Clampdown on TV 'Dodgy Boxes'

Hi I’m mr sky, please pm me your providers xoxoxoxo

IMG run a worldwide streaming service for the Premier league. All the 3pm games are available on that platform.

Obviously it's not available in the UK and many other major TV markets but it's available in a lot of countries.

It's already available and can be set up for the UK very quickly.

In the US it's under $100 per year for every PL game on Peacock. Peacock is a streaming arm of NBC who show live matches on their main channel.

You can stream the EPL legally in every pretty much every country outside of the UK and Ireland. I lived in Australia for years and used to have all the Premier League matches on my Optus App.

If Sky went in the morning, there'll be absolutely no issuing replacing it with the streaming service, and getting cameras and crews at the ground. Question is, will the Premier League like the reduced costs that a streaming platform may offer for the product??

The Premier league decide how much they want from each market. You could be paying €10 per month in one country and €10 per year in another.

No need for the demeaning "fanboy" language, they may be a vocal section but they are very much in the minority of fans.

We all know that it's the tv deal which means Bournemouth can outbid AC Milan for players and this is fundamentally wrong but it's Sky and TNT that are funding this, of course the clubs will take advantage.

Again, majority of people on IPTV aren't going to pay for Sky/TNT even if their service goes down, they're targeting a market that isn't interested in their service at the current cost and model of it.

You can see exactly why Murdock and News Corp sold their interest in Sky to Comcast in 2018. They could see exactly where the market was going. The technology has shifted enormously in the last few years, particularly with ubiquitous very high speed broadband becoming normal.

Sky is basically just a content provider and repackager. It owns nothing — unlike most of Comcast’s American assets, it’s not a cable company with a huge network. It owns no infrastructure at all really — yet it dresses itself up as a telco. It’s had access to people’s living rooms because it’s been the dominant pay TV provider in this market, but there are other options, including the licences fully legal cable and cable like IPTV services and commercial streamers that bypass the need for Sky. Even looking at their entertainment packages, who in their right mind would want Sky Movies? It’s a 1980s / 90s concept. The glory days of Sky One and Sky Atlantic being the major platforms for big mostly U.S. programmes are long gone, so what’s left ? Just clawing money out of sports rights.

Their software is failing behind and now seems clunky, and the user experience is not as impressive and useful as it was a decade or more ago and even in rural areas here now ppl have access to fibre and the need for direct to home satellite is dwindling. They’re also ludicrously expensive and they keep hiking the prices to pay for ever more bidding wars for content.

They’re basically the Virgin Megastore or Xtravision of the 2020s — their whole business model is being disrupted by rapidly changing technology.

Because it's completely out of the context.

Even the best players don't get 1 million per week, and rightly so.

it will change though, maybe not in favor of viewers,

This is a key observation.

There is this narrative that if it's wasn't for those evil Sky people everything would be fine.

But that's not the case, EPL rights in the UK and Ireland will never be cheap, regardless of who is broadcasting them, because they are a premium product, people want to consume them.

And they will always be targets for pirates because premium products are targets for pirates.

People say that the business model is broken.

Well if it is to be changed then it's not just the broadcasters that will need to change.

To allow things like subscriptions to individual teams games etc, the whole structure of the EPL has to change.

Whatever about Sky, etc content being pirated, I would love to know the technology behind how they are getting Clubber streams.

It would seem like it would be much harder to intercept and decrypt a stream for a GAA match in Kilkenny where a user has to log in etc to gain access to the stream.

No I get that alright. But do they intercept the stream and mirror it or how do they manage it is what I'm wondering?

There's millions of streams for a EPL match which they can copy but there would be only one for a hurling match in Kilkenny. You'd imagine they'd be able to lock it down somehow!

Yeah, I didn't think encryption cost that much though any longer and in the case of Clubber, it must be absolutely hammering their business so you'd wonder if it is not in their own interest to secure it better.

Virgin / UPC / Whatever tried to do similar around the time they launched the horrific Horizon box. They had loads of people downgrade to just the internet package as IPTV was kicking off via XBMC and the likes. They deliberately throttled streaming traffic but could not differentiate between legit streamers and illegal ones. It got to the point that Netflix were indirectly advising Irish people not to use them because their service was so patchy. They published a list of service providers ranked on how good they were, and UPC fell to the bottom of the list.

AFAIK they launched a dedicated Netflix channel to combat this but eventually had to stop throttling traffic because of the backlash.

Sure they are just mirroring it from a paid clubber subscription surely?

You’d wonder might the TV rights issues eventually just result in less people watching sport. I know I’ve definitely just stopped bothering as the costs are annoying.

Casual viewers have their limits.

So I see some comments along the lines of IPTV users would never subcribe to SKY so there not losing out.

Thats like going to movies and asking to be be let in for nothing because there are empty seats available and you assure them you would never pay in so there not losing out.