So, a lot of users in this thread seem to be misunderstanding what Mux is, and how the "soccer pirates" interact with their service. Let me clarify:
Mux is a streaming infrastructure provider. They provide services for companies who want to stream video to their users -- news web sites, video chat services, etc. Kind of like web hosting, but specifically for video. They are not a video content provider; they do not sell subscriptions to end users.
Mux's problem is that pirates will sign up for their service to restream pirated video content, like live sports streams:
Official stream --> pirate --> Mux --> viewers
When this happens, Mux usually gets stiffed on the bill, and if the stream stays up, Mux gets legal nastygrams from the content owners. So it's in Mux's interest that they detect these pirates quickly and terminate service before they run up too much of a bill. The blog post explains how they do that.
It would have been better for the post to put the motivation up front, and then explain how they deal with the problem, instead of the other way round but I'm not sure what issues you have with the tone.
What they do here (preventing "piracy" and reducing cost) is no different from what other hosting platforms do.
FWIW, I didn't get a bad impression and learned about MUX in the first place (good).
There's probably a point here that they offer free credits and other ways for people to get "free bandwidth". So this is a way to avoid less friendly strategies to get pre-payments on this stuff, at least without going through a sales team.
I enjoy being able to sign up and just try a thing without interacting with a sales team, but... I mean. This is a video CDN, not a newspaper subscription. I definitely know what I would do (but I am not a successful business)
That's not correct, there's no time allowance to remove. What there is, from the person issuing the DMCA, is two weeks before you can start legal proceedings.
You could argue that this means that you don't have to act for two weeks, but in practice this is where if you got into legal proceedings you'd be looking at damages claims for the period.
You get two types of hosting providers: those who act promptly and those that don't. Those that don't, mostly fall into one of two camps: conscious safe spaces for piracy (and potentially other dubious content) and providers who don't have the facility to do anything promptly (e.g. no 24/7 NOC looking at email notices).
DMCA only applies if the pirate stream is showing a signal from a US broadcaster (for soccer, NBC or Fox Sports). As soccer is a global sport, live games will usually have pirate streams from many different countries' broadcasters, not just the US.
In that case, isn't this a similar situation platforms like Twitter or Youtube find themselves in, where they don't want to take full responsibility for moderation or suddenly they're liable for all the harmful content on their platforms, but on the other hand they're forced to moderate just enough to avoid governments forcing them to be on the hook?
Section 230 seems to say they can moderate if they want, and have no obligation to do so, or to not do so.
Seems like they're motivated to moderate in this case, because this usage costs them money and the users that sign up for this type of usage tend not to pay their bills.
IMHO, it might make more sense to work on usage tiers, sales calls, and collecting good payment before incurring large costs, more than a pipeline to inspect user content, including sending it to an uninvolved third party (Google Vision), but maybe that's just me.
Yeah I was one of the confused at first. Throwing my hands up saying who cares pirates going to pirate. But this is different. They are abusing this service to stream illegal content, vs tapping directly from the akamai stream which I've seen in the past.
Sigh... f*ck sports leagues/governing bodies. The reason some honest people pirate streams for sporting events is because they make it so annoying to pay for them. Some examples...
I live in the US.
I briefly took an interest in the EPL. If I wanted to watch all EPL games (or have the option of watching any particular EPL game), I'd have to subscribe to Peacock _and_ Fubo -- and I'm still not sure that gets me all games.
I briefly took an interest in the NHL (this was years ago, granted -- things may have changed). If I would have subscribed to their service, the ONLY team whose home games I couldn't watch would have been the TEAM OF THE CITY I LIVE IN (i.e.: "my" team).
My two favorite sports, though, are Cycling and F1.
I LOVE cycling. To watch every UCI race, I'd have to subscribe to GCN+ (they have the Giro), Peacock (they have the Tour de France and La Vuelta), and Flobikes (they have most of the Classics races).
THE ONLY sports governing body that has figured this out (for sports I like, anyway), is F1. I pay F1.com $80 a year and get MORE content than I would if I watched the races on ESPN. I can see EVERY RACE, EVERY QUALIFYING, EVERY PRACTICE. I can even choose WHOSE car I want to see the first person view from.
If you want to "stop pirates", make it easy for them to give you money and watch their favorite sport.
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.
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?
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."
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.
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.
Exactly this. I am a rabid women's soccer fan. I study and follow the draft like a professional coach, watch as many matches as I can, drive three hours to NWSL matches when I can, try and catch overseas games when possible, and I am continuously frustrated by the broken state of sports streaming. The NWSL shows up on ParamountPlus, unlesss its on CBS, unless its on CBSSN, unless its on Twitch on like three different Twitch channels - it is maddening as a hardcore fan and in no way leads to a casual fan having an easy time to watch.
I am heartbroken too at the amount of historical matches that will be lost because they simply aren't available. NWSL, FA WSL, International Friendlies or International Cups. It will all be lost over time as streaming partnerships change. The key to making better players is a better soccer culture and that means the key is to have them watch the game, love the game.
I have had seasons where I have almost quit as a fan because how frustratingly disorganized it all is. I know partnerships are important, but these leagues need to start pushing for their own streaming infrastructure or unified streaming partner or they will see the sport tip into irrelevance with the general public.
Yes, americans gets screwed over with the CBSSN matches, as it requires a cable account. To top it off, the replays of CBSSN matches take up to 48 hours to appear, while CBS matches up to 24 hours, and P+ much shorter.
The twitch deal ended last season, but americans only had to deal with one twitch channel, which aired the twitch exclusive matches. The other twitch channels were exclusively for international viewers, and they had to have multiple channels due to matches being on at the same time.
With the twitch deal over, international viewers can watch on NWSL's own website again, like we did years ago, before the ESPN and later twitch deals.
When it comes to international sports, the whole "where to watch" is so painful, especially women's sport, as it's covered less, and most broadcast deals are in the local country, and very rarely international coverage at all.
The brits have done a great job with FA Player, but also in selling the international rights to broadcast companies. Their lawyers though... the rights contracts are so shitty. To take England/FA WSL as an example, Viaplay bought the rights, and they air the matches that receive proper tv production in England (2-3 matches per round), but they also force FA to geoblock the other matches, so we can't watch them live on FA Player, only on demand 24 hours later.
They even geoblock short clips on twitter. Utterly bizarre, as these international broadcasters aren't posting similar clips.
I presume you're fairly knowledgeable of men's soccer too, even if it's not your cup of tea.
