SKY Coverage

Livesport.tv broadcast the A-League last season - but not necessarily this season.

They have definitely lost the Eredivisie they had last season.

Check out their current rights here - not worth paying for really:

http://www.soccer.livesport.tv/live?ICID_LEA_TOP_1

At present they have only the J League, K League, Chinese League, Latvian League, AFC Champions League.

My bluray recorder allows me to recod 2 channels at the same time.

Yes, through the freeview tuner, but it wouldn't record 2 Sky channels.

Your view of leagues might be regionally filtered out. When i use unodns, i see:

Sky going to offer online sports. Maybe

That would be tempting if they keep the A-League, also have a soft spot for the Daugavpils teams in the Virsliga although the ice hokey is the main sport in that part of the world.

What country do you need to VPN through to get access to livesport.tv?

i use unotelly.com - its not a VPN but DNS trickery that works for many many sites. Essentially its always on and works for any device on your network if you change your routers DNS details...

Some of the language is a bit technical for me in here but on the plp thread someone recommended hola and I've been using that, it's amazing. I haven't gone and got netflix or anything yet but it has allowed me to see highlights on espnfc that previously always said 'not available in your region', and has also allowed me to watch highlights on arsenal.com that were previously delayed 24 hours due to Sky having the contract for arsenal tv here. 

I've only just started using it but I can see it becoming very useful as time goes on...

Yeah Hola is a great tool. Allows you to access BBC Iplayer and watch things like Match of the Day too. Can also stream BBC and ITV live so I've used it to watch England internationals that haven't been screened here. Very easy to use too so I've even set my Dad up with it and he's been watching a lot of British TV.

ooh! hadnt even thought of watching MOTD

great

MOTD2 would be good viewing today! Can't confirm whether it's available on demand though.

I use Hola to access SBS TV in Australia for their excellent football coverage, since the bloody Optus satellite change few years back stopped me from picking up the direct SBS TV broadcast on the telly.

Yes, you used to be able to tune into the optus1 satellite with your sky satellite dish and get SBS free but then they went digital and screwed it up. Excellent foreign films on there too. Mostly subtitled and there was no censorship. Got to see some really "interesting" action sequences so to speak.

.... and that includes the Champions League!

I was referring to something a tad more intimate than that.

SKY SPORT - SPECIAL OFFER

Sky are kindly offering Sky Sport for $5 for a month just in time for the new A-League season.

Conditions: Only for those without Sky Sport for last 30 days or more.

(so even if you have Sky Sport right now, drop it immediately and get it on again in last days of October and pay $5 for a month)

Offer ends 31 October

See first few pages latest Sky Watch magazine.

The $5 you pay goes to the Starship Children's Foundation.

If you have access to BBC iPlayer try out a recent BBC TV movie called - Marvellous.  I can highly recommend it

Hey i just emailed the live sport people from the link you just provided and they said yes they are going to be covering the 2014/2015 a-league season. So thats great for me then as i dont want to buy sky as the only thing i want to pay for is the a-league. Just a few questions on the site tho.

1. Do you have to hide your DNS address as you are in NZ to watch matches on site?

2. Is the site legit?

3. Will a simple program such as hola allow me to watch livesport.tv from NZ.

Thanks for posting about that site thanks becuase i am sick of watching shitty quality dodgey streams and would glady pay for some good quality legit ones without having to pay heaps monthly for sky.

1. Yes.

2. Yes.

3. Yes.

Do they usually have A league on demand as well?

I see they have an "on demand" section. Could be worth it for live A league + AFC champions league.

Would be perfect if they still had test match cricket. 

Hey thanks for that clarification mate. I just Boughy the season pass, stoked we managed to find a legal high quality stream so I don't have to pay for sky just for the nix games. Although not strictly legal to view from NZ :P are you a subscriber to the service yourself may I ask?

Yup, I used it last season for ACL games and the A-League games that Sky didn't show. Was superb for me.

I used it last year without having to hide my NZ IP address. It worked if you entered the site from the main page rather than a nested page that specifically referred to the A-league or something.

Slightly unrelated but topical question for those of us not on unlimited broadband accounts:

- What would you say your internet use (Gb) was per month, Fink, during the footie season?

sorry

woohoo that means sky might not be filled with golf!

