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My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

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Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s most likely that football is honestly a bit shit, and there are many better things to do for entertainment that don’t require mortgaging a kidney to watch.

try going to germany, where you can get a season ticket at top club for a few hundred euros. i think Bayern Munich's cheapest season ticket is like $200 at the current exchange rate. that's manageable. i've paid more than that for a single NFL game in OK-ish seats.

You won't get a season ticket for most clubs in your lifetime, the queues are enormous, so the price point really doesn't matter.

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#152

In Italy something similar is happening: they have split the football game rights among different competitors, so that if you want to watch every game you have to spend >100€ monthly (that's very high for our economy). To this, add the facts that there has been a major hit to illegal streaming piracy and that football games are getting extremely boring in our country (compared to the Premier League or our Serie A of…

What pisses me off is that they've said (in Germany) that they are trying to avoid monopolies and the rights need to go to multiple rights owners. Instead of giving the same rights to multiple broadcasters as would be normal for real non-monopolies, they split up the rights and gave each part to a single broadcaster. Which means, the full broadcasting rights are held by multiple parties, e.g. it's not a monopoly, but each broadcaster has a monopoly over his part of the cake. Which means if you want to have the whole cake as a fan, you need to pay the cartel, i.e. all broadcasters at once.

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month. This is common in Europe in general, also for copyrighted music. If your establishment wants to play recorded music, even just playing the radio or Spotify on the background, a copyright royalty fee has to be paid. Applies to all venues and even…

Do bars in the US just show matches on a residential cable tv connection?

Yup

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#154
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't they sue LaLiga for damages? Only because a court grants you some power you aren't absolved from the responsibilities that come with that power, or are you?

Cloudflare are https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2025/02/19/cloudflare-takes-... What complicates it is that the ISP, Telefonica, is also a Soccer rights-holder. How they haven't sued La Liga for defamation is beyond me though; publicly condemning Cloudflare's role in enabling piracy by knowingly protecting criminal organisations for profit. https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/official-statement-in-rela... Traditionally…

Exactly: Telefonica is not only the rights holder, it is an ISP… Which seems a conflict of interests but you know, Spain is different!

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#155

In Italy something similar is happening: they have split the football