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."
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.
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.
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!
Now im literally paying pirates. Its a pittance and its much better service.
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.
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).
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.
> Is the email address a company domain or a consumer email like Gmail?
Do you actually expect people to use their work email for personal purposes?
Then there's the stuff that can come out of private sector in a lawsuit.
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.
Bold.
With that said, I'm not saying that as a value judgment -- and I guess I'd be curious if you'd be skeptical of making that choice.
Why shouldn't it be able to handle the task here?
I'd sooner pay a bucket for something like Tines to offload critical mechanisms, and then do the dirt-cheap stuff on n8n.
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.
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.
This is a pretty terrible, sheltered introduction. He didn't realise that American sports aren't the most popular sports outside of America? He feels the need to tell us that in the intro? Did he not do any research before starting his job? Did no one interviewing him pick up on this?
Also note that the detection labels mention "field" but not "pitch" even though a football playing area is by definition called a football pitch. More American-centricity that will ultimately harm them (not that I consider that to be a bad thing in this case).
It looked good enough so that people actually watched and they got the ad revenue off it :D
Also: perfectly legal, they're just streaming a video game =)
In my mind it's fair game to record and watch anything, if it's an unencrypted, freely available broadcast somewhere (local laws here back me up) - That includes the use of VPNs to access it. Sports broadcasters know this and make the use of VPNs quite hard, still if you get it to work, good for you. That includes other sneaky trickery like VPNing into Switzerland, where rebroadcasting other countries' FTA TV is legal, if you can receive them there (e.g. all of the UK's FTA TV) or setting up a remote controlled TV receiver in the country for you own use.
Making these streams available publicly is a different game. Depending on where you live, passing on streams privately again may be OK - for example the country I live in allows passing on recordings to a handfull of friends.
If at any time during the chain from the broadcast to you there's a need to break an encryption to make this possible: No fair game, pirate!
hulu told me i could bundle EFL with Disney (!) but i was never able to see any Sunderland games on Hulu so i cancelled.
EFL streams are hard to find, but in the absense of being able to pay to view, i will take anything i can.
I’m pretty sure you can watch almost all EFL Championship games via ESPN Plus. You’ll have to download a different app, it’s not on Hulu,
Just one story, I remember a children of 10 trying to watch a soccer match but without having a TV plan at home. The solution? Call friends via Discord and have them put the webcam towards the TV! They even have a friends meeting watching a soccer match.
The $750k figure is the amount of Mux's services they provided in 2021, that were (claimed to be) pirate streams, and were not paid. By taking steps to catch and remove pirates, they are reducing the number of unpaid invoices they have.
Their actual costs are less, yes (in that how much they invoice != their actual costs), but it's reasonable to say saved themselves $750k of their services.
It had nothing to do with converting pirates to paying customers. It had to do with preventing pirates from incurring infrastructure costs for them/making use of their services without paying.
> That, combined with the fact that these streams usually have large viewership, means we incur a not insignificant cost and have no one to bill. In 2021 alone, Mux had over $750,000 in unpaid invoices due to pirated streams. For an infrastructure company like Mux, this pirating comes with hard costs. Transcoding, storing, and delivering video is not cheap. If these pirated streams were not held in check, they could quickly spiral out of control and have a significant negative impact on our business. By identifying and shutting down these streams, we are able to reduce our costs.
So to actually saved $750k, they'd have to have some combination of:
1. 100% COGS or 0% operating margin. Youch. Probably not, likely closer to 30% COGS, making actual infra/bandwidth cost to them of $750k services closer to $225k 2. Massive growth in attempted abuse. E.g. Their level of attempted abuse grew 3.3x to $2.5M, they stopped all of it, that would have cost them $2.5M x 30% COGS = $750k
But at the end of the day I think they just wrote a clever headline to get upvotes on HN :)
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.
I wonder what this looks like? Everything that isn't Gmail or outlook?
1. Stream the video game fifa 2023 for the first 2-3 streams until my account gets onto your allowlist.
2. Stream illegal football content, not triggering your n8n flows, due to the allowlist.
1. Switch to another provider
2. No second step.
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.
please have a look at such a tool and maybe reconsider your addition of defective by design (aka DRM) technology to f1tv streams. It broke on three (!) different playback devices I own.
thank you,
a valuable customer
The root cause here is “sports streaming services are garbage.” Mux can’t do anything about that, and likely their “partners” don’t want to hear it anyway.
Part of me would have preferred to technically sweep this under the rug so nobody who cared would notice or be able to complain about it.
