wssw2.jpg

I have seen really disturbing versions of this. mostly on Ten Sports

Well since cardsharing came prevalent it's easier than ever to get Sky illegally. They shut down HD recently by messing with the ECM timing.

Now most illegally suppliers have switched to IPTV.

Germany has this as well. Looks slightly different and I've never payed enough attention to see if it changes. Interesting how the glass is localized :)

https://planetofsports.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/38917790....

With prices of a monthly Sky subscription for venues ranging from 449 EUR to 1449 EUR [1], you can understand why Sky are keen to prevent the home subscription being misused.

Notably, it is also not in their interests to have too many venues showing the football games. That results in less home subscribers.

I often watch Champions League and Bundesliga football games in these sports bars. I see no reason for a home Sky subscription. It is a complete rip-off.

[1] http://business.sky.de/sbs/cms/static/img/Einleger_Gastro_St...

That seems incredibly expensive. In the US as a bar / restaurant you can get a $80 package from DirecTV that covers just about everything but the league owned channels.

I think a lot of that pub subscription price goes to the rights owners, no?

DISH and DirecTV, the two major US satellite operators, pay the individual content networks a cut of the subscription for rights to broadcast. So for example if your $80 package has ESPN in it, ESPN might be getting $5 of that. Whereas common networks like ABC, NBC, TBS, CBS, TNT, Fox and similar might only get $0.50.

For public viewing they scale it based on occupancy. So if your bar is likely to have a viewer count of < 100 people, you'll fall into the normal tier. For a maxed out package with 2000 possible viewers, you'll pay $175, or $425 if you want all of the ESPN channels (Disney must be getting a huge cut of that +$250).

I wonder what keeps the American sports leagues (and/or ESPN) from charging more for public-performance licenses? I can't imagine they're doing it out of goodwill, so they must feel like they can't get UK-level fees out of bars. Maybe carrying a particular league (or even sports at all) is not as much of a "necessity" for American bars, so if they push it too much, bars will just say no thanks? In much of the UK a pub really has to have football, and usually not just any football, but the local club's games (plus "big" games).

What's amazing/amusing to me is a hacky technical solution that solves the problem for "inspectors", instead of a solution that removes the need for any inspector to inspect the TV. A good administration system would make it easy to automatically check whether pub addresses use a business subscription.

Are there pub proprietors that live over their pubs though, or beside them? If so, they could just snake the wire in from their homes.

Yes, this is very common.

To clarify: Living next to/over the pub is rather common. Fraud… not so much.

It's not a matter of how they physically get the signal, it's a matter of whether they have license to use that signal in a commercial setting.

Well I think the idea might also be non-inspectors noticing and reporting establishments.

Very much so and case of being something joe-public can spot and report https://business.sky.com/fighting-fraud

Now if they were to offer a token reward of even £50 then they would still be ahead as they would catch them all pretty much.

Though imagine what would happen if traffic parking enforcement offered a commision to the public who reports such violations they see. Traffic wardens would be out of jobs and everybody would park much better in the long-run and many people without jobs and spare time would have a better quality of income.

So like HOAs for the road where soccer van moms can make money enforcing the most insignificant laws over and over again.

Um... maybe let's not.

The problem with HOAs isn't the soccer moms enforcing stupid rules, it's that stupid rules are in place to begin with. Likewise, the problem with parking enforcement isn't the enforcement, it's the stupid parking rules they enforce. Fix that, and citizen reporting is perfectly reasonable. (After all, we do it for all sorts of other crimes.) Don't fix that, and dedicated enforcement is also bad.

These laws already exist. http://gothamist.com/2015/03/10/cash_in_on_idling_vehicles.p...

Wrong country, dude.

It's an example where the law suggested is in place and for the most part no positive result is being achieved.

Most people want to watch their sports in their favourite environment. They're not going to report the pub and have that stop permanently.

Pull the other one!