What are important things that are different in the women's game? Tactical style, practical impact of rules, physicality of contact fouls, etc? Are brawls (controlling for country/culture) as common in women's soccer as in men's?
There's a common polycule meme where every new member pays for a different digital media subscription service and it's shared between everyone. If you get together with a few friends it's possible to split the costs of all these services. If you're sufficiently tech savvy, each person can run a VPN from their home so it doesn't look suspicious from the streaming service's end. Here's a video showing how to do this with Netflix [0].
I remember growing up it would be really common for people to split the cost of a PPV fight and VHS recordings would be passed around. It seems pretty similar.
Community-based media sharing is great. I wish it was possible for me to lend all of my Steam games when I'm not using them.
I have no interest in doing all that work to share. I do have an interest in paying hundreds of dollars to guarantee access to any game, any time, any place I want, but apparently that is not a product they want to sell.
For example, I would pay $200+ to watch Tennis Opens, but I need it to be a simple transaction and 1 click to watch the game from the schedule page on the tennis association website.
> Community-based media sharing is great. I wish it was possible for me to lend all of my Steam games when I'm not using them.
You can do that, actually. It has some pretty big caveats, but if you are not actively playing anything on Steam then your library can be lent out to others... all you have to do is sign into their computer using your Steam credentials.
> If you want to "stop pirates", make it easy for them to give you money and watch their favorite sport.
I don't disagree, but that isn't something Mux is in a position to do. They just provide video streaming infrastructure -- they're in no position to demand that various sports broadcast rightsholders change their policies.
That's fair. My main objection is labeling _everyone_ as "pirates". Technically, yes, they are pirating the steam.
But some of those people are also PAYING to watch plenty of games in whatever sport they are "pirating" streams for. Calling these people "pirates" fails to acknowledge that they are also "paying customers" who are frustrated with how complicated it has become to pay for the product they want to watch.
As I slowly grow crotchety and old I've really become fed up with the giant corps. I've taught dozens of both older and younger folk how to use a VPN and a torrent client. I've had one parent accuse me of teaching their teenager how to steal. I told them you're damn right, your kid is a sharp young woman and she is learning from the best.
Media companies like to claim that each act of piracy costs them huge sums of money. That isn't true, but I wish it was.
F1 has this absolutely nailed. I fear that if it gets popular enough in the US ESPN will buy exclusive rights and then you'll have to have a cable package in order to watch it.
It was easy for them to nail it and un unfair comparison to soccer or cycling.
In F1 there is only one serie/league. And that doesn't give you access to all 4 wheel motorsport, let alone openwheel ones. An F1 subscription doesn't give you access to formula E, formula nippon, national formula 3 championships, or the different motorsport series accross the world. Nor does it give you access to rallying. MotoGP did the same and I used to watch all their races. Now since I want to watch cycling anyway I only pay for eurosport which allows me to watch most races as well as superbike, moto and car endurance, as well as some rallying and formula E. But there is no way I will pay separarely for MotoGP and F1. In that case they just lost a viewer for good.
Also, for 1 F1 grand prix there are 20 to 50 soccer play or cycling races. The thing is cycling races and tv rights aren't managed by the governing body, but by different orgs. On one hand this is annoying to us because ASO, RCA and Flanders Classics (the 3 majors organizers) can sell rights to different channels. On the other hand a monopoly wouldn't necessarily better for the sports, the riders and the smaller races. If there had to be a monopoly, I would wish its shareholders would be the racers themselves but that won't ever happen.
It actually hasn't, which is really frustrating. It's not possible to watch F1 online via F1TV in Germany - you must watch it via Sky who have purchased the exclusive streaming rights up to 2024, which is €20/month or so (and means you only have the German commentators, AFAIK). At least Sky don't force you to pay for a cable (or satellite) package - it is possible to pay just for a basic sports streaming package.
I always wonder if that is a good decision for the sport in the long run. There is no way I'd subscribe to cable and ESPN to watch F1. That means I'd stop following the sport and the probability of me again spending > $1,500 on tickets goes to zero.
I hope that whoever the executives are over at the MLB who decided that blacking out games on streaming services was a good idea, are well into their 60s and 70s and will be dying or retiring soon.
I lived a ten minute walk from the Cubs' stadium and really wanted to watch every game. I moved to Chicago the year before they won the world series and got to experience all the build up, so was extremely excited to follow them.
But even though I had a MLB.tv subscription, from T-Mobile, it was completely useless the entire time I lived in Chicago. The Cubs' games were on an over the air network, WGN, for decades, so I had to spend money for a one time expense of an antennae to be privileged to watch some games and the added inconvenience of switching away from my streaming box.
Soon after they won the world series, they moved to a cable only network Marquee. I would have been forced to pay for cable to get the same shitty experience of watching only some games. I ended up only ever watching games I was physically at or when a game aligned with the exact time I happened to be at a bar with it on in the background.
Blackout rules feel like a completely untenable situation if baseball wants anyone under 45 to get in to the sport.
You're completely right, and as a baseball fan myself I deeply sympathize, but it's not so much MLB that is the problem (today) but the patchwork of cable-based Regional Sports Networks (RSNs) that have contracts for exclusive broadcast rights from MLB that were inked years ago. In a lot of cases teams even have ownership stakes in their own RSN. So now all the local broadcast rights (and $$$) belong to these RSNs instead of MLB themselves. And most/all of them broadcast exclusively on cable and offer limited-to-no streaming options.
There's been some hinting from MLB that they know blackouts are painful for fans, but without being able to alter/cancel the RSN contracts they're up shit creek, legally speaking.
What's interesting right now is that Diamond Sports Group (Bally Sports) just recently declared bankruptcy and they own/operate the RSNs for almost half of MLB teams. They are behind on their rights payments and MLB is trying to forcibly get broadcast rights back so they can presumably stream on mlb.tv. If that happens it could give MLB some power and put the issue more front and center. Maybe. Here's hoping.
And I don't mean to white knight MLB here, they made this bed for themselves by making exclusive deals with RSNs in the past. But now it's not as easy as MLB just ending blackouts by decree. Not without a lot of lawsuits.
But someday it has to happen. For the good of the game and fanbase. Please be soon.
>Blackout rules feel like a completely untenable situation if baseball wants anyone under 45 to get in to the sport.
It's crazy thinking about baseball growing up. It was just on TV. Or it was on the Radio. Or it was in the newspaper. Either way, it was everywhere you looked during baseball season. These days its a different world. People don't subscribe to the newspaper and see the big win on the front page anymore. They don't listen to AM radio swing by swing while they drive, cut grass, watch their kids, operate the cash register at work, doing whatever with the game on. It was so amazingly unavoidably accessible.
