English Premier League on SkyTV

Not so much lost their bottle as had a disaster.  Watched at a friends with fibre and the first half was almost unwatchable the resolution was in and out of crystal clear HD to so pixellated you couldn't read the score probably 30 or so times, with a couple of 30 second freezes in there for good measure.

edit: Agree the change in commentary was great.  I'm not a big fan of Stevenson, but I thought he actually did really well, and I enjoyed Donald's contributions too.

Had a 15 second buffer in the second half, and a few patches where the quality dropped, otherwise worked fine.

I also watched the France vs Argentina game and thought the half time pundits were very good, and actually went quite in depth to some preventative rugby tactics.

Not having Justin Marshall is a massive plus as well. 

Wouldn't it be great if Spark Sport could flick their EPL coverage to Duke, or some iteration along the lines of a Duke Sports channel or service?

Considering on weekends (and I'm assuming during the week) when Duke's regular programming finishes at midnight and they've got nothing but quiz questions for 7 or so hours.

Pipe dreams I guess. In saying that, I've only had minimal problems with Spark Sport so far.

They chopped the game into the middle of "Ghosts of Mars" movie but at the end of the game, they didn't pick up the film from where it was chopped.

Who brought up it affecting 'a few customers,' Spark? Bit of an own goal if they said something like that.

If you subscribe to SKY sport (either via a decoder or via SKY Sport Now) you get free access to the beIN app so you can choose from all the games beIN have on their platform.  Also I think there is football being played on the sports channels that are not full time with another sporting code when there is a clash on Sport 7.

^^^Fair enough. Just feels a bit wasteful having 8 and 9 showing replays of AFL and snowboarding tomorrow morning for example, which surely not many people would be tuning in for at that hour. You've got three pretty tasty 4am-ish kickoffs: Atalanta-Fiorentina, Frankfurt-Dortmund and Athletic-Alaves. Would be nice to have two devoted football channels, guess I'll have to check the app out.

Just felt really cool last year basically having an entire channel devoted Serie A, especially when they scheduled all of the replays of the overnight matches back to back in a big block.

To quote them correctly..... From "Stuff"......

Spark Sport are shifting coverage of the All Blacks vs Springboks match to TVNZ after their streaming services failed for many viewers.

Frustrated fans took to social media to complain about the quality and reliability of the coverage, with many who had forked out for a tournament pass demanding a refund.

It prompted Spark to shift coverage to free-to-air television.

A Spark Sport spokeswoman said: "A small percentage of our customers are experiencing streaming issues when watching the All Blacks v South Africa match on certain devices.

Leicester-Spurs streamed fine last night. So long as there is relatively no issues with streaming an actual sport then i'm not too bothered.

Yeah coverage was good for that game, any reason we dont get pre game interviews though?

There's not really the big pressers and all that before the game, usually all the interviews & media sessions are done in the lead up to games earlier in the week and on the Friday's, with only some bits and pieces stuff on gameday prior to KO.

Today's report on the Spark rugby coverage:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/116004263/rest-of-rugby-world-cup-will-stream-perfectly-spark-sport-boss-says

 Spark's head of sport Jeff Latch....said the issue on Saturday night, caused by the configuration of the video signal from the US. had been identified, resolved and fixed. He believed the rest of the tournament streams would go off without a hitch.

"There were 132,000 people that were streaming it live when it started to have the video quality issues, and by the end of the match we had 126,000 streaming, so 6000 we assumed dropped off and went to watch the second half coverage on Duke."

          ____________________________________________________________________________

So, they're making th same excuses they've given recently for poor EPL streaming...

Plus, with only 132,000 subscribers streaming the All Blacks it seems quite a small percentage of the population are subscribing.

And if 6000 dropped off by the end of the match, that must have been because their stream was unwatchable.

Many others may have persisted with a poor quality stream... 

My spark sport coverage so far has been pretty much error free... first inkling I had that there were issues was seeing the message on the bottom of the screen saying to switch to Duke.

Have I been part of a lucky few, or the majority? 

Majority of feedback I have from acquaintances was it was just fine.