I could fill a stadium with people who, if they saw a Time Warner or Comcast truck on fire in the street, would with great urgency and celerity rush past their fire extinguisher on the way to the bag of marshmallows.

I'll report the guy who cheats the distribution channel the day after I see a monthly bill that I believe treats me fairly and respectfully.

Also amusing, these inspectors are paid to go to pubs to watch football matches. Not a bad job.

I had a part-time job for a while inspecting cinema advertisements. The pay was minuscule (I did it on the side of my full time work), but all it involved was writing down the ads and previews in the order they were shown and noting any reaction from the crowd (positive, negative etc).

My work was done when then feature started ... at which point, well, it would be rude to get up and leave wouldn't it?

(We did have to get the manager's permission to stay for the show, but I was never once knocked back. I'd usually buy a frozen drink, so I guess they got something out of me.)

Doesn't it defeat the purpose a bit if they know you're there? Why not cloak the inspection so you can catch the sort of fumbling of ads that happens when you're not aware you're being watched?

They're paid to visit lots of pubs during one particular match.

Walk in, look at screen(s), walk out.

You wouldn't get to see much of the game at all as most of the time you will be traveling between pubs.

Yes, but they get to tell a bunch of hooligans that the show they are watching is over.

Sky is a satellite system, not cable; it's trivial to take the receiver and smartcard from one address to another and plug it into the dish there.

How does the pint glass help with this and how doesn't this just strengthen gp's point?

I expect that Sky broadcast multiple copies of the sports channels simultaneously (at a minimum, one with and one without the pint glass logo). Home subscribers are set up to tune[1] to the channel without the logo, the more expensive pub subscribers get the version with the pint glass logo.

If a pub landlord subscribes at home, and then take their receiver/smartcard to the pub and plug it in there, the receiver will still display the home version of the channel without the logo. That's what the inspectors are looking for.

(Alternatively, the smartcards used for pub subscription could insert the image into the decoded stream, but I'm not sure if they have enough processing power for that. The end result would be the same, though -- no expensive subscription, no logo.)

[1] Yes, it's a digital system with multiple program streams per frequency, so 'tune' isn't quite the right word, but it's close enough.

A for some reason I thought you were talking about a COTS receiver and just pirating the business channel completely, not using an actual home receiver.

I think there's probably a perception issue at play too. Buying a pirate decoder card from a shady dealer is 'obviously' wrong, while using a subscription that you've already paid for in a different location is a different matter. I could see pub landlords being more comfortable doing the latter than the former.

I don't know what the current state of the art for pirate decoders is, but if it still depends on extracting a keystream from a legitimate decoder in real time and sending it to the pirate receivers, limiting the number of legitimate receivers of the business channel to would also help cut down on piracy of the business channels by reducing the possible sources of key material. The high cost of a subscription and limiting subscribers to pub businesses only also reduces the number of potential key sources.

The current state of the art prevents this technique from working on Sky's highest value HD channels. (HD channels require a newer set top box with a later generation of decryption abilities, and these ensure that any liftable keystream is specific to that one receiver, so it has no value if distributed, and no ability to activate other receivers.)

> the receiver will still display the home version of the channel without the logo. That's what the inspectors are looking for.

But why can't the inspector just look for: is this pub showing the channel, and is it in our database of pubs which are allowed to show the channel? That was what I took from scrollaway's post, though I might have misinterpreted ver.

They are also seeking to prevent subscribers re-streaming the content on the Internet.

The more expensive subscription displays the pub glass. I don't think sky minds if you want to pay for the more expensive sub and move it elsewhere.

Because satellite is one-way, the cheapest option for sky is to pay for enforcers. There must be quite a spread between commercial and home licenses.

It's pretty expensive; based on location, size/value and some other factors (whether the location serves food etc.).

