[astorsnk]

>> Last year I was in the UK visiting family and was unable to watch races there, despite havng already paid for them, as the geo restrictions were different.

Yep, thank sucks. You can thank brexit for that. AFAIK services offered in one EU country have to work throughout the EU (so if you were in Germany it would have worked). This meant that on holiday (coming from UK to Spain) a few years back I was able to watch F1 live on my phone via the NowTV/Sky app. This year - geo restricted.

[squeaky-clean]

I think they're referring to the official F1TV app, which is region restricted in UK because of an exclusivity agreement between SkyTV and Formula One Group.

F1TV also added DRM this season, so open source clients for it no longer work. You're allowed to view up to 6 simultaneous cameras with your subscription (There's the main feed, the map view, the data view, and 20 onboard cameras). But there's no easy way to do this now aside from having 6 chrome windows with all their chonky borders taking up space, or using 6 different devices.

RaceControl [0] is an amazing open source client that offered split screen and synchronization of the videos (F1's own app has the onboard cameras about 20s ahead of the main feed, which means you either had to manually delay them all yourself or you get spoilers). Now it only works for archivee races.

Which is ridiculous because someone with an HDMI splitter can still strip the DRM and stream it illegally.

I'm probably going to end my subscription after this season and switch to watching pirated streams, because I'm being punished for having the gall to be a paid subscriber.

[0] https://github.com/robvdpol/RaceControl

In case robvdpol is an HN member, thanks for all the work you put into RaceControl. It was the best way to watch the sport.

[detaro]

> AFAIK services offered in one EU country have to work throughout the EU

Streaming services are a bit of a special case: they can have different access in different places, but the location that counts is the users home location. So e.g. a national sports league can license exclusive rights to different streaming services in different countries, and in your home country there is only one choice, but if you sign up with them and then travel, you still can access it, even though the "exclusive" contract for that country is with someone else.

[denton-scratch]

Nothing to do with Brexit.

[astorsnk]

The British government disagrees with you.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/cross-border-portability-of-onli...