What are you talking about, La Liga is making billions of dollars [1][2]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobbymcmahon/2019/03/07/report-...
[2] https://www.laliga.es/en/news/laliga-grows-20-6-and-posts-re...
PL is also a far superior product, the a/v is better, there is considerably more drama and the lower league, The Championship is almost on par. Football wise, there is a big debate. Entertainment wise, the PL is far better.
I wouldn't be so hasty, as the service has had some blackouts.
https://www.gpfans.com/en/articles/38904/f1-tv-offering-comp...
Disclaimer: Happy subscriber and an F1 fan.
Yes, they refund and send nice emails but people don‘t want refunds - they want to see a race!
Just check that twitter account, it‘s hilarious. I have cancelled the subscription, it was so bad.
To add to that, every single time they claim their engineers are trying to identify and fix the problem. For months now. It‘s like they work only during race sessions. No post mortems, no description of what measures have been taken to resolve the problem.
It‘s not even possible to load the help chat sometimes. The website during those outages barely works. Can‘t log out, can‘t log in.
The mobile app is another garbage. People being advised to reinstall the app when having login problems. Also for months!
It‘s garbage. Which is shocking. There are so many paid tv services streaming hundreds of channels and not having any of those problem. For a powerhouse like Liberty Media and F1, this is ridiculous.
We pay for it, but still use pirate streams if we want to watch an actual race live!
The streaming also has some technical issues as they vastly underestimated the demand and the server could not take the load. Latest occurrence was at Canadian GP. I am not praising the service in the current state, but I strongly feel that is the way forward for sports broadcast. I have been an early adopter, and like the options I am provided (along with the influx of data I get) when the traditional TV streaming felt constraining and powerless.
Too bad the 2019 season is shaping up so poorly...
World Rally Championship (WRC) is doing this too.
Cricket caught up too, ICC cricket world cup that occurs once every 4 years and this tournament is going on right now, ICC is now offering highlights packages on the official youtube accounts. There wasn't a way to purchase/watch highlights of games even if one wanted to pay for it before.
Even French open tennis had highlights packages available on their official youtube accounts.
Provide some basic stuff out for free, in interest of promoting the sport, consider it cost of user acquisition. And, then provide options to stream/additional access for a reasonable cost. Seems to work well for some sports, wonder when others will catch up.
And I love that I can watch the replay at my leisure on any device. That is amazing.
However ... would it kill them to remember where I stopped watching and continue the replay from there? I don’t always (ie never) have the patience to sit through a 2 hour race
He truly is F1 to me. The experience just isn’t the same without him :D
If only they spent all the money they used to identify the games on actual customer-beneficial things ...
Somehow I find it hard to believe a business can't afford cable. Even if it costs $200 / month, surely they ought to be able to cover that.
I tend to side strongly with bars in most of these cases as broadcasters absolutely must be aware that bars frequently want to show sports games and they have failed to make licensing for this sort of showing reasonable from a logistical standpoint (sometimes wanting to charge a royalty based on how many distinct people watched any part of the game) that might actually be a reasonable fee in the end - but the cost of calculating the proper fee to pay outsizes the fee itself.
In Chicago, I've seen bars charge $30 a person for entry to see a PPV fight.
I feel no pity for content producers that disallow a reasonably priced (or any) access to their content and then cry foul at pirating. I similarly feel no pity for people who pirate old games that haven't been abandon-ware'd if they're available for a pittance on GOG. I value my time highly and trying to circumvent obstacles in my effort to give a content producer money is something I refuse to put any serious effort into.
How those rules are enforced is beyond me. Tangentially related, some of the legitimate, paid-for streams have been of pretty low quality, cutting out frequently. Not sure if it's because of draconian DRM or just excessive demand, but it would be interesting to find out.
This is when 200 € / month hurt - because you already run on a very tiny profit margin.
Soccer / football is such a huge thing in Spain, people would understand if they need to pay a little extra for their drinks or food in bars that have decent infrastructure to broadcast the games. Yet somehow most bar owners are afraid to take the risk.
I know this, because I used to live there for many years, and keep going there to visit relatives many times a year.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/football/the-set-pieces-blog/201...
You need special permission (and may need to pay extra) to "perform," copyrighted works for a larger audience, in the same way you can play music over a speaker for yourself, but not for a large group of people.
https://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/content/directv-for-business/...
Also, Soccer is the true religion here, not Christianity.
Add Soccer and bars and you get basically what truly the average Spaniard does love from the Pyrenees to the Gibraltar Strait.
It's not available in every country and it's been comically bad so far. Most races the streaming just fails and when it's not failing it routinely drops down to an incredibly low resolution for a few seconds. The replays usually work once the race is over though.
No adult does "siesta" in Spain. Please, let's stop spreading this stereotype.
Soccer games usually start at 22:00 or 23:00 hours.
That's how ridiculous they look.
That's ridiculous.
Head to the North in the Atlantic, or better, I dare all of HN to head Burgos in Winter, you'll see how "sunny" will you feel.
Hint: it will chill-screw you all below 0 ºC.
Bars should not be streaming the games illegally either. But since the cable prices are too high, and nothing on free to air, they have to in order to attract crowds. There is no official streaming service - albeit not bundled with cable tv subscription - that people in these countries can make use of to watch games.
The path forward maybe what Formula1 did by introducing a streaming service which is not geo blocked. This way, I can watch a race at reasonable subscription from anywhere in the world. They also allow me a racer only feed, or the global feed, or a feed from a particular stand. I will definitely buy it if any official football league offers that too.