- Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month.
- The official app, with over 10 million downloads, asks you for microphone and GPS permissions.
- La Liga remotely activates the microphone and tries to detect if the sound matches with that of a football match. In addition, it uses the geolocation of the phone to locate exactly where the establishment is located. That way they can locate bars and other establishments where football is being pirated or showed without paying for the bar package.
Still amazes me this just sort of went by and no one really seemed bothered. Absolutely insane.
> - Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month.
This is common in Europe in general, also for copyrighted music. If your establishment wants to play recorded music, even just playing the radio or Spotify on the background, a copyright royalty fee has to be paid.
Applies to all venues and events. Bars, restaurants, grocery shops, barbers, sports events, concerts, taxis, lounges, everything with an audience.
I don't want to say it's the same everywhere in the EU, but I have always assumed it's a common concept in most western countries at least.
In most EU countries private copying levies are paid to the copyright mafia any time you purchase a hard drive, printer or even a blank cassette. Because you know, you might copy something using it.
This is common in many countries around the world.
I’m sure the prices have gone up since that comment, but 200€/month actually seems very reasonable for a commercial bar that shows sporting events. That’s let’s than 7€/day and would be more than covered by the first group of people walking in the door and buying a round of drinks.
I don’t approve of the microphone activation spying stuff or the ridiculous internet blocking. However it’s also kind of bizarre that it reached this point when the monthly fees for bar owners were such a trivial amount.
It's not the same everywhere in the EU, but here in Poland as an establishment owner you have to pay this fee to an agency that purports to represent the musicians. As you describe eg. Spotify in background.
This agency pays out proportionately to registered licensed musicians, but the proportions are calculated in some ridiculous way that doesn't really factor in who's music is played. It means that the only folks who get reasonable payouts from this agency are, like, stars and old hits authors. The ones who's music gets played a lot in radio and other places. Winners take all.
The reality is that a lot of that cash is really for some chums who's job it is to be controllers.
AFAIK the entire scheme is a result of that one and only legacy industry that needs to protect it's interests: football and sports in venues, and maybe music clubs. In practice it means you rarely see TVs in bars the way you do in the US.
Private corporations acting like police, engaging in illegal wiretapping and eavesdropping at massive scales to detect and punish crimes as defined by themselves.
No, the bar pays something like 10x the price of a normal subscription to be able to publicly show live Sports as a draw for their customers.
In UK/Ireland you can easily identify if the venue in question is paying for the commercial package as it will intermittently display a pint glass symbol in a bottom corner of the screen. Indeed, Sky investigators, who do spot checks, use it to quickly ensure that the pub has a valid pub contract and not a residential contract.
La Liga are presumably muxing infrasonic audio into their residential streams to try and:
(a) watermark the residential account(s) used to provide the streaming services so they can prosecute the providers
(b) Detect commercial usage of residential accounts used in piracy to prosecute the venues, by listening out via the App.
They could presumably get around GDPR by virtue of the fact they're only listening and recording audio out of human audible range, and only for identification of copyright infringement as per the TOS of the La Liga App.
I would never agree to this. But it doesn't strike me as particularly unethical, either. So long as both parties understand what they're agreeing to, this seems perfectly fine.
If, for example, the NFL ever did this, I would just not watch.
I'm not sure about other sports, but for the MLB, there are some very strange policies that make it difficult to watch games even if you want to pay for it, mostly stemming from the local broadcasters of the games. Even if you sign up for the subscription service to stream games, they'll "black out" the games that they expect you to be able to watch by getting a cable subscription, which not only is ridiculous (since one on of the main selling points for streaming is to not have to pay for a bundle of things you mostly don't want to be able to get the few things you do), but it assumes that people will never be traveling and unable to watch the games locally even if they do normally have access to it. My dad frequently travels for work, and he pays for the streaming service mostly to be able to watch Phillies games despite living in the Boston area, but the blackout rules mean that he can't even watch the Red Sox games with the streaming service if he's traveling outside of Boston. He also can't watch the Phillies games when they play the Red Sox in Boston, which is mostly fine, but it's still a little weird since he'll be have to watch the Red Sox broadcast (and therefore their commentators) rather than the Phillies one he's used to seeing for their games. The games that are given special slots on ESPN also tend to be blacked out for everyone, so that also causes issues for people wanting to stream them even if it's not a local game. The whole model seems to be more about trying to railroad people in paying for a less convenient, more expensive product even when they actively want to pay for something that's actually available but artificially limited. I don't get why anyone would be surprised that people just turn to "piracy" when things work like this.