The average pub Sky Sports subscription is £1250-1500 per month, on a 12-month contract. You can price it up online just like a domestic package.

http://business.sky.com/calculator/desktop.aspx

The domestic equivalent is about £25

That's £25 on top of the basic package subscription, which is another £22-£30 by itself.

Not entirely true. Sky can be delivered over the internet via Sky NOW / Sky GO and in certain countries (e.g. Germany) over the cable network.

The picture quality on Sky Go is horrible (no where near HD), even over fibre. Sky Go is just a token feature. For instance, you're allowed 4 devices (with Sky multiscreen) but can only add/ change one device per month.

And they'll still know exactly which door to knock on if they see the streams being illegally re-streamed.

A good administration system would make it easy to automatically check whether pub addresses use a business subscription.

That's what the TV licensing people do. There are people who've never bought a TV who've been hassled endlessly by TV Licensing simply because they can't believe there are any households who might choose not to own a television. The whole "detector van" thing is mostly a bogeyman to scare people.

The whole "detector van" thing is mostly a bogeyman to scare people.

The technology to remotely see what's showing on a CRT is Van Eck phreaking. Not sure over what distance it would be possible (and whether you could target a specific house accurately), also given the diversity in display technologies at current I can't see it being too effective.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking

I think you could do a pretty good job just by watching the pattern of lights changing in a room, and comparing it to what's currently being broadcast. No need for Van Eck hackery.

Yes, van eck phreaking obviously works.

But is it actually used in the UK to detect people without a license?

Probably not, even though TVLA used to heavily advertise the use of detector vans.

TVLA have the largest civillian database in the UK so mostly they just send letters and inspectors to addresses without a licence.

The detector vans are most likely smoke and mirrors. Even when they had the technology, you don't need to use it in most cases, the van's presence is enough to scare people.

There's an interesting subculture of license refuseniks in the UK.

It does indeed seem to be true that the detector vans are pure PR, with no useful electronics. According to legend no data from a van has ever been used in a prosecution.

But it's a sad business. A lot of people who are caught and fined incriminate themselves unnecessarily.

They're almost always at the poor and not very educated end of the population, and will always accept a rubber-stamped prosecution because they literally have no idea they can often put up a defence in court.

Really, fining them four figures for what is really a trivial offence is unhelpfully nasty and persecutory.

The recent attempt to decriminalise non-payment of the license fee failed:-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-31151821

> They're almost always at the poor and not very educated end of the population > Really, fining them four figures for what is really a trivial offence is unhelpfully nasty and persecutory.

It's a great reflection of the sad state of the country.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-csYPQVaqA

AIUI (from distant days working at BT) the thing they were looking for was the EMR of the CRT flyback transformer. But it could only be detected if the television was towards the front of the house (not behind too many internal walls) and only on the ground floor.

That method has got no hope of detecting a modern LCD/OLED/Plasma display.

The majority of enforcement is database driven:-

Royal Mail database of addresses - addresses of current tv licenses = huge list of possible offenders

Now cross check database of possible offenders with databases of: * Sky or Virgin Media subscribers * people who have recently purchased or rented appropriate equipment (televisions, VCRs, PVRs, etc) * etc

Would it be possible to detect the transformer noise in the antenna cable? The cable often runs on the outside of buildings, especially older ones.

I thought that they were looking for the IF (intermediate frequency) being fed back up the antenna cable, but I have no source for that information other than "something my dad once said".

In reality, I'm sure it's like road tax, they check the database of addresses without one against a list of people who own a television. I believe all retailers are required to take a name and address when selling televisions.

You still need to send someone out to confirm whether or not they are actually showing the TV to customers. For example, many pubs owners live over top their pubs, and their home may have the same address as the pub. Or, some pub owners might have a TV subscription to entertain their employees who are washing dishes in the back, but not actually show the TV to patrons.

Here in Spain, they show a B (as in bar), but also, they randomly put a banner with some code related to the customer (pub), so if an internet stream shows the code, they know who is the customer.