At least Spark had plans in place to switch to Duke with any issues, if your Skygo behaved as badly as it normally does you used to just have to lump it.

Good article IMO

https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/opinion-analysis/116007696/rugby-world-cup-2019-spark-sports-streaming-of-is-a-national-tragedy-or-is-it

It's really not.  Forcing consumers onto a new technology, and then not being able to deliver the product to those consumers via that technology, is a really sharkty experience for those consumers.  

Referring to sky's "rain fade" is a red herring, very very few people have complaints about sky or terrestrial TV being able to deliver a clear signal during major sporting events.  Having the stream crap out during an All Blacks game at a World Cup is about as much of a disaster as you could have.  They've done their best to make it right, but that's not really a defence of Spark Sport...  

I agree the rain fade is a red herring, I have heard this a lot from people and commentators defending Spark Sport. I could count the number of times I've seen the rain fade signal on the fingers of one hand. Others might have different experiences, but in the 20 odd years I had SKY, that was my mine.

From the info I have seen, they delivered for >95% of customers, and switched to their back-up plan for the sake of the <5%. 

I would rate that as a success. The way software and services are delivered these days mean the first experience is expected to be the worst, and from there it should only improve, and fast. 

Going by my own interactions with live sport streaming providers (the only appropriate comparison I can make), this is the best first-up experience by quite some distance.

The best overall experience I can recall was probably year 2 of Coliseum with the Premier League. Nothing but complaints then as well. 

It won't change, people will complain non stop, even if they deliver a perfect experience, because it's new, it's different, and victims get clicks and attention. 

Our brave new world. 

This is also a red herring. It's just not what happened. Did you read about the actual issues and the volume of people affected, or just the hysteria being whipped up? 

How is rain fade a red herring? It's a limitation of the technology. Back when I had Sky I would see it far too regularly.

Streaming has almost worked flawless for me. On top of that, it's cheaper than Sky, I can watch it anytime, on any device, I can start late, I can jump around, etc etc.

Spark has had some teething issues. But these are not issues with the idea of streaming itself.

For the 5% that is has "severely" effected, I imagine the far majority of it is user error.

Either user error, or the internet connection is not good enough (and the user is unaware of that, so it's another form of user error).

The only sports streaming services I have used have been Spark and Fan Pass. Spark has had a few minor issues for me but Fan Pass had bigger ones (for instance, trying to watch a game live but giving me footage that was an hour delayed then caught up to the actual time so I missed an hour of the game) and when I had an issue with my login last week Spark were super responsive and helpful whereas when I contacted Sky about FanPass issues they transferred me to multiple people and never gave me a straight answer or offered any form of refund. 

 Spark Sport >Fan Pass IMO

I've used:

- PLP (Coliseum)

- Fanpass

- SkyGo

- Bein Sports

- Spark

- Various illegal streams

And my experiences would be ranked in this order:

1 - Spark

2 - Fanpass

3 - PLP (on average - year 1 was bad, year 2 was great)

4 - Bein Sports

5 - SkyGo

6 - Various illegal streams

But let me tell you it was a close run thing between 5 and 6! SkyGo is so bad. 

Yeah I've used illegal streams too but they are so much worse that they aren't even the same category for me

I've had illegal streams that are better than any of the products I've paid for, but finding quality ones is inconsistent unless you know where to look (especially now reddit has cracked down on illegal streaming links).

PLP definitely lead the way amongst the paid content. I haven't used BeIN or Fanpass though and haven't found Spark too bad so far.

I've had really good illegal on demand services, but live streams have always been a bit shark for me. Clearly my cyber criminal skillz need updating

This is flawed thinking - obviously for Duke to have been of value, you would have to have been near a TV capable of showing it and not watching via Spark in the middle of nowhere - so using that same definition if you were using your SKY go (which is only supplied to those who hold SKY accounts) your backup plan is obviously your decoder.

Now if your talking about your out and about then the reality is neither Spark nor SKY had a backup plan.

Of course you could be using SKY Go from a mates account or something like that - which really invalidates any further complaints.

