I am in no way condoning sports piracy, or any other sort of piracy, but watching sports has become so incredibly difficult using legal means as to be virtually impossible.

I am a foreigner in my country of residence, I only own an Android smart TV (Philips, and with minor side-loading patches, all ads and nonsense are removed).

I used to run a media PC as my TV because local media options are so bad, and I cannot get "cable" because the TV corner, and telekoms corner of my apartment are opposite.

By now, it is impossible to watch MotoGP, or Formula 1 on a SmartTV using any kind of app in either my host, or home language - my choices are streaming with DRM via custom apps on some platforms (Apple iPad, desktop browser with DRM plugins), or to subscribe for €50/month to a nonsense cable package I won't use.

I maintained the desktop PC and fought with VPNs (and, the arms-race of anti-vpn, with DNS tricking from the stream host) to get a stream (Eurosport, if I recall) for a while, but at some point the VPN detection was reliable enough that I couldn't watch UK Eurosports, just EU Eurosport which didn't show the same streams.

In the end, I'm 18+ months out of any kind of motorsports, and completely lost the interest after a lifetime of being enthralled. They are killing these sports for internet audiences.

So, to rephrase, watching the sports you’d like to legally is rather easy, the options being very obvious and straightforward.

You just believe the costs, either in money or in privacy concerns, are not worth it. Which is reasonable.

But to describe it as impossible does not seem accurate.

Huh? The VPN isn't for privacy.

The poster can just subscribed to the 50 Euro cable package. That is the legal way to get it. The poster just won't pay the list price. It isn't impossible to watch by any stretch of the imagination. There just isn't a willingness to pay.

Just to note that in many cases the cable package is not equivalent to getting F1 TV or MLB TV to take two examples I have experience with. Both those lets you watch the events after the fact which many cable packages do not.

Not just that... the "good" F1TV package gives you many many many streams.

At least 30 or so...in-car from every single car, the main broadcast feed, and a number of others, including alternate (and generally far better... commentary)

Which package is this?

I think it's called Pro or something? It's the one that in the US, at least, costs $100/yr or so.

There's also a basic package that's just the main broadcast feed, that's ~$40 or so

No, but obviously it’s not the intended path, which would be a cable package.

Yup, friend moved back to Puerto Rico after finishing his PhD and can no longer legally watch most cycling. I know there's a whole history of PR/US whatever-you-want-to-call-it, but it's honestly absurd to me that he can't pay for the same steaming package as me.

It's interesting to see how some sport leagues (from my limited understanding of MLB TV) have realized that they are all in this together. Others, like F1 also have that centralized content control, but still manage to drop the ball in parts. And then you have sports like cycling, with historical stakeholders desperately clinging to their slice of pie as everyone slowly sinks (monetarily).

There are matches here in the UK that aren't televised nationally on Saturdays due to rights, but are shown live in other countries. It's a bit of a silly situation when you can't watch a match legally that's 5 miles away but if you're 5000 then that's cool. I understand why, but this only drives people to piracy.

>By now, it is impossible to watch MotoGP, or Formula 1 on a SmartTV using any kind of app in either my host, or home language - my choices are streaming with DRM via custom apps on some platforms (Apple iPad, desktop browser with DRM plugins), or to subscribe for €50/month to a nonsense cable package I won't use.

In many cases, its impossible to watch certain teams, events, and entire sports even if you get cable and purchase every streaming app available in your area. You are left with no option but to pirate a stream or simply be denied the chance to watch at all.

What country? Formula 1 now has its own streaming service [1]. I used to stream it via less legal means previously, because the only legal way to watch it was to pay high monthly costs for some sports TV package, which would have commentators in my native language (which I don't want). I'm not interested in any sport other than Formula 1, so I'm very glad they made their own streaming service.

[1] https://f1tv.formula1.com/

And then they made in unavailable again in Germany because Sky got exclusive licensing rights.

Luckily I had a year long subscription that has remained active.