These days its totally locked down. You can't fire up any TV you encounter and get to the game in a few presses of a remote anymore. You can't be sure you'd see the game when you'd go out in bars, much less overhear anyone's AM radio. Executives forgot why baseball became America's pasttime: because it was in your god damn face all the time! It's like making friends, you tend to make friends with the people life happens to have you spend more time with, like your classmates or coworkers you spend the bulk of the day with. Baseball is really in a death spiral with the direction of the current mlb office IMO. And that is to say nothing about the actual state of the game of baseball (various hardly punished cheating scandals, favoritism in officiating, juiced balls, etc).
I had an MLB.tv subscription for many years, paying like $140 a year. In the UK, so nothing was blacked out... great... except last year find out they sold post-season rights to BT Sport so nothing in the post-season was available live AT ALL on MLB.tv in the UK. Forget it, did not renew this year.
As someone who's in Asia who loves to watch baseball, it is so hard to subscribe to live stream. I have no choice but to resort to illegal streams. MLB.tv outside the US will cost me $24.99 per month. What the fuck. The only option I have right now is Apple TV+ which has Friday Nights Baseball live, thank you Apple.
>As someone who's in Asia who loves to watch baseball, it is so hard to subscribe to live stream.
That's not just a problem outside the US. In order for me to watch my local team's games (well, 130 out of 162), I must have a cable TV subscription (minimum package that includes the specific channel ~$100/month) -- even to watch the games on the channel's streaming platform.
MLB.tv is worse than useless, as those with local broadcast rights require MLB.tv (as well as other channels) to black out games that they carry.
I'd happily pay MLB.tv (or anyone else) to watch my local team's games $24.95/month. But I can't even do that!
I don't get this complaint- there is no difficulty in watching the games. IIRC no game would be blacked out for you (besides the handful of national TV games?). You might disagree with the price, but streaming baseball outside of the US is quite simple.
Considering I just paid $74 to Youtbe TV just so I could watch one month of NBA playoffs, I'm sure $80 per year would get you laughed out of the room. They know exactly what they're doing and exactly how much pain they can inflict on the fans to extract the maximum amount of money. Though I do think that kind of short-term MBA thinking causes long-term damage to their brand and product, but they don't know how to calculate that in their quarterly earnings reports. In my mind the Olympics is an example of where the long-term damage is really starting to accumulate, I know several people that used to be big Olympics fans 10 years ago that couldn't be bothered last time around because of how painful NBC makes it.
100% agree. I watch Bundesliga, with sky Germany over VPN you could watch all games 2/3 years ago, not some of them are on DAZN which also charges. ChampionsLeague used to be sky as well, not its prime. Not to mention English, Spanish and Italian league. I watch 4-5h soccer a week throughout the league based in time and interest. Without pirating I would have to pay several hundreds of dollars. Ridiculous.
> If I would have subscribed to their service, the ONLY team whose home games I couldn't watch would have been the TEAM OF THE CITY I LIVE IN (i.e.: "my" team).
They don't want to cannibalize in-person attendance where fans pay for $300 tickets and $20 pints of beer.
Surprisingly world rally championship is also amazing with this. A very affordable subscription to wrc+ gets you live coverage, summarized coverage, highlights, specials, historical reviews, as much content as you'd want really!
I was actually considering becoming a WRC fan... especially after I was watching some YouTube highlights and saw that Cyril Abiteboul is a team principal! Where do I subscribe? And... you promise that it's similar to F1 -- where I pay one company one price and get all the content?? :-)
> THE ONLY sports governing body that has figured this out (for sports I like, anyway), is F1.
No. The only ones who figured it out is the NFL. F1 shafted Germany after youg Schuhmacher came into F1 and German Sky bought exclusive rights.
The NFL? Intl Game Pass €190 per season live streams, instant repeats no adverts, various show, dedicated tv apps, no limit on number of devices, high def.
In the USA, there is no way to simply pay the NFL or even any other entity to stream every single game.
American football, ice hockey, baseball, basketball all have “black out” games and other bullshit, plus many times require a secondary subscription to a “TV” subscription, where you then have to hunt down which media provider is streaming the game.
I would rather save my time and just not watch sports. Only US soccer is decent because you can simply pay Apple and guarantee watch all the games.
F1 is great in the US. I can't speak to NFL -- I don't watch it. However, I suspect it may be a better deal in Europe (where they are trying to get new fans) than in the US (where it's one of, if not "the", most popular sports).
This is similar to GCN+ for cycling. In the US, it doesn't get you much -- but from what I understand, in some (most?) European countries, GCN+ gets you most (if not all) UCI cycling evnets.
FWIW GamePass in the US is cheaper, but godawful software that will, for example, force you to clear your cache and log back in every time you want to watch another game. Every year it gets a fresh new look, removes a couple features, and adds bugs. It's the worst software I've ever used.
I think this is country specific. F1's service in the US is great, but the NFL international game pass isn't available to people who live in the US, it's not as easy to watch domestically.
NHL blackouts (at least today’s NHL blackouts) are not for getting fans into arena seats. They exist because local cable broadcasts own the exclusive rights to broadcast games in local markets.
> I briefly took an interest in the NHL (this was years ago, granted -- things may have changed). If I would have subscribed to their service, the ONLY team whose home games I couldn't watch would have been the TEAM OF THE CITY I LIVE IN (i.e.: "my" team).
This is why I won't give the NHL or MLB any money for their video services.
This is a good example of the situation in many sports. The UCI is a governing body, not an event organiser or promoter. Basically anyone can put on race, and they are responsible for making money out of it. So event promoters make their own deals with broadcasters.
Thanks for pointing that out -- I guess I should have realized that (maybe I did at one point). At the very least, then, I wish the UCI would make it EASY to figure out what services I needed to subscribe to in my country to watch which races. Just a page on their website with a big table would be great.
Figuring out that I need to subscribe to GCN+, Peacock, and Flobikes in the US was no small feat (and it changes from year to year!).
Agree 100%. I'm a cycling fan and I refuse to subscribe to 4+ services to pick up the major races. I want the classics and big one-day races, the 3 grand tours, UCI XCO and DH, and all the world champ events.
As best I can tell...
The classics and spring season are spread across Flo, GCN+, and Peacock.
Giro is GCN+.
le Tour is Peacock.
Road worlds is Flo.
