Coliseum Sports - EPL Overlords

This is true on the website, not on the apps though. You can't manually pick a quality

Feel sorry for you lot having to stream less than HD quality football on NZ infrastructure. 

Going to piss me off when I am back over xmas too no doubt. Hopefully this will just be a temporary kick up the arse for Sky. 

Just heard the interview, really excited for this now.  

Great that football fans are being taken seriously!

Never used NFL Game Pass (or even watched any NFL) but might have a gander at a game to get a feel for the service

I used NFL gamepass a bit last season for the Ravens run in, really good quality stuff

NFL Game Pass quality was great! Didn't have to pay a cent and they had some preview/news show on

Very easy to adjust the stream quality

https://gamepass.nfl.com/nflgp/secure/schedule

excite.

Does anyone know what bitrate iSky runs at? 

Good point, I'll ask.

By default it's set to "Best Quality" - on my VDSL connection (30Mbps/9Mpbs) it automatically picked 4500kbps which was crystal clear.

You can manually change it once logged in by clicking a small checkbox and selecting what you want/  Even 800Kbps was as good if not better than iSky or TAB Watch and Bet

FAQs top right  http://premierleaguepass.com/

Don't know who the unmetered access from an ISP is, could be Telecom?

Firstly - Apologies to those who I've had 'discussions' about this on Twitter (Patrick etc), you'll probably want to stop reading...

Right here's my moan about this new deal. Firstly let me say I will be buying the $250 package, love my THFC and will be supporting them.

The deal only allows 25 games out of the 38 for each team to be available 'On-Demand'. So when you wake up on a Sunday/Monday  morning you can watch your team online, but on 13 occasions during the season, you will need to get up at 2-3 am and watch live otherwise you won't be able to see your team that week except for the 1 hour highlights package of the round.

This is enforced by the EPL to ensure all teams are given equal live coverage. Obviously with SKY you could 'MySky it' and watch it later, but with an online offering you can't do that.

This is likely going to be a big issue for fans of the top 5/6 teams who are usually on Sky every week (esp Man U, Chelsea, Arsenal). Those fans who are used to be able to watch EVERY game at a time that suited them will now need to get up and watch.

This will likely be lessened by the 3-4 teams a year (?) your team features on the Monday night game (UK time) and you can watch live at 7-8 am here on Tues morning. 

This is a great deal for fans of the league and 'lesser' teams but for those of us who follow the top 5-6 teams, who are used to watching every game (or close to it), we will see fewer games unless we're prepared to get up in the middle of the night!

Rant over....

Got to say I don't understand it. Surely 38 games on demand would be equal coverage of all teams too. 

So yeah, sucks for man utd etc fans, but good for other teams fans. If it helps, I imagine the match of the day on TVNZ on a Sunday would generally be a big club. So hopefully for your sake a few of those coincide with games that aren't available on demand. 

Another option may be to get software that records what is happening on your computer screen. I think you can get some for free? It'd be a massive pain in the ass though as you'd have to leave it running overnight etc. but its something to look into perhaps?

all this continues to add up to more hassle for the end user. Extra cost for something we already had access to, and now we can't even record all the games and watch them we we want to. I just cannot see how it is better than what sky offered?

It will be in future. For me, its exciting to see it happening finally, and the more they can add to it the better it will get. Hopefully they manage to get that on demand thing sorted though. 

IIRC on the podcast, he said they will be able to pick which games are available on demand mostly by fan feedback. I think the bigger clubs will have the on demand option most, if not every week.

You could always watch it live.  I'm a Everton fan and never bothered with MySky etc.  Just got up and watched it when it was on.  That way you'll get to watch every game and not have to worry about on-demand.  As someone who has done it for the last 10 years (and I'm not a student - 33 years old), it can be done.

Yeah, watch the games live if you have to. Not ideal but unless your a fan of a top 4 club then this is a better option than sky. Previously games for newcastle weren't shown until sometimes after midday. 

I guess Patrick you watch no other sports on sky. Nevertheless judging by the above you may be waiting a generation or two before you give up sky. Your grandchildren will appreciate your deeds however

Yeah interesting question AP. I kind of answered it earlier I think. 

But I watch NBA, MLB, A League, EPL and test cricket (black caps and the ashes) mostly. Also various NZF games.

3 of those 5 are available on a service like coliseums. However since sky show some MLB and NBA, its currently too expensive for me to have those 2 online. I'm unsure at which point I'd switch off. 

I think you may be getting at something, which is if they were split half and half, then that would really suck. And I agree. But I'd blame sky for that more than any company offering the service online, generally superior, and for cheaper. 

It's easy to bash sky - but I'm not sure that the situation for next season is going to be any better.  It's more expensive overall and it's subject to the vagaries of less reliable technology.  