The whole copyright institution seems pretty unethical to me. It's wild that someone can own the royalties to a particular piece of content for 70+ years after the original creator dies (at least that's the law in the US, I assume similar elsewhere), and that the creator can unilaterally name his price for licenses to that content (you can't even know if you want the content without first paying for a license to consume it) and then if you want to put the content into a different format (for example, if you own an HD Blu-Ray and want to put it on a hard drive) you effectively have to pay for a _new license_ for the same content. This is just scratching the surface of the ethical bankruptcy associated with intellectual property.
In Italy something similar is happening: they have split the football game rights among different competitors, so that if you want to watch every game you have to spend >100€ monthly (that's very high for our economy).
To this, add the facts that there has been a major hit to illegal streaming piracy and that football games are getting extremely boring in our country (compared to the Premier League or our Serie A of twenty years ago).
The major effect of this is that newest generations aren't giving a shit anymore about football, much less than their parents and grandparents.
These people are trying to milk a cow that will be dry in less than 5 years, unless a major revolution happens in FIGC (Italian Football Federation).
> they have split the football game rights among different competitors, so that if you want to watch every game you have to spend >100€ monthly
Same in Germany.
> newest generations aren't giving a shit anymore about football
Also the same in Germany.
But I am not sure which direction the causality goes. Maybe people are less interested in football because of the shenanigans they are constantly pulling. Or maybe they try to squeeze the remaining audience because people are less interested. It may also not be related at all.
Most leagues face the same issue: just one to three wealthy clubs dominate, winning around 70–80% of the time, which makes the competition less exciting. The German Bundesliga is one of the starkest examples: Bayern Munich has taken 16 of the last 20 titles.
I think it’s most likely that football is honestly a bit shit, and there are many better things to do for entertainment that don’t require mortgaging a kidney to watch.
What pisses me off over here, is that for some strange reason, well not strange rather the whole thing that is being discussed, we hardly get any matches on the radio, whereas in the south this is a given, even in Spain.
It is always some streaming service like Magenta Sport, and that's it.
In Ireland it's closer to €200/month just for Soccer depending on who you support. As a result 1 in 5 homes in Ireland admit to having a 'dodgy box' - i.e. an android or SoC box capable of running an IPTV Subscription pirating live Digital TV and various streaming services. These are usually sold as an annual subscription for €50-100 in pubs and on places like facebook marketplace.
The Irish Legal Community has already raised issues with how Sky is going about tracking down infringement at the user level, as they have an appalling record in this area and are likely to try and emulate the egregious situation in Spain to mitigate or retaliate.
What's even more ridiculous is the "3pm blackout" rule which prevents football matches from being shown on UK television between 14:45 and 17:15 on Saturdays when 50% of fixtures in the top two divisions are scheduled to kick off at 15:00. The policy was introduced in the 1960s to encourage fans to attend lower league games - and it remains in force even in the globalised streaming era. Sadly the rights-holders can't be bothered splitting the package for Ireland, so we get to pay more for SkySports and still have to buy additional services.
In short, piracy is always a service issue. As a soccer fan going legit you'd possibly need to maintain a Sky Sports, BT Sport, TNT Sports and Premier Sports subscription. God forbid you want screen-casting support or 4K resolution.
In Ireland you STILL can't purchase/watch UFC PPVs as one-offs, there isn't a way for you to watch it legally the next day or live as a single event. The only way would be to get a subscription to a big provider like SkyTV or NOW!
