[anewguy9000]

its legally dubious but not morally ;)

pirated sports are even a better product. they dont have ads. so if i pay for sports on tv, im actually paying to watch ads?? it should be the other way around, and if it were, i would probably sign up. also give me all your money

[mgkimsal]

Yeah, we paid for an extra sports package so my wife could watch her UK football. "WTF? There's huge ads taking up 20% of the screen? And every time we start (or restart) watching, we have to watch a minute of ads? Fuck that" was mostly my wife's response (possibly slightly less salty language, but that's how I remember it now).

She's gotten really good at finding various streams for the games she wants to watch, and just watches those, usually with no ads. To keep the system we had to watch them "legally" was... I think "only" $90/month - $60 something plus more for 'basic sports'. Oh... but you want HD? That's even more. And you need a new satellite dish. That will be an extra $200/installation.

But had we just been a new customer... I'm sure they'd have thrown the world at us for free for the first 3-6 months.

[iso1631]

> There's huge ads taking up 20% of the screen?

I don't do sports, but I do remember that sky sports was on in a pub I was in recently with a football game. I don't remember seeing any onscreen adverts (there was the score, the time left, a sky sports logo etc in the corner which seemed fairly unintrusive -- certainly the score and time left are an essential viewing when I do watch England in the finals)

Obviously there's also the adverts around the actual ground, and on the players shirts, most of which seem to be for betting (when I was a kid my grandad put a couple of quid on the pools each week, but this modern stuff seems quite the scourge)

Now at half time sure, they are dripping with adverts -- despite I believe sky sports costing somewhere in the order of £600 a year, and advertising raising just 10% of Sky's revenue from the last annual report I saw.

Were you paying a legitimate provider?

[tomcam]

She actually said “sod that” because she’s 103

[mgkimsal]

She does say 'sod that' but she's not 103...

[tomcam]

Damn I figured that was out of style by now

[mynameisvlad]

How would pirated sports work without ads? It’s a live product, so it wouldn’t work in the standard *arr pipeline. Are there live streams with ads blacked out by a host?

[mgkimsal]

Dunno exactly, but there's gotta be some original camera feeds from on the ground that don't have those. The ads we saw years ago were overlayed at the top of the screen, taking up around 20% of the vertical space. And... every time you started a stream, there were 1-2 minutes of the same stupid commercials (trucks, etc).

[mynameisvlad]

Ah so it’s just streaming the most premium product available.

Usually that’s something like NFL RedZone/MLB.tv/etc which offers direct feeds, out of market, with blackouts etc.

Have enough people feeding your provider with streams and you have a legally dubious nationwide ad-free service for that league.

I thought you meant it somehow got rid of commercials on normal channels, but live. That wouldn’t make sense. But these channels don’t have traditional commercials in the first place.

[tshaddox]

Yeah, I think the premium services offer feeds directly from the local TV production. Sometimes they'll offer multiple feeds from the same game, one of which will be a national broadcast feed and another will be a local production with different commentators.

[whateveracct]

I have a guy who runs OBS and overlays fun graphics over ads and plays music over commercial audio. And all I need to watch is VLC - so it works on my phones, tablet, laptops, etc without any trouble.

He has a KoFi so you can donate and get a message on-screen too. Fun for rallying your fellow fans :)