The idea that in the future we can all just subscribe for what we want to watch and that will all end up cheaper is a great idea, but I don't see how that will happen.  Yes, with sky now you pay for a lot of stuff you're not actually interested in.  But it's a lot easier for sky to add a sport or a set of rights to an existing platform, than it is to justify a sport setting up it's own online platform to broadcast over the internet - you have to have a very compelling product to justify doing that in a small NZ market.  There must be an element of cross subsidy there (even if at times sky has used it's dominant position in a way to make it more difficult for smaller sports to get on air).  If you like a lot of sports you could end up with a lot of premium online sports packages which right now is going to be expensive.  

There's also the random sports factor.  Do I like being able to watch India vs Sri Lanka in some random one day tournament?  Yes.  Would I pay for individual rights to watch it?  No

I suspect as well there is a cross-subsidy for people who watch a lot of sport from people who just get sky package without sport or who get sports packages but wouldn't sign up to something else if they decided to drop sky altogether.

If each sport ends up as a standalone internet offering I don't see that ending up cheaper, I see it ending up more expensive.  Plus you then have the simple factor that's it's just a lot more of a pain in the arse to run 6 or 8 online channel packages through your computer without some sort of feed aggregator and you can't just flick channels on Tuesday evening from football, channel 2 NFL, then over to something on normal telly then back to EPL highlights that you've already watched during the ads....I dunno, i'm not sure this is a great brave new world that's so fantastic.

It'd be quite easy and cheap for them to simply add sports to the platform. MLB shows every single game over a season, live and on demand. Coliseum are looking at offering MLS etc also, and are saying there would be a discount if you did so. Its quite clearly cheaper. I make sky out to be 1200 a year - that is 8 sports you can get full coverage of for the same yearly price of sky. That isn't including possible discounts as mentioned above

. With regards to randomly watching a game, you'd have more options to do that, to take your cricket example, sky don't often show a lot of series - a similar online cricket platform would show all games, and you'd be able to simply purchase a day or match pass if you wished to watch India v Sri Lanka. 

I get that you can't channel flick, but essentially what you're saying is you're willing to pay sky all of this extra money, just so you can mindlessly flick through channels, but you're not willing to pay a one off fee to watch the same random game you'd end up watching whilst channel flicking. 

Perhaps in future, on a smart tv you could load different sport providers on to favourites, then randomly flick through to see what is on, and pay a small one off fee to view that game - and you wouldn't mind doing it so much as its nothing compared to the $100 a month you used to shell out to do the same thing. 

I'm not saying its perfect, but sky has limitations too. Its also clearly cheaper, with more content available. The only reason it becomes more expensive is because of the monopoly sky currently has, and their insistence on bundling everything together. 

Also, in terms of the 'small nz market': systems like these aren't necessarily tied to a nz market. MLB, NBA and NFL stream their services to places all over the world, from the same system. A much greater economies of scale is possible with such platforms than it is on sky, this makes it easier to justify bringing more of different sports into nz as doing so may even decrease their marginal cost per customer. 

It would be interesting to see the viewing stats for say Perth v Adelaide live.

It would be so minimal I could understand why Sky would delay it to show live rugby for instance.

When the A-League gets shafted because there are four other live sports on, then I can see where Sky are coming from, A-League ratings would rank lower. What frustrates me is when Sky decide to show the Fishing Show or Golf highlights instead of showing the A-League live, which they did multiple times last season.

Could that possibly be because the Fishing Show or Golf highlights still has higher ratings that the A League?

I feel like I have had this arguement before - they show loads of live sport. Problem is that they are not going show live sport for 8 people watching the game and 1 old dead person who accidently changed the television to the A League when they were trying to dial for help on the Sky Remote (thinking it was the new fangled telephone that their grandson got them for Christmas) when they were having a heart attack.  This is especially true if they have other shows to put on that get higher viewer figures even though they are not live.

And they can show fishing highlights/replays any time, they can't do the same for live sport. 

why would they show live sport ahead of fishing highlights if no one wants to watch the live sport, and some people want to watch the fishing highlights?  That makes no sense.

If they moved the A league highlights show to 3am because they wanted to show live fishing from Alaska, I assume we would all be alright with that?  Even if we knew that the live fishing had viewership figures for 25?

Actually I would. You're exaggerating figures to make a point. 

If you show the live sport, and the highlights show, then everybody gets what they want. Its a subscriber service, they aren't competing for key time slots with other channels to get advertising revenue. A portion of their subscribers have signed up because of the promise of live A league, they should therefore try their best to deliver on that promise of live sport as much as possible. Which they have started doing, so credit to them. 

Of course I am exagerating figures to make a point.  Bottom line for me is basic supply and demand - if fuck all people want to watch the product they are going to bump it for something that people want to watch.  I really fail to understand why anyone here struggles with that concept.  Bottom line is very few people in NZ want to watch Newcastle vs Perth, so it is no surprise that it is not shown live.  A lot more people want to watch Phoenix games, so it is only in extraordinary situations that they are not shown live.