What pisses me off is that they've said (in Germany) that they are trying to avoid monopolies and the rights need to go to multiple rights owners. Instead of giving the same rights to multiple broadcasters as would be normal for real non-monopolies, they split up the rights and gave each part to a single broadcaster. Which means, the full broadcasting rights are held by multiple parties, e.g. it's not a monopoly, but each broadcaster has a monopoly over his part of the cake. Which means if you want to have the whole cake as a fan, you need to pay the cartel, i.e. all broadcasters at once.
Best way to watch sports now is to go to a bar that broadcasts it. If you have a drink, it only costs you 5EUR/match. Maybe you watch 5-6 matches a month, so still cheaper than 100EUR/month and you get drinks and service included.
They pulled the plug on the project almost right away.
Apparently, it had something to do with YouTube not being able to limit the live stream to Southeast Asian countries without it leaking to the rest of the world—where you’d need a pricey subscription to watch the game.
Anime has long had a model where shows are ‘free’ (historically, on broadcast TV) and the money comes from sales of disks, manga, and other merchandise. (On the other hand, Japan has copyright laws that make the US look laid back.)
To be fair for anime you can get pretty good coverage with only crunchyroll and a minimal price. Though some significant shows often end up locked on random services unfortunately.
The main reason I don't watch any one it is because it's all locked away under expensive subscriptions and I don't really live in a place with great football matches, so yeah...I'd actually be into it if it was accessible, I just couldn't be bothered figuring out how to watch it, nor can I afford 100 euroes a month.
So it looks like a self resolving problem? As a bonus football hooligans and football vandalism will disappear, and hopefully kids will be encouraged to do more creative activities than kicking a ball.
Sport is good and team sport is better. A "lifestyle guru" should know that. Kicking a ball is maybe the lowest entry barrier sport in many countries. I'm from latin america and here you grow playing fútbol. Find a ball, gather your friends and you're ready to go.
Given your username I wouldn't expect such harsh sentiment about people who enjoy playing football. I would prefer my kids play a sport they enjoy than sit on an iPad all day. But I'm not a lifestyle guru.
> As a bonus football hooligans and football vandalism will disappear,
You think these people would suddenly stop needing an outlet for their emotions? They'll find a different way of doing the same thing, around a different theme. If you've hanged out with people who are proud to be hooligans and ultras today, you'd see how removing football wouldn't get them to stop.
On the other hand kids (and adults) not getting enough exercise is a modern health crisis. More kids kicking a ball would be significant improvement over current status quo of kids staring at brainrot.
It's not only Cloudflare, but also other not so tiny CDNs are being blocked - currently an entire Backblaze B2 region is blocked in 3 out of 5 ISPs (!).
Particularly hurtful, the entire Cloudflare R2 is blocked during football matches so you can't pull Docker images or Ollama models.
The amount of resources that goes into soccer in many countries is really astonishing. It can be seen as a modern equivalent to bread and circuses however.
Yes, we know. Internet does not work in Spain when there are football matches.
It would be more interesting to know if something is getting done about this. Other businesses must work, people must communicate, the very same Spanish state must keep working. Is there any protest with at least a slight amount of hope?
Internet mostly works in Spain when there is a match: one can see traffic figures from the mayor exchange points: they are unaffected.
Big businesses are unaffected, since LaLiga will quickly reverse any block that impacts popular websites and risks triggering significant public outcry.
Most people in Spain don’t care — and many aren’t even aware of the overly broad blocks.
Cloudflare and RootedCON are challenging this in court, but it may take many years before a final outcome is reached.
> Internet does not work in Spain when there are football matches.
There's a distinction between the above statement and the truth, which is that CloudFlare and other large CDNs do not work in Spain when there are football matches.
Yes, it's not CloudFlare's fault in this instance, since I believe CloudFlare is not being notified to take action in real time. The blocking needs to happen quickly to block access to illegal streams of a live event. My understanding is that CloudFlare is largely out of the picture when this decision is happening, and CloudFlare is only taking the blame since that's what Twitch uses, which also can't react as quickly as La Liga wants.
That being said there is a solution to this that helps protect from collateral as well as the decentralized open nature of the internet: moving away from those large CDNs
I think moving away from cloudflare is not a solution because:
1. You need CDNs for reasonable web performance, especially on mobile. Hitting your dedicated server for every static asset like images is going to bring latency through the roof.