Vuelta is Peacock.
And the UCI mountain bike stuff is (mostly) on GCN+ (used to be Redbull, maybe)
I'd happily spend $300/year or so to get it all in one place. Instead, I end up watching highlights on Youtube. I don't torrent because I have an iPad, so I can't (without jumping through hoops) - but I'm tempted to grab a cheap PC just to torrent cycling.
Positively nailed it. Why can’t I just watch gt racing? Who can I just give my money to to watch all the GT and SCCA racing I want? Nobody has it and whoever owns it has made it balls out the hardest thing in the world to watch.
> I LOVE cycling. To watch every UCI race, I'd have to subscribe to GCN+ (they have the Giro), Peacock (they have the Tour de France and La Vuelta), and Flobikes (they have most of the Classics races).
If you were okay with not watching it live, people were torrenting each day's stage of the tour de France in 2004. There is a pretty big overlap between tech industry people and enthusiastic road cyclists.
Now there's whole communities of people sharing the euro broadcasts of just about everything race for worldwide people to watch.
On the other hand, what kind of life do you have if you need to watch every single event/games of at least 4 different sports/league?
I mean I like different sports but I mostly stick to the one I love the most (cycling) and even then I skip most of it and only watch the events that count the most for me (spring classics, a bit of the grand tour in the background especially while working, world champs and MTB world cups). And given the choice to go for a bicycle ride or watch a cycling race, I will always go for the former and do the later only when I am tired, my partner or kids aren't at home or busy doing something else and I feel like lying for a bit on the couch after my own ride. I don't mind the occasionnal motogp, world rallycross, or rally coverage but I have accepted I can't both follow everything and live a decent and happy familial and social life.
Only exception being Paris-Roubaix which is probably one of the only classic that is worth watching from km 0. But even then I didn't watched live this year. I avoided getting spoiled by living mostly offline appart from professionnal stuff for 3 days before dedicating the time to watch it.
It is the same for social medias in fact. Most of them are trying to make you feel bad if you don't see all their content. I deleted my twitter, fb, instagram accounts a while ago and although I keep a bit of presence in mastodon I have accepted the fact that I will just connect to it a few times a week and miss tons of informations/content/jokes. Is my life worse for it? Well, not really.
Yep -- watching cycling stuff is insanely hard. And I can't help but believe this is one of the reasons competitive amateur cycling is dying as well. People like to do what they watch the pros do, but when it's so hard...
I don't watch much cycling stuff, but sometimes I want to sit down and watch a CX race, or maybe one of the MTB races, or the TdF highlights or something... But there's just no one platform for it.
I feel for you. Here, GCN+ (or GCN+ Eurosport as it’s officially branded as a partnership being both owned by Warner Bros. Discovery along with BT Sport) has literally everything - from all the grand tours, to classics and even the most insignificant 1.2 and 2.2 ranked events. And all for a fair price. I didn’t even consider that in other territories the rights might be snapped up piecemeal style. That’s a shame.
I’m with you, including the F1 part, and I’m glad that Liberty Media hasn’t hiked up the prices in the US so far. Even with the $80/year, I still end up watching some races on ESPN because Sky’s broadcast rights won’t allow F1TV to show the interviews with pit wall, Ted/Karun and other small things… still miles better than all other sports.
Yeah I 100% agree. While I DON'T pirate anything, I DO pay for a sh!t ton of services to watch soccer and Cycling. Furthermore, I follow Scottish Soccer, specifically the Glasgow Rangers. So I pay 1. the club for their RangersTV, 2. Paramount+ for their half-ass SPL 'channel' (which btw doesn't show more than 2 games per weak, and rarely even Premier level teams), subscribe (free) to a small Scottish-only-football channel on YouTUbe (PLZ) for news.
On top of that I watch Serie A, Paramount+ has better coverage of this. But then you want to watch UEFA Europa and Champions leagues.
It gets very confusing and very costly.
I don't get why the individual leagues don't get smart and have their own streaming services rather than relying on legacy broadcasting services.
As for Cycling, I am in the same boat with GCN & Peacock. DIdn't know about flobikes so thanks for giving me something else to purchase :)
Can I ask how you end up caring about Scottish league? It's quite rare for there to be any interest in it outside Scotland or Ireland, and rarer still for someone like that to support a team other than Celtic.
As an aside, I am both delighted by Aberdeen's win over Rangers this weekend and nervous that our next game will be against Rangers @ Ibrox. I imagine they'll be pretty fired up judging by how many still-angry Gers fans I've seen trolling Aberdeen FB groups :D
Btw you might like the r/ScottishFootball subreddit. I’m not really a Redditor but its a pretty fun place with some good banter
>THE ONLY sports governing body that has figured this out (for sports I like, anyway), is F1.
Unless you live in Australia, where F1TV gives you live timing and not much else. Foxtel seem to have F1 locked up here - the cheapest option I have is Kayo (an affiliated streaming service) for $25/mth.
I actually feel this should maybe be regulated. Sportsball** seems to manipulate humans at an instinctive level to a degree that most other media doesn’t, stirring up an artificial form of tribalism or patriotism. To then charge a huge amount of money and make people basically do a dance to get the product is gross. Especially when it is so popular among groups with not so much disposable income to throw at it, and when tax dollars are often used to fund sports infrastructure (at least in the US).
**I.e. spectator-focused sports leagues, not leagues regular people actually play in, those don’t have this issue.
For anyone who is low to mildly interested in sports, this is pushing them to consume zero sports. I wonder if they're not shooting themselves in the foot long term.
World Chase Tag has solved this by broadcasting exclusively on ESPN after a slight delay, and then uploading the matches to their own website and to YouTube for free after a slightly longer delay. But they're still in the position of growing their audience, so the free content (and full back catalogue on YouTube) is important. That marketing position might change in time.
Completely agree on F1 - it's super easy and I get more than I could ever consume. Between highlight episodes, multiple commentary tracks, live data, and race archives including seasons 10 years ago they've done a great job. I don't even question buying again each year.
Just wish the old seasons included qualifying and practice sessions. That's the only thing I still have look for from other sources.
Absolutely love that you can turn commentary off, though, even on old races. I used to have a very rube golberg esque solution playing the same stream through two players, bouncing them to mono and playing with the polarity to remove the comms feed.
This article could use big improvements in both its tone and organization.