What we've got now is a situation where Sky no longer has a monopoly on sports content in NZ.  It's content is beginning to get picked off by other providers, eg Premier League and golf, and I bet they won't be the last sports to disappear from Skys program listings.  If it eventually gets to the stage where all sports content in NZ is offered online in a user-pays format then OK I can learn to live with that.  But until then we'll have this piecemeal cocked up situation where we're paying $80 a month for Sky Sport (more if you have MySky and/or HD) then having to pay another $15-$20 a month each for some sports.

The quick answer may be to ditch sky and go online using streaming from overseas etc but I actually like having Sky Sport.  I like being able to flick through the channels and watch stuff I wouldn't necessarily actively hunt out, I like the coverage they provide of events like the Commonwealth Games and I like having one source for multiple sports viewing.

I don't know that I can see Sky changing their subscription to a completely user pays situation while they still own rights to the majority of sport in NZ, as that will no doubt decrease their revenue.  So I can see the next few years being quite frustrating.

I don't really understand what Coliseum's role is if it's going to be provided directly by the PGA. I thought the point was that they can make more money by providing it direct and Sky said they didn't believe they had been outbid so what will Coliseum actually be dong if not delivering the content?

I'd estimate I used about 25 GB of data a month for 3 or 4 games a week, which I probably averaged. You could work it out properly if you know the bit rate for the games.

Is there anything Sky could do to protect their exclusive rights?

Offer a more fair pricing scheme that isn't bundled behind an expensive paywall? 

I was just wondering, what could they do? Cease and desist letters as part of the skynet law?

Skynet law doesn't cover it. It only covers peer to peer file sharing, which streaming video is not.

Tegal's point is the only way to really protect their exlusive rights is to be competitive... to make people WANT to get the content from them. They could litigate, but the number of ways now easily available to people who want to bypass them really makes it practically impossible to stop.

The age of broadcast TV being the only viable model is over.

It's aguable that the whole broadcast model - where the broadcaster decides when the content is served up, and the consumer can take it or leave it - is dead. It is at least dying.

You can now access sports coverage packages where you can be your own director, choosing which camera angle(s) you view, instead of just consuming what the broadcaster chooses to show.

Content on demand, is the new model. Sky need to adapt, and present content in this new market reality, or they will die.

It's a fact, and it is not going away, that we all now have the option to stream content if we choose to do so.

This is a critical change in the game.

It means that Sky's bundled access package of the past, which made sense then, is increasingly going to turn people off. People CAN pick and choose, so they WILL.

Hence Sky's gradual move to sport by sport pricing.

I love the idea of Sport by Sport pricing.  Means I can get all that crap rugby off my screen and replace it with as much football and motorsport as sky carry.  I don't watch many other sports on there anyway.

I agree with that. At present, the main limitation of online streaming for me is the reasonably poor quality of the delivery. However, with increasing bandwidth available, better technology and optic fibre being rolled out, there is no reason we should not see better video streaming over the internet. At the moment, A-League is protected by the SKY rights here, but if SKY drops it then it will be available for video providers, or third parties like Coliseum.

At the same time, I wonder if people considered loss of broadcaster support as a factor in A-League funding.

the picture quality is key for me - once you have a large screen and HD (which has absolutely revolutionised watching of televised sport for me) there is no way you want to go back to a lower quality picture where you can't see the details of what's going on (my first time watching F1 on the large screen with HD, having watched it religiously on small screens every week of the season for more than 30 years, particularly springs to mind).  HD quality may/will be available via streaming eventually, but there is no way it can be done at the moment (and certainly not onto a large screen) as far as I am aware (and there is also the major problem of the data caps we suffer under in NZ).  The amount of rugby on Sky is crazy (I find it hard to believe anyone is watching even a fraction of it), and presumably the amount of rugby will only increase as they slowly continue to lose the more premium sports with worldwide appeal. But with 2 ESPN channels in HD now as well, I am able to watch 3 games a week of NFL and actually see what's going on, and was even able to see an England (football) Euro qualifying game for the first time in years recently (also in HD).   For all these reasons, there's no way I'll be giving up Sky for a while yet ......         

Hopefully not haha

pretty sure they can seek to shut down websites offering streams to their content (pretty sure they have the internet based rights so they can play it on SKY GO).

Not sure if this will happen or not but there is a risk that it will i guess.