2. Many companies don't have a physical presence in Europe, but are still able to achieve adequate performance because of CDNs.
3. If everyone just moves off of cloudflare, the blocking would just increase. Nothing would be solved if even bigger ranges are blocked, and probably even more stuff would break.
Apparently it's not being communicated properly, or you don't actually read what you come across, because "Internet does not work in Spain when there are football matches" isn't true at all.
Large parts are blocked, yes, as collateral damage. But it doesn't seem like they're completely switching it off, as obviously then there would be huge protests, mostly because people wouldn't be able to legally watch the games then!
Access to the IP address detailed below has been blocked in the United
Kingdom by court order.
The block will apply to:
IP Address: 95.217.118.31
For all Premier League Match Periods Until: 07 Dec 2020
Further notifications will not be sent about this IP address unless and
until further infringements are detected after the date and time indicated
above, though the IP address will remain subject to blocking until then. If
your organisation is planning to reallocate this IP address to another
customer before the date listed above, please notify us at
ipallocation@friendmts.com with the appropriate information so that we can
consider releasing the IP from subsequent blocking.
I might be naive, but this is absolutely outrageous. What laws allow a private company dictate what IPs can be banned across an entire country? Are the ISPs voluntarily cooperating or are they now all obliged to follow LaLiga requests?
ISP with the right to football goes to court to report themselves (not a joke) about piracy happening in their networks.
An old man judge which understand technology as much as I understand biochemistry (nothing) decides that they need to stop piracy, His solution is to give laliga the power to block those illegal streams, that all ISP must comply for the time that a match exist. The judge covers himself by saying, that the blockage can't affect third parties.
All ISP happy comply. It does affect third parties.
Cloudflare (third party) puts a recourse to say that it is affecting their business. The very same old man, decides, that is not going to proceed with that investigation.
So cloudflare needs to to through a different slower legal procedure.
Meanwhile, we have a company with the authority to block what they want thanks to corruption.
Tribunals. But notice that a possible outcome here is that _Cloudflare_ gets mandated by the same tribunals to perform the blocking of sport streaming sites.
I obviously don't agree with spain doing this, but I also have trouble feeling sorry for cloudflare, since they're also in the business of randomly blocking certain IPs from accessing half the internet
Cloudflare created a problem where everything is centralized.
It's also, not that great. Even the most crude WordPress vulnerability scan requests aren't flagged or blocked. It seems most DDoS attacks may come through as well.
And I thought things were bad in my country where all "sports" shows are about football and you can have 3 different FM stations broadcasting the same game and they'll discuss football even when there is nothing going on.
It's a monothematic sporting desert.
I'm glad I raised my kids oblivious to this football religion.
Readit News
https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/8q1j0o/la_liga_uses...
- Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month.
- The official app, with over 10 million downloads, asks you for microphone and GPS permissions.
- La Liga remotely activates the microphone and tries to detect if the sound matches with that of a football match. In addition, it uses the geolocation of the phone to locate exactly where the establishment is located. That way they can locate bars and other establishments where football is being pirated or showed without paying for the bar package.
Still amazes me this just sort of went by and no one really seemed bothered. Absolutely insane.
This is common in Europe in general, also for copyrighted music. If your establishment wants to play recorded music, even just playing the radio or Spotify on the background, a copyright royalty fee has to be paid.
Applies to all venues and events. Bars, restaurants, grocery shops, barbers, sports events, concerts, taxis, lounges, everything with an audience.
I don't want to say it's the same everywhere in the EU, but I have always assumed it's a common concept in most western countries at least.
I’m sure the prices have gone up since that comment, but 200€/month actually seems very reasonable for a commercial bar that shows sporting events. That’s let’s than 7€/day and would be more than covered by the first group of people walking in the door and buying a round of drinks.
I don’t approve of the microphone activation spying stuff or the ridiculous internet blocking. However it’s also kind of bizarre that it reached this point when the monthly fees for bar owners were such a trivial amount.