The sticker-on-screen hack seems a bit easy to detect.

I've always wondered why there isn't (or maybe there is?) a black market for a wee box that takes the Sky box video output and overlays a pint glass icon in the corner.

But I didn't know until this article that the pint glass volume and colour changes each day; that would make it a lot tougher. Plus I guess the pint glass isn't always shown, e.g. during adverts.

Startup opportunity - Capture pint glass logo from commercial feed in real time, Chroma key it, stream over internet to small overlay device, profit.

Beat me to it. In one sentence. You're another Dirac, only human.

Sky will then start to geo-code the pint glass shape and colour...

Via satellite? Good luck...

Oh, right, I forgot about that. Disregard my comment.

They could though, your subscription is tied to a viewing card, which should be tied to your address. They could use firmware on the box to generate a modified pint glass based on that. It'd be a fun game of cat and mouse.

The pint glass is generated by the box software, so it already knows the viewing card number and, potentially, can ascertain where that card should be, geographically. So it's absolutely possible.

A startup with an offering based entirely on making fraud easy. That's... novel.

but it's "disruptive" :-)

Ask for forgiveness, not permission!

It was how Jobs and Woz got started.

Maybe there can be a server with a genuine subscription that would capture the video (genuine), process it, and extract the pint's features.

Then it'd broadcast that information to the other wee boxes that would have 3G and will always overlay the "right pint".

The cost of Sky pub subscription is €1,224 (about $1314.65).. I think you can go wild on the box's features and still be cheaper than a one month subscription.

That could be interesting..

Oh, the publicans have to pay you, of course, a subscription for your subscription avoiding scheme.. You could send inspectors to verify the box is operating properly, and have a drink with Sky's inspectors.

You would need an HDCP license... I don't see that happening.

> You would need an HDCP license...

The suggestion is for an illegal device, no need for licenses in that case ;)

The easiest way would be to extract the pint glass graphic over the wire (sitting in middle of the HDMI cable the set top box to the TV) then transmitting that to other establishments and overlaying that graphic in between the set top box and the TV (the best bit is that you wouldn't even need to decrypt the video, just overlay the graphic).

> The sticker-on-screen hack seems a bit easy to detect.

Probably a little harder when you're in a crowded, bar with low illumination and TV hung from the ceiling. Maybe that was enough for the hack to work.

You know what this article needs? An image!

They sometimes fill them with different colours, too. Here is a link to a picture. http://goo.gl/ZDnSE0

I think that's just the red button indicator isn't it?

If you pressed 'Back Up' on the controller, it would disappear and you would be left with the white overlay, unless I'm mistaken.

Interesting, a lot of pubs who can afford it simply get a satellite dish and a subscription to a foreign channel. Saves them thousands a month and they get all of the important matches. Although some commentary is in a foreign language.

it's legal to show a foreign language too.

Yup, a publican went to court with Sky in the UK about this.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17150054

Wow "publican" is a real word, cool! As an American, I have never heard this and thought you were making it up.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/publican

It's a great word but it's not one I've heard often in person, usually people just say landlord.

(I live in Southern England, and this comment is only from my experience.)

Ireland here we use publican.

Publican is common in Australia.

For me it sounds like a real word, but refers to a tax collector (with similar connotations as "collaborator", though not quite "quisling".)

Surprised that people dislike this comment. This is a meaning for "publican" much older than pubs, and the also the meaning of "publican" as described in Wikipedia [0] and as many of us have learned at school about Gospel of Luke (where this role of a despised tax collector or collaborator with the occupying Roman empire was at heart of the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican).

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publican [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharisee_and_the_Publican

Semi-OT, there's an excellent bar/restaurant in Chicago named Publican. If you're ever in Chicago, you should check it out.