People don't have a lot of love for greedy sports broadcasters, and tech people are often associated with a kind of "information wants to be free" ethos (for better or worse), so starting out your blog post with:
> identify and take action against soccer pirates and other delinquents who try to stream copyrighted content
comes across as pretty tone-deaf for the intended audience. Delinquents? What's next, are they going to tell me not to copy that floppy, or ask if I'd download a car?
What's crazier is that they actually have good justification but don't put it until the end of the article -- that pirates are using the service to broadcast streams that become super-popular (racking up charges) and then don't pay their bills for bandwidth and processing, losing near a million dollars in a year. Talk about burying the lead.
This article is a great example of what not to do. But it's a great learning opportunity for the rest of us. Always start your article with why the article subject matters. Don't wait until the end, don't just assume the reader is on your side.
...And also maybe don't call people delinquents when a decent proportion of your readership probably watches some of these same pirated streams...
Not the author, but I am a Muxer with edit access. I agree that the "delinquent" bit isn't hitting the intended tone there so I went ahead and made a quick edit to at least address that piece. I think the author intended as a reference to the payment kind of delinquency, but I can see why it wouldn't read that way.
The sentence easily read as calling consumers of streams "delinquents", and that's how I had read it. Because the verb "to stream" can be used to refer to both the server and client, same as "pirate" refers to both distributor and consumer. I had definitely read it as them calling the viewers of soccer streams being delinquents and pirates, since no further context was given.
This was my point -- the actual context isn't explained until the very end. And even then, it doesn't unambiguously clarify who is being attacked at the top.
I wish they explained the cost model more rather than just vaguely mention they had $750,000 in unpaid bills in 2021. How much does one game game/cost them?
People used their service to run the illegal streams and then didn't pay for it. Or they abused a free trial credits and MUX got a takedown notice, so someone used their service for free and they got a bad rep for it.
As a side note, another way to look at this is like email spam relays. Illegal activity utilising public services to deliver content (although in this case those receiving it will actually want the traffic). It still hurts the reputation of the service provider with people who spend a lot of money. I don't work for MUX but I work in live sports and we certainly appreciate service providers who prevent piracy, as well as have a negative opinion of those that don't (e.g. Cloudflare).
I know my views are about as popular as health insurance providers among a significant number of people here. But ultimately I work in tech for a company that's investing a huge amount of effort into getting rights to consumers (based on what we've been able to license) and when people steal our work to profit from it, it sucks. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
> The contractor can escalate or silence the alert using the buttons on the Slack message. If it is a false positive, they will press “Silence,” which activates another n8n workflow that adds the asset to an allowlist, so it won’t alert again.
So if I were a prospective soccer pirate hoping to take advantage of Mux publishing the specific details of their content moderation system, could I just stream myself harmlessly showing off my soccer jersey collection for an hour to get future alerts ignored and then swap the feed over to soccer when the game starts? Granted I'm sure they'll take notice once they get a DMCA letter, but I imagine it might take awhile for everyone involved to catch on.
You’d be surprised how quickly a decently popular stream get dmca’ed these days (and in some jurisdictions your entire domain is autoblocked by isps). Content owners use automated tooling to scour the web for their IP
Presumably, but they could always add more heuristics like tracking viewership spikes. Sounds like they'd have a way to append more checks and were aiming for "good enough for now".
This already happens to an extent. I've noticed that some live streams will splice in non-football content (lets say a car commercial or sports panel discussion) for 10-20 seconds, then switch back to the live feed. This is done to circumvent the image recognition described in the article.
People pirate streams of soccer matches because it's nearly impossible to pay for legally. The matches for a single team or league are spread out amongst a ton of different streaming providers. Sometimes there is no paid option at all because of region blocking and complicated deals.
I happily pay Apple for MLS matches because there was no reliable way to get them here in New Zealand. It is still stupid because Apple has no idea what they're doing, the announcers are terrible, the audio levels all over the place, random silence, it gets loud, then random cutting between shots... At least it streams well.
But for other leagues? It is cheaper to go buy a ticket to watch the Wellington Phoenix at the stadium than it is to pay for streaming! Even then I can only find some matches.
What about other leagues? I follow Uruguayan soccer... good luck finding a place I could even pay for that which licenses the content in New Zealand.
My only hope is that this post about how to block pirate streaming will help the pirates evade being blocked.
Plenty of people also pirate to avoid paying, or to pay less.
I knew someone in England who ran a pirate football streaming service. He had TV and streaming subscriptions to a rented apartment in Cyprus, and streamed from there to people who paid him in England. Customers were introduced by word-of-mouth, so supposedly it was difficult for the copyright holders to discover.
The same matches were shown in England, but at a higher price.
I work in the tech side of a sports streaming company.
A quoted statistic from a study that was made a few years ago suggests that around 30% of people consuming pirate content are "pay never". We've done some exercises that show that a proportion of people can be encouraged not to watch pirate streams, but a good proportion won't no matter the cost.
Interestingly, we did an event where we made a significant match available for free, you still had to register for a 30 day trial, but you could easily cancel and pay nothing. The piracy on that match was no different than any other match and the estimated pirate viewership (we have various ways of estimating impact) was NO LOWER.
I have every sympathy with people who don't have access to content, and even for a portion of those who can't afford it. I certainly want everyone to get affordable content everywhere, I strive with my colleagues to make it better and deliver it in a cost effective way. But ultimately, we cannot ignore that too many people could afford to pay and don't want to. It's all well and good to point the finger at faceless corporations or the perception of the leagues, but ultimately its engineers like me who have to struggle with piracy, it's our work that's affected.
I have the same problem like the others say in Germany. I have a Bundesliga season ticket for which I pay 360 euros and I see all home matches in person. Away matches are a completely different story. Half of them are shown by Sky, the other half by DAZN, and for some matches they only show highlights during the game. Sky wants 30 euros per month and at least a year of subscription and DAZN wants 25 euros per month.
My life doesn't revolve around football, I don't need to see all matches, just my team's. I would gladly pay 10-12 euros for pay per view, but no, that's apparently not an option.
Back in 2012 (!) I had a streaming package from Rogers that gave me access to most English Premier League and all Champions League games, for about $300. Well worth the price then. The next year, they lost the rights to CL games, didn't announce it to customer and kept charging the same amount!
It's also an FU to people like me who work on the legal side of streaming. My work is devalued and my efforts are stolen by pirates for their own profit. They get the privilege of profiting from the streams we make which requires massive infrastructure, yet we get vilified.
It's one thing to hate the way things are structured, it's another to think that it doesn't affect real people.
”If it is a false positive, they will press “Silence,” which activates another n8n workflow that adds the asset to an allowlist, so it won’t alert again.”