Sky has neither individual cockpit streams nor English (and French, Dutch and Spanish) language commentary.

> watching sports has become so incredibly difficult using legal means as to be virtually impossible.

> subscribe for €50/month to a nonsense cable package

I mean, these two sentences directly contradict each other.

If I want one specific thing and it is only available with 100s of shit I will never use, is it really available?

Sure, you’re paying 50 for the one thing you want and the rest is effectively free shit you don’t have to watch.

In my experience with trying to watch sports streams in Germany the experience of paying for it is usually worse than using some random IPTV provider.

Until last year Eurosport had a horrible app where instead of watching the segments you want you had half an hour of the previous event in there just because something ran longer and it was cut at pre-determined times.

For F1 it's even worse as F1 TV (the official streaming service of the F1) is now not available in Germany any more and has been replaced by a Sky Sport subscription that costs three times more per year than before. As someone who prefers to watch Sky UK's F1 coverage there's really no way around paying for pirated streams from some random IPTV provider every month. Funnily enough the official F1 TV service was mostly unusable or down during the race weekends while the pirated streams were working well and with faster loading times.

> For F1 it's even worse as F1 TV (the official streaming service of the F1) is now not available in Germany any more and has been replaced by a Sky Sport subscription that costs three times more per year than before.

Sky has really gone downhill, lol. Their STBs were/still are slow as molasses, their customer service atrocious, and to add insult to injury they don't even stream all soccer matches. Glad I cut the cord some years ago - and I'm not surprised at all that Big Pay TV is attempting to buy some legislation to keep them alive...

F1 TV has gotten more reliable as of late. Their website still sucks, but watching via the third-part app Race Control has worked really well for me.

FYI, the guy behind a resolution is a Bulgarian MEP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Dzhambazki

I doubt that any of the resolution text can be his original writing.

Good point: German public TV had some interview with Bulgarian government officials a couple of months ago, on the show Conflict Zone (https://www.dw.com/en/denitsa-sacheva-on-conflict-zone/av-55...), about them being the "most corrupt government in the European Union". The interviewer straight up asked why they didn't just resign.

It looks like this dude as a Member of European Parliament (MEP) is no different.

Any government is fragile. Democracy is fragile. Look at the US for example. The institutions don't hold up on their own: people have to fight for democracy. Democracy is actually worth dying over, compared to what tyranny offers. The Americans got lucky, at the end of the day, with the coup attempt.

I am a dual US|Croatian (European Union) citizen, and I find your comment thoughtless and offensive. (I don't downvote.) In my country (Croatia), if you want to leave the EU, usually you straight up want war with our neighbors.

The history of the EU started with the European Coal and Steel Community, which was created as a solution for "what to do after empire".

I am a Finnish (European Union) citizen and the fact that the EU has a fragile structure has literally nothing to do with the regional wars you've been fighting. It's a strawman of the worst kind and one that I'm tired of hearing; "anti-EU sentiment? You must be a racist and/or a warmonger/nazi/Russia sympathizer/[insert other negative character here]!"

Fact is that the European Union lacks the flexibility required to build such a superstructure. Everyone knows EU is a bureaucratic hell, and the further we "progress" with EU, the worse it gets with the top-down politics.

For crying out loud, the UK already left the EU! And still you have the guts to "take offense" in even suggesting that the pipe dreams of the suits in Brussels will not realize? Feel free to refute instead of playing the offense card and using logical fallacies.

Whether or not UK leaving was good for them or the EU is very debatable. It was a demagogue vote, that many wanted reverted as soon as it passed.

And as for the EU, sure it is a bureaucratic hell, but it’s core values are imo at the right place.

> And as for the EU, sure it is a bureaucratic hell, but it’s core values are imo at the right place.

This is the most dangerous attitude you can take and an example of how fragility is built; when focus is on values/intent rather than outcome, bad things happen. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

Btw, to not be misunderstood, I’m not anti EU by all measures, rather against the governance structure and the increasing drive to going into a full-blown federation

I fully admit to taking offense with people like you who drop illogical zero-value comments into discussions with the intent of causing arguments. That is why I dont use Twitter. Please read the HN guidelines before making your next comment.