Have you tried SKY Sports Now?

Reason I ask is in a strange way SKY need Spark to actually do a decent job of streaming as SKY are also in that market and going forward SKY will be able to offer the best of both worlds (as long as they hold onto, or re-aquire key pieces of content)

YouTube live streaming of the Bundesliga a few years back was excellent. I haven't tried a vpn to access the HAL on YouTube, would be interesting to see what that is like.

I've used it when I was overseas last year, it was really good.

I'm not a luddite, I regularly stream games (both legally and illegally).  I live in a household with no SKY and no normal TV connection - all our TV is delivered via the internet.  I just think that a 95% success rate is not success!  

There is clearly still an issue with the reliability of delivering sports streaming over the internet.  The technology is close, but it's not there.  Netflix gives a consistent, reliable product.  So far, the sports streams have not.  

This was the big test and they failed.  The rest of the All Black pool games will be against weaker teams so there will be less demand.  From the quarters on they are also on Duke.  Even if it gets better that's not really the point...if you were Spark going into another major sporting event would you do it without the backup of terrestrial TV coverage?  That will affect their capacity to bid for other, major events.  Spark can deal with complaints about premier league streams, but they can't bid for Super Rugby if they don't have a reliable product.

Sky Sports Now is repackaged Fanpass. Moving towards what Sky could and should have done years ago. Except they didn't, after Fanpass finally picked up some steam (it was great) they more than doubled the price and wrecked it... and to put the nail in the coffin the whole time they pushed SkyGo to their subscribers which is a much inferior platform.

But, Sky will only be able to offer the best of both worlds for a limited time. As streaming picks up pace, and less and less people rely on satellite television (thanks to Netflix, Disney, etc) the satellites will no longer have the economies of scale to continue using.

nope - that's not correct.

How much research have you put into your second statement there?  do you know how much of the south island (in particular) has no DTH or decent enough internet to support any delivery other than from a dish.

I get SKY have made mistakes - I get people don't like them and I get some people just want them to go away.

You don't think an 'I work for Sky' disclaimer might be in order Chops?

If you don't know that I work for SKY then you are right behind the 8 ball - I'm not hiding that.

Not sure where I accused you of having no streaming experience...
But sounds like your complaints are about the reliability of streaming live sport in general, which i agree is not yet up to scratch. In comparison with all other efforts so far in nz, spark were the best on their first up try, my personal experience was excellent, and so was literally every single other person I have talked to about it. Those seem like the best factors to base my opinion on. 
So in my opinion, a good success. The only talk of failure I hear is reports on isolated instances, mostly not even from people who actually experienced it. Feels like hysteria for clicks to me. People love piling on, nature I guess. Look at LG, he's been ripping into Spark day in day out since before they even released their app. It was always going to be this way, regardless of spark's actual performance.
On the other side of the coin, I literally cannot watch the arsenal game this morning even though i pay for a service for it. Sky Sports Now are not showing it, and Bein is not working. Sky/Bein do not support the Bein app - queries/issue reports go unattended, as I have experienced over the last 2 years. But hey no one else cares so that will get no coverage. Thats what I call a real failure.

Yea when i say fanpass in that list i mean fanpass/skysportsnow

Chopah - if that's the case I'm genuinely interested to know what platform does Fanpass run on and what platform does SkySportNow run on?

Re 2nd paragraph, according to this 680,000 households of NZ's 1.8m subscribe to Netflix. That's over 25% of the way. Sky has what, about 750,000 subscribers? That number is going down, inline with trends across the world. I don't know Sky's economics are (apparently you might), but it's safe to assume there's a point where maintaining the satellite infrastructure just to service some number of South Islanders won't be economical.

Also - I had no idea you worked for Sky. Not really that vested in YellowFever users if I'm honest.

I've recently purchased NFL Gamepass and it's beyond fantastic. I've also had no issues whatsoever with SparkSport. Every Chelsea game has been in crystal clear HD

So how many commenters on this thread actually experienced the issues with Spark that are being widely discussed?

Really interested to know, as more and more seem to be confirming they had no issues at all.