So the secret is to first stream a safe video that will purposely trigger a false positive, and then switch to a pirate stream later on.
Readit News
Mux is a streaming infrastructure provider. They provide services for companies who want to stream video to their users -- news web sites, video chat services, etc. Kind of like web hosting, but specifically for video. They are not a video content provider; they do not sell subscriptions to end users.
Mux's problem is that pirates will sign up for their service to restream pirated video content, like live sports streams:
Official stream --> pirate --> Mux --> viewers
When this happens, Mux usually gets stiffed on the bill, and if the stream stays up, Mux gets legal nastygrams from the content owners. So it's in Mux's interest that they detect these pirates quickly and terminate service before they run up too much of a bill. The blog post explains how they do that.
I'm left wondering if they also forward these details to the copyright holders or the FBI.
What they do here (preventing "piracy" and reducing cost) is no different from what other hosting platforms do.
FWIW, I didn't get a bad impression and learned about MUX in the first place (good).
Dead Comment
I enjoy being able to sign up and just try a thing without interacting with a sales team, but... I mean. This is a video CDN, not a newspaper subscription. I definitely know what I would do (but I am not a successful business)
Doesn't the DMCA give several days to remove the content? At which point any stream will be long gone anyway?
You could argue that this means that you don't have to act for two weeks, but in practice this is where if you got into legal proceedings you'd be looking at damages claims for the period.
You get two types of hosting providers: those who act promptly and those that don't. Those that don't, mostly fall into one of two camps: conscious safe spaces for piracy (and potentially other dubious content) and providers who don't have the facility to do anything promptly (e.g. no 24/7 NOC looking at email notices).
It seems like such a weird place to be in.
Seems like they're motivated to moderate in this case, because this usage costs them money and the users that sign up for this type of usage tend not to pay their bills.
IMHO, it might make more sense to work on usage tiers, sales calls, and collecting good payment before incurring large costs, more than a pipeline to inspect user content, including sending it to an uninvolved third party (Google Vision), but maybe that's just me.
I live in the US.
I briefly took an interest in the EPL. If I wanted to watch all EPL games (or have the option of watching any particular EPL game), I'd have to subscribe to Peacock _and_ Fubo -- and I'm still not sure that gets me all games.
I briefly took an interest in the NHL (this was years ago, granted -- things may have changed). If I would have subscribed to their service, the ONLY team whose home games I couldn't watch would have been the TEAM OF THE CITY I LIVE IN (i.e.: "my" team).
My two favorite sports, though, are Cycling and F1.
I LOVE cycling. To watch every UCI race, I'd have to subscribe to GCN+ (they have the Giro), Peacock (they have the Tour de France and La Vuelta), and Flobikes (they have most of the Classics races).
THE ONLY sports governing body that has figured this out (for sports I like, anyway), is F1. I pay F1.com $80 a year and get MORE content than I would if I watched the races on ESPN. I can see EVERY RACE, EVERY QUALIFYING, EVERY PRACTICE. I can even choose WHOSE car I want to see the first person view from.
If you want to "stop pirates", make it easy for them to give you money and watch their favorite sport.
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.
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?
"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
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.
Deleted Comment
I am heartbroken too at the amount of historical matches that will be lost because they simply aren't available. NWSL, FA WSL, International Friendlies or International Cups. It will all be lost over time as streaming partnerships change. The key to making better players is a better soccer culture and that means the key is to have them watch the game, love the game.
I have had seasons where I have almost quit as a fan because how frustratingly disorganized it all is. I know partnerships are important, but these leagues need to start pushing for their own streaming infrastructure or unified streaming partner or they will see the sport tip into irrelevance with the general public.
The twitch deal ended last season, but americans only had to deal with one twitch channel, which aired the twitch exclusive matches. The other twitch channels were exclusively for international viewers, and they had to have multiple channels due to matches being on at the same time.
With the twitch deal over, international viewers can watch on NWSL's own website again, like we did years ago, before the ESPN and later twitch deals.
When it comes to international sports, the whole "where to watch" is so painful, especially women's sport, as it's covered less, and most broadcast deals are in the local country, and very rarely international coverage at all.
The brits have done a great job with FA Player, but also in selling the international rights to broadcast companies. Their lawyers though... the rights contracts are so shitty. To take England/FA WSL as an example, Viaplay bought the rights, and they air the matches that receive proper tv production in England (2-3 matches per round), but they also force FA to geoblock the other matches, so we can't watch them live on FA Player, only on demand 24 hours later.
They even geoblock short clips on twitter. Utterly bizarre, as these international broadcasters aren't posting similar clips.
What are important things that are different in the women's game? Tactical style, practical impact of rules, physicality of contact fouls, etc? Are brawls (controlling for country/culture) as common in women's soccer as in men's?
I remember growing up it would be really common for people to split the cost of a PPV fight and VHS recordings would be passed around. It seems pretty similar.
Community-based media sharing is great. I wish it was possible for me to lend all of my Steam games when I'm not using them.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CunwUs08og
For example, I would pay $200+ to watch Tennis Opens, but I need it to be a simple transaction and 1 click to watch the game from the schedule page on the tennis association website.
You can do that, actually. It has some pretty big caveats, but if you are not actively playing anything on Steam then your library can be lent out to others... all you have to do is sign into their computer using your Steam credentials.
If I'm going to the trouble of exposing a VPN service over the internet for my friends, it's not so I can also pay for a streaming service.
I suspect there are so many great deals on Steam specifically because it's not possible.
I don't disagree, but that isn't something Mux is in a position to do. They just provide video streaming infrastructure -- they're in no position to demand that various sports broadcast rightsholders change their policies.
But some of those people are also PAYING to watch plenty of games in whatever sport they are "pirating" streams for. Calling these people "pirates" fails to acknowledge that they are also "paying customers" who are frustrated with how complicated it has become to pay for the product they want to watch.
Gaben is right. Piracy is a service problem.
Media companies like to claim that each act of piracy costs them huge sums of money. That isn't true, but I wish it was.
In F1 there is only one serie/league. And that doesn't give you access to all 4 wheel motorsport, let alone openwheel ones. An F1 subscription doesn't give you access to formula E, formula nippon, national formula 3 championships, or the different motorsport series accross the world. Nor does it give you access to rallying. MotoGP did the same and I used to watch all their races. Now since I want to watch cycling anyway I only pay for eurosport which allows me to watch most races as well as superbike, moto and car endurance, as well as some rallying and formula E. But there is no way I will pay separarely for MotoGP and F1. In that case they just lost a viewer for good.