>To use any of these extra parts [chrome, trails, reviews, etc.] associated for a broadcast, a pub would need the permission of the Premier League. //

That's an interesting statement. Presumably though the Premier League licenses their feeds to multiple companies in different countries - shouldn't that exhaust their rights then; meaning a pub could sub-license from a foreign country within the EEA. Otherwise they're perverting free trade within the EEA.

There are actually talks within European Commision to make such country-based licensing illegal, i.e. it must be EU wide licensing, citing, as noted above, the free trade within the EEA.

> it costs £700 a month to see Premier League matches

Wow, that's ridiculous. I can see why people are trying to find ways to get it cheaper.

Wow, that's ridiculous. I can see why people are trying to find ways to get it cheaper.

It goes both ways; pubs are often packed to the rafters for games, with the beer flowing heavily throughout.

Seems absurdly cheap to me for something that draws in customers effectively. You'll probably make back the money in a few hours, and the rest of the month will be profit.

Not all pubs cant accept hundreds of people within there premises. And large crowds are only attracted for big games which are few and far between.

If showing games can't bring in an extra 700£/month then it hardly seems worth showing them to begin with.

I can't blame pub owners for wanting to save money wherever they can. But I don't see this as being particularly expensive for the context.

(American) pub owner here.

700£/month would be an absolutely massive expense in my place, and there's essentially no chance we could afford it. We don't get much draw for sporting events, even the Superbowl or what have you.

That doesn't mean that everyone in the place during the Superbowl doesn't want it on, though.

So although it couldn't possibly pay for itself at my place, not having it would also cost us quite a lot when there are big games.

I can see this being the problem for most small pubs in the UK as well. The UK is full of small local pubs that work on very small margins.

That's for a commercial license.

Home subscriptions are about £25.

The Sky package for pubs is a lot more than £700. £1200 to £1500 per month more like.

It depends on the size of the pub and, therefore, how much extra beer money is likely to be brought in by the venue showing live football (etc)

Indeed; in my regular pre-match pub a working knowledge of cyrillic has come in handy to decode the names of English teams from the televised Bulgarian :)

My local did this, until he was caught, prosecuted and subsequently lost his job/business and something like £30-40k IIRC.

I know many who do this and Sky activly try to pressure the publicans to purchase sky but can't do anything about it.

Yeah this was in 07/08-ish - I think someone successfully challenged them in court since.

Strange the Sky did not approach one of the beer factories and ask for "sponsorship"...:-)

Pubs tend to be owned by the breweries. I suspect there would be problems if Sky wanted (for example) Greene King to start advertising Fuller's in their pubs.

I don't think it would be a problem.. there's plenty of beer ads during footy...

I always thought it was a pint of Guinness....

You'll probably also notice a small rectangle which appears in the top right of the screen made up of moving black and white stripes.

This often indicates when an advert break is coming up, so it's pretty handy to notice if you want a head start on getting to a likely-busy pub toilet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_mark#Other

Sky and most other channels don't do that anymore. I've only seen ITV use that in recent years

Yes, that visible cue dot is exclusively an ITV thing these days.

I thought this article was a joke and the answer would be "because you're half passed out with your head on the table dumb-ass."

Is this only for satelite TV service providers or cable too? Also, is this strictly a UK thing? I have not noticed anything similar in the US but from what I can tell, all the bars I go to all have Comcast boxes. And a lot of times, you can see a rack of Comcast equipment stacked up either behind counters or right at the entrance behind the person that checks people in.

Most likely a UK thing. There is some odd stuff there when it comes to TV and "licenses"

Not really, we have it in Italy too, but it shows a martini glass.

Sorry I can't find a picture, but it looks like this one http://business.sky.it/statics/images/business/Bar/offerta_b...

Ireland & Germany also have (ish) TV licences

It's the noun, so "\"licences\"".

Sky is a private business, so the arrangement here is an ordinary licencing arrangement between one business and another. If you pay £25/mo, or whatever, Sky give you the right to watch men kicking a ball about at home; if you want to show the same thing to paying customers, on the other hand, you need to be paying more. Sky pay through the nose for the rights to all this nonsense and they have to make the money back somehow.