This agency pays out proportionately to registered licensed musicians, but the proportions are calculated in some ridiculous way that doesn't really factor in who's music is played. It means that the only folks who get reasonable payouts from this agency are, like, stars and old hits authors. The ones who's music gets played a lot in radio and other places. Winners take all.
The reality is that a lot of that cash is really for some chums who's job it is to be controllers.
AFAIK the entire scheme is a result of that one and only legacy industry that needs to protect it's interests: football and sports in venues, and maybe music clubs. In practice it means you rarely see TVs in bars the way you do in the US.
Idk it's a shitty concept imho.
We truly are living in a cyberpunk dystopia.
E.g. I go to the pub, have a drink and watch some random LaLiga match on my phone?
In UK/Ireland you can easily identify if the venue in question is paying for the commercial package as it will intermittently display a pint glass symbol in a bottom corner of the screen. Indeed, Sky investigators, who do spot checks, use it to quickly ensure that the pub has a valid pub contract and not a residential contract.
https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/668952/why-pub-TV...
La Liga are presumably muxing infrasonic audio into their residential streams to try and:
(a) watermark the residential account(s) used to provide the streaming services so they can prosecute the providers
(b) Detect commercial usage of residential accounts used in piracy to prosecute the venues, by listening out via the App.
They could presumably get around GDPR by virtue of the fact they're only listening and recording audio out of human audible range, and only for identification of copyright infringement as per the TOS of the La Liga App.
How much do GPS/Galileo/GNSS jammers go for nowadays?
If, for example, the NFL ever did this, I would just not watch.
Same in Germany.
> newest generations aren't giving a shit anymore about football
Also the same in Germany.
But I am not sure which direction the causality goes. Maybe people are less interested in football because of the shenanigans they are constantly pulling. Or maybe they try to squeeze the remaining audience because people are less interested. It may also not be related at all.
Just because you want something to be true to make your argument...doesn't make it true.
Growth for memberships over the last few years are pretty strong especially in the under 16 age group with 9% yoy.[1]
Attendance is also on a steady upwards trend.[2]
The last EM also had new highs in viewership linear and streaming. As overall the non-linear media surrounding football is growing...[3]
[1] https://www.dfb.de/news/dfb-mitgliederstatistik-mehr-schiris...
[2] https://twocircles.com/gb/articles/2024-sports-attendance-ge...
[3] https://www.agf.de/en/services/press/press-release/tv-bilanz...
It is always some streaming service like Magenta Sport, and that's it.
That's not right. Still expensive, but the dual abo for Sky Bundesliga + DAZN is 65€ per month.[1]
1 https://www.sky.de/pakete-produkte/sky-dazn
The Irish Legal Community has already raised issues with how Sky is going about tracking down infringement at the user level, as they have an appalling record in this area and are likely to try and emulate the egregious situation in Spain to mitigate or retaliate.
https://www.lawsociety.ie/gazette/top-stories/2025/june/dodg...https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2025/0619/1519317-data-prote...
What's even more ridiculous is the "3pm blackout" rule which prevents football matches from being shown on UK television between 14:45 and 17:15 on Saturdays when 50% of fixtures in the top two divisions are scheduled to kick off at 15:00. The policy was introduced in the 1960s to encourage fans to attend lower league games - and it remains in force even in the globalised streaming era. Sadly the rights-holders can't be bothered splitting the package for Ireland, so we get to pay more for SkySports and still have to buy additional services.
In short, piracy is always a service issue. As a soccer fan going legit you'd possibly need to maintain a Sky Sports, BT Sport, TNT Sports and Premier Sports subscription. God forbid you want screen-casting support or 4K resolution.
In Ireland you STILL can't purchase/watch UFC PPVs as one-offs, there isn't a way for you to watch it legally the next day or live as a single event. The only way would be to get a subscription to a big provider like SkyTV or NOW!
https://old.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/1nf7ghg/serie_a_ann...
It's the same for anime, and guess what, I just pirate and pay no one.
These are good news, tbh.
Sport is good and team sport is better. A "lifestyle guru" should know that. Kicking a ball is maybe the lowest entry barrier sport in many countries. I'm from latin america and here you grow playing fútbol. Find a ball, gather your friends and you're ready to go.