Problem with music/video piracy was mostly resolved by providing reasonably priced usable services. Maybe instead of lobbying for quick takedowns, someone should put effort into providing services people would rather be using instead of bothering with finding pirated content.

I renovated vacation house and live in it for some time. It is in nature, no cable providers. Also, as I got older, I watched sports less and less, and now I follow only one sport team FC Barcelona, and sometimes I watch national team games, but not always.

So my options are non existent. No cable service (btw, I do not own TV for more than 5 years now, not here nor in my flat in the city), I can't subscribe to any online sport streaming like Fox or Sky from my country. And if I could, would I pay XX eur to watch 2-3 games per month and nothing else?

It is dumb that we do not have pay per game streaming services.

I think they need to look at the source and the keywords here content diversity and cost, does everyone in EU can access provider service? Can they pay a reasonable cost in their region? Does the quality of service in EU standards? By no means i am justifying pirating but those precautions will force service providers hands to be reasonable. Not a sprots fan but many streaming contents gets reduced if you go from western to eastern EU, i hope someone in parliament will become stargate fan, so he can understand access issues. In Czechia there is no way to stream stargate serials, there was a stargatecommand website they have immediatly refunded and closed my account when they found out i am not US resident.

I think what's often missing from these discussions is the cost of the professional sports( excluding maybe chess). Football is probably the best example,where clubs spend astronomical amounts of money on players. Right now it's probably cheaper to get NASA to send a few people to the space station than to get 2 full football teams. And this gets more and more expensive with each additional layer before it even reaches the end consumer.

To me, the big sports industry ( F1, Football, Basketball,etc.) is where the film/music industry was 10-15 years ago,when every monkey in the world did Emule and Torrents and then along came Netflix and Amazons of this world and now we pay pennies for it.

One merely has to wonder what other content will find itself behind a no court order thirty minute window all on the word of designated groups with an interest.

So how much investiture into sporting facilities do EU countries end up fronting? Is it as bad as the US? Do they get any funds locally for sports broadcasting involving local teams? I will by default assume their is monetary relationships between politicians either direct or friends and family arrangements but I am not clear on how localities benefit.

The entertainment industry, be it sports, music, or movie and television, had an outsized influence of politics and policy and that itself needs reigned in.

I don’t think any of us can condone piracy, but I think like has often been the case the EU is scoring an own goal here.

The problem is that big companies with streaming services will be able to support this, but any new up and coming streaming service will not. This means that potential EU based startups in this space will have yet another reason to avoid the EU and instead go somewhere else.

I think there needs to be some kind of middle ground where a company shows best effort within their current capabilities financially.

I'll absolutely condone it for sports. It's the only way to consistently have access to the games you want to watch from anywhere in the world thanks to the byzantine licensing contracts, and you don't actually escape the advertisements that pay for just about everything.

Funny no-one can condone it yet it is widespread......

It’s just too easy to pirate everything. I had a billing dispute with Comcast over a decade ago and all they get from me now is money for internet.

This is the reason why all infrastructure should be serviced by a public utility, allowing you to receive service from any ISP or cable provider of your choice.

It is in the UK, effectively. I have a choice from a good thirty ISPs over preexisting cable connections.

We are talking $profits$ here people, more important than child pornography or online harrasment.

This is a very good example of lobbying and morally corrupted institutions!

And child pornography content hosters are given 24 hours to remove it...

I, too, think that most sports aren't entertaining for many reasons. A lot of it has to do with their compensation structure.

But it's very much an opinion. And calling it shitty says a lot more about you than it does the sport.

Well, I tried to think of a better word, but can't come up with anything. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks!

As a non TV owner and no sport watcher at all, I still think sport is probably something from the best you can watch these days on TV. Have you an idea gow bad the other content is these days LOL