Also, for 1 F1 grand prix there are 20 to 50 soccer play or cycling races. The thing is cycling races and tv rights aren't managed by the governing body, but by different orgs. On one hand this is annoying to us because ASO, RCA and Flanders Classics (the 3 majors organizers) can sell rights to different channels. On the other hand a monopoly wouldn't necessarily better for the sports, the riders and the smaller races. If there had to be a monopoly, I would wish its shareholders would be the racers themselves but that won't ever happen.
I lived a ten minute walk from the Cubs' stadium and really wanted to watch every game. I moved to Chicago the year before they won the world series and got to experience all the build up, so was extremely excited to follow them.
But even though I had a MLB.tv subscription, from T-Mobile, it was completely useless the entire time I lived in Chicago. The Cubs' games were on an over the air network, WGN, for decades, so I had to spend money for a one time expense of an antennae to be privileged to watch some games and the added inconvenience of switching away from my streaming box.
Soon after they won the world series, they moved to a cable only network Marquee. I would have been forced to pay for cable to get the same shitty experience of watching only some games. I ended up only ever watching games I was physically at or when a game aligned with the exact time I happened to be at a bar with it on in the background.
Blackout rules feel like a completely untenable situation if baseball wants anyone under 45 to get in to the sport.
There's been some hinting from MLB that they know blackouts are painful for fans, but without being able to alter/cancel the RSN contracts they're up shit creek, legally speaking.
What's interesting right now is that Diamond Sports Group (Bally Sports) just recently declared bankruptcy and they own/operate the RSNs for almost half of MLB teams. They are behind on their rights payments and MLB is trying to forcibly get broadcast rights back so they can presumably stream on mlb.tv. If that happens it could give MLB some power and put the issue more front and center. Maybe. Here's hoping.
And I don't mean to white knight MLB here, they made this bed for themselves by making exclusive deals with RSNs in the past. But now it's not as easy as MLB just ending blackouts by decree. Not without a lot of lawsuits.
But someday it has to happen. For the good of the game and fanbase. Please be soon.
It's crazy thinking about baseball growing up. It was just on TV. Or it was on the Radio. Or it was in the newspaper. Either way, it was everywhere you looked during baseball season. These days its a different world. People don't subscribe to the newspaper and see the big win on the front page anymore. They don't listen to AM radio swing by swing while they drive, cut grass, watch their kids, operate the cash register at work, doing whatever with the game on. It was so amazingly unavoidably accessible.
These days its totally locked down. You can't fire up any TV you encounter and get to the game in a few presses of a remote anymore. You can't be sure you'd see the game when you'd go out in bars, much less overhear anyone's AM radio. Executives forgot why baseball became America's pasttime: because it was in your god damn face all the time! It's like making friends, you tend to make friends with the people life happens to have you spend more time with, like your classmates or coworkers you spend the bulk of the day with. Baseball is really in a death spiral with the direction of the current mlb office IMO. And that is to say nothing about the actual state of the game of baseball (various hardly punished cheating scandals, favoritism in officiating, juiced balls, etc).
That's not just a problem outside the US. In order for me to watch my local team's games (well, 130 out of 162), I must have a cable TV subscription (minimum package that includes the specific channel ~$100/month) -- even to watch the games on the channel's streaming platform.
MLB.tv is worse than useless, as those with local broadcast rights require MLB.tv (as well as other channels) to black out games that they carry.
I'd happily pay MLB.tv (or anyone else) to watch my local team's games $24.95/month. But I can't even do that!
Deleted Comment
Now im literally paying pirates. Its a pittance and its much better service.
https://www.theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
They don't want to cannibalize in-person attendance where fans pay for $300 tickets and $20 pints of beer.
I can watch all of it on YouTube or Twitch for free.
No. The only ones who figured it out is the NFL. F1 shafted Germany after youg Schuhmacher came into F1 and German Sky bought exclusive rights.
The NFL? Intl Game Pass €190 per season live streams, instant repeats no adverts, various show, dedicated tv apps, no limit on number of devices, high def.
American football, ice hockey, baseball, basketball all have “black out” games and other bullshit, plus many times require a secondary subscription to a “TV” subscription, where you then have to hunt down which media provider is streaming the game.
I would rather save my time and just not watch sports. Only US soccer is decent because you can simply pay Apple and guarantee watch all the games.
F1 is great in the US. I can't speak to NFL -- I don't watch it. However, I suspect it may be a better deal in Europe (where they are trying to get new fans) than in the US (where it's one of, if not "the", most popular sports).
This is similar to GCN+ for cycling. In the US, it doesn't get you much -- but from what I understand, in some (most?) European countries, GCN+ gets you most (if not all) UCI cycling evnets.
This is why I won't give the NHL or MLB any money for their video services.
This is a good example of the situation in many sports. The UCI is a governing body, not an event organiser or promoter. Basically anyone can put on race, and they are responsible for making money out of it. So event promoters make their own deals with broadcasters.
Figuring out that I need to subscribe to GCN+, Peacock, and Flobikes in the US was no small feat (and it changes from year to year!).
As best I can tell... The classics and spring season are spread across Flo, GCN+, and Peacock.
Giro is GCN+.
le Tour is Peacock.
Road worlds is Flo.
Vuelta is Peacock.
And the UCI mountain bike stuff is (mostly) on GCN+ (used to be Redbull, maybe)
I'd happily spend $300/year or so to get it all in one place. Instead, I end up watching highlights on Youtube. I don't torrent because I have an iPad, so I can't (without jumping through hoops) - but I'm tempted to grab a cheap PC just to torrent cycling.
If you were okay with not watching it live, people were torrenting each day's stage of the tour de France in 2004. There is a pretty big overlap between tech industry people and enthusiastic road cyclists.
Now there's whole communities of people sharing the euro broadcasts of just about everything race for worldwide people to watch.
I mean I like different sports but I mostly stick to the one I love the most (cycling) and even then I skip most of it and only watch the events that count the most for me (spring classics, a bit of the grand tour in the background especially while working, world champs and MTB world cups). And given the choice to go for a bicycle ride or watch a cycling race, I will always go for the former and do the later only when I am tired, my partner or kids aren't at home or busy doing something else and I feel like lying for a bit on the couch after my own ride. I don't mind the occasionnal motogp, world rallycross, or rally coverage but I have accepted I can't both follow everything and live a decent and happy familial and social life.