You think these people would suddenly stop needing an outlet for their emotions? They'll find a different way of doing the same thing, around a different theme. If you've hanged out with people who are proud to be hooligans and ultras today, you'd see how removing football wouldn't get them to stop.
https://hayahora.futbolhttps://tinyuptime.sconde.net
It's not only Cloudflare, but also other not so tiny CDNs are being blocked - currently an entire Backblaze B2 region is blocked in 3 out of 5 ISPs (!).
Particularly hurtful, the entire Cloudflare R2 is blocked during football matches so you can't pull Docker images or Ollama models.
I for one think that football streaming should be blocked when I'm pulling docker images ;)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
It would be more interesting to know if something is getting done about this. Other businesses must work, people must communicate, the very same Spanish state must keep working. Is there any protest with at least a slight amount of hope?
Big businesses are unaffected, since LaLiga will quickly reverse any block that impacts popular websites and risks triggering significant public outcry.
Most people in Spain don’t care — and many aren’t even aware of the overly broad blocks.
Cloudflare and RootedCON are challenging this in court, but it may take many years before a final outcome is reached.
There's a distinction between the above statement and the truth, which is that CloudFlare and other large CDNs do not work in Spain when there are football matches.
Yes, it's not CloudFlare's fault in this instance, since I believe CloudFlare is not being notified to take action in real time. The blocking needs to happen quickly to block access to illegal streams of a live event. My understanding is that CloudFlare is largely out of the picture when this decision is happening, and CloudFlare is only taking the blame since that's what Twitch uses, which also can't react as quickly as La Liga wants.
That being said there is a solution to this that helps protect from collateral as well as the decentralized open nature of the internet: moving away from those large CDNs
1. You need CDNs for reasonable web performance, especially on mobile. Hitting your dedicated server for every static asset like images is going to bring latency through the roof.
2. Many companies don't have a physical presence in Europe, but are still able to achieve adequate performance because of CDNs.
3. If everyone just moves off of cloudflare, the blocking would just increase. Nothing would be solved if even bigger ranges are blocked, and probably even more stuff would break.
“Vuelva usted mañana.”
Large parts are blocked, yes, as collateral damage. But it doesn't seem like they're completely switching it off, as obviously then there would be huge protests, mostly because people wouldn't be able to legally watch the games then!
> On 27 Nov 23:27, operations@friendmts.com wrote: To whom it may concern:
Our reference: PRB-XXXXXX Security Code: 2x364371x-x45x-59x2-8760-32x46276790
Access to the IP address detailed below has been blocked in the United Kingdom by court order.
The block will apply to: IP Address: 95.217.118.31 For all Premier League Match Periods Until: 07 Dec 2020
Further notifications will not be sent about this IP address unless and until further infringements are detected after the date and time indicated above, though the IP address will remain subject to blocking until then. If your organisation is planning to reallocate this IP address to another customer before the date listed above, please notify us at ipallocation@friendmts.com with the appropriate information so that we can consider releasing the IP from subsequent blocking.
A copy of the court order, which was obtained by the Football Association Premier League Limited is available here: https://www.fmtsoperations.com/HC-2017-002013-ORDER.PDF
Any affected server operator or hosting provider has the right to apply to the Court to discharge or vary the Order.
An old man judge which understand technology as much as I understand biochemistry (nothing) decides that they need to stop piracy, His solution is to give laliga the power to block those illegal streams, that all ISP must comply for the time that a match exist. The judge covers himself by saying, that the blockage can't affect third parties.
All ISP happy comply. It does affect third parties.
Cloudflare (third party) puts a recourse to say that it is affecting their business. The very same old man, decides, that is not going to proceed with that investigation.
So cloudflare needs to to through a different slower legal procedure.
Meanwhile, we have a company with the authority to block what they want thanks to corruption.
This is what's happening in Italy, for example.
It's also, not that great. Even the most crude WordPress vulnerability scan requests aren't flagged or blocked. It seems most DDoS attacks may come through as well.
Don't get me even started on the checkbox.
It's a US data-hoarder.
It's a monothematic sporting desert.
I'm glad I raised my kids oblivious to this football religion.