The TV "licence" (a tax, pretty much) is separate matter.

According to my dictionary "license" is also used as the noun (equivalent to "licence") in American English.

My dictionary may be wrong, though.

The entire point is that the TV licence is a UK thing ;)

But if we were talking about the colour of the BBC logo, would you correct Americans who say "color"?

Honest question. I'm a non-native speaker, but my understanding has been that you only keep the original spelling for proper names and terms of the trade (i.e. anything you wouldn't translate if it was non-English, like "Grand Prix" in sports or "vert" in heraldry).

My comment wasn't entirely serious. But it seems that "TV Licence" actually is written that way, capitalization and all - see, e.g., https://www.gov.uk/tv-licence) - suggesting it is a technical term.

Comcast charges $34.95/mo for a sports pack for bars and restaurants: http://business.comcast.com/tv/restaurants/plans-pricing

...but only $8.95/mo for the same sports pack for waiting room TVs and other "office" uses: http://business.comcast.com/tv/offices/plans-pricing

Because Comcast uses cable (instead of satellite), they actually have two-way communication with most of their equipment. And even one-way-only equipment (like CableCard and DTA) can still be restricted to only work on the encryption keys for a very small geographical area. If Comcast equipment is moved to a location other than the address where it's supposed to be, it usually won't work.

For what it's worth, a lot of bars and restaurants use DirecTV (it has popular exclusive sports packages). Even though it's satellite-based, I've never noticed any sort of "pub glass" or the licensing indicator. So I'm not sure how they enforce licensing.

The link you pasted says it's actually $189.95/month for the sport pack.

Also, this is aside from any premium sports subscriptions like NHL/NBA League Pass/NFL Sunday Ticket channels, which charge based on the occupancy of the bar/restaurant and costs thousands of dollars per year.

This particular approach is strictly a Sky (UK) thing, although I believe that Sky in other countries (e.g. Germany, Italy) adopt a similar technique.

UK cable operators don't sell commercial subscriptions to premises, so the pint glass doesn't apply, although the surprise numbers are still present, to catch any unauthorised streaming.

There have been a number of courtcases involving pub owners and tv sports rights owners.

Some people wanted to use domestic contract for their pubs. Other people bypassed local providers and used their satellite dishes to receive foreign broadcasts.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-25849670

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17150054

None of this has anything to do with TV licences.

On a related note, I wonder why a lot of public places in the US have stuff on cable (not just sports) and often not HD. They could just use an antenna and get a great picture. I makes me wonder if that's not allowed because it would be a public showing - even though anyone with a portable TV could view it right there anyway. It this the case?

The NFL has poked around with this with the Superbowl broadcasts:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/01/will-your-big-scr...

Broadcast television is not licensed for commercial use.

Its not licensed for anything. It is a broadcast signal that anyone with a reciver can view. Any restrictions beyond that seem completely artificial and unwarranted.

The law disagrees, though.

Perhaps but when people tell me something is illegal and therefore immoral I always respond with the fact that the holocaust was completely legal in germany.

So copyright holders enforcing their rights has any equivalence at all to mass murder? I'm going to go ahead and assert that your moral compass is more or less fucked.

Nobody said or implied that they have any equivalence. Please try to follow the logic of the arguments being made before being outraged at them.

I wonder if there is a pattern to the glass if it's only full, half and empty it may be simple to figure out.

Hmm.... As a Smart TV app developer I see an app opportunity here...

So much knowledge in such a small post.

Beer - the social lubricant.

I wish there was an image so I could get a sense of what it looks like.

Here's an example: http://up.metropol247.co.uk/davidlees/daybreak_sky_sports.pn...

Thanks! I tried Google image searching but all I got back were pictures of actual pint glasses. :)

Pub tvs have beer image to manipulate viewer to buy more beer!

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