Only exception being Paris-Roubaix which is probably one of the only classic that is worth watching from km 0. But even then I didn't watched live this year. I avoided getting spoiled by living mostly offline appart from professionnal stuff for 3 days before dedicating the time to watch it.
It is the same for social medias in fact. Most of them are trying to make you feel bad if you don't see all their content. I deleted my twitter, fb, instagram accounts a while ago and although I keep a bit of presence in mastodon I have accepted the fact that I will just connect to it a few times a week and miss tons of informations/content/jokes. Is my life worse for it? Well, not really.
I don't watch much cycling stuff, but sometimes I want to sit down and watch a CX race, or maybe one of the MTB races, or the TdF highlights or something... But there's just no one platform for it.
On top of that I watch Serie A, Paramount+ has better coverage of this. But then you want to watch UEFA Europa and Champions leagues.
It gets very confusing and very costly.
I don't get why the individual leagues don't get smart and have their own streaming services rather than relying on legacy broadcasting services.
As for Cycling, I am in the same boat with GCN & Peacock. DIdn't know about flobikes so thanks for giving me something else to purchase :)
As an aside, I am both delighted by Aberdeen's win over Rangers this weekend and nervous that our next game will be against Rangers @ Ibrox. I imagine they'll be pretty fired up judging by how many still-angry Gers fans I've seen trolling Aberdeen FB groups :D
Btw you might like the r/ScottishFootball subreddit. I’m not really a Redditor but its a pretty fun place with some good banter
Unless you live in Australia, where F1TV gives you live timing and not much else. Foxtel seem to have F1 locked up here - the cheapest option I have is Kayo (an affiliated streaming service) for $25/mth.
**I.e. spectator-focused sports leagues, not leagues regular people actually play in, those don’t have this issue.
Absolutely love that you can turn commentary off, though, even on old races. I used to have a very rube golberg esque solution playing the same stream through two players, bouncing them to mono and playing with the polarity to remove the comms feed.
People don't have a lot of love for greedy sports broadcasters, and tech people are often associated with a kind of "information wants to be free" ethos (for better or worse), so starting out your blog post with:
> identify and take action against soccer pirates and other delinquents who try to stream copyrighted content
comes across as pretty tone-deaf for the intended audience. Delinquents? What's next, are they going to tell me not to copy that floppy, or ask if I'd download a car?
What's crazier is that they actually have good justification but don't put it until the end of the article -- that pirates are using the service to broadcast streams that become super-popular (racking up charges) and then don't pay their bills for bandwidth and processing, losing near a million dollars in a year. Talk about burying the lead.
This article is a great example of what not to do. But it's a great learning opportunity for the rest of us. Always start your article with why the article subject matters. Don't wait until the end, don't just assume the reader is on your side.
...And also maybe don't call people delinquents when a decent proportion of your readership probably watches some of these same pirated streams...
Thanks for the feedback!
This was my point -- the actual context isn't explained until the very end. And even then, it doesn't unambiguously clarify who is being attacked at the top.
Pirating is illegal and unethical. I do it - most of us do - but pretending it's a moral high ground against "greedy broadcasters" is just weird.
It seems very reasonable for a streaming company to have issue with people who abuse their services and cost them time and money.
As a side note, another way to look at this is like email spam relays. Illegal activity utilising public services to deliver content (although in this case those receiving it will actually want the traffic). It still hurts the reputation of the service provider with people who spend a lot of money. I don't work for MUX but I work in live sports and we certainly appreciate service providers who prevent piracy, as well as have a negative opinion of those that don't (e.g. Cloudflare).
I know my views are about as popular as health insurance providers among a significant number of people here. But ultimately I work in tech for a company that's investing a huge amount of effort into getting rights to consumers (based on what we've been able to license) and when people steal our work to profit from it, it sucks. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
So if I were a prospective soccer pirate hoping to take advantage of Mux publishing the specific details of their content moderation system, could I just stream myself harmlessly showing off my soccer jersey collection for an hour to get future alerts ignored and then swap the feed over to soccer when the game starts? Granted I'm sure they'll take notice once they get a DMCA letter, but I imagine it might take awhile for everyone involved to catch on.
I happily pay Apple for MLS matches because there was no reliable way to get them here in New Zealand. It is still stupid because Apple has no idea what they're doing, the announcers are terrible, the audio levels all over the place, random silence, it gets loud, then random cutting between shots... At least it streams well.
But for other leagues? It is cheaper to go buy a ticket to watch the Wellington Phoenix at the stadium than it is to pay for streaming! Even then I can only find some matches.
What about other leagues? I follow Uruguayan soccer... good luck finding a place I could even pay for that which licenses the content in New Zealand.
My only hope is that this post about how to block pirate streaming will help the pirates evade being blocked.
I knew someone in England who ran a pirate football streaming service. He had TV and streaming subscriptions to a rented apartment in Cyprus, and streamed from there to people who paid him in England. Customers were introduced by word-of-mouth, so supposedly it was difficult for the copyright holders to discover.
The same matches were shown in England, but at a higher price.
A quoted statistic from a study that was made a few years ago suggests that around 30% of people consuming pirate content are "pay never". We've done some exercises that show that a proportion of people can be encouraged not to watch pirate streams, but a good proportion won't no matter the cost.
Interestingly, we did an event where we made a significant match available for free, you still had to register for a 30 day trial, but you could easily cancel and pay nothing. The piracy on that match was no different than any other match and the estimated pirate viewership (we have various ways of estimating impact) was NO LOWER.
I have every sympathy with people who don't have access to content, and even for a portion of those who can't afford it. I certainly want everyone to get affordable content everywhere, I strive with my colleagues to make it better and deliver it in a cost effective way. But ultimately, we cannot ignore that too many people could afford to pay and don't want to. It's all well and good to point the finger at faceless corporations or the perception of the leagues, but ultimately its engineers like me who have to struggle with piracy, it's our work that's affected.
My life doesn't revolve around football, I don't need to see all matches, just my team's. I would gladly pay 10-12 euros for pay per view, but no, that's apparently not an option.
I don't condone it, but hypothetically, the $7 a month I pay to stream illegally is a fuck you to the leagues and their rights owners.
It's one thing to hate the way things are structured, it's another to think that it doesn't affect real people.
So the secret is to first stream a safe video that will purposely trigger a false positive, and then switch to a pirate stream later on.
Or just make it look at a glance like a safe stream: https://www.polygon.com/2017/12/4/16733386/ufc-pay-per-view-...
That strategy would probably work for a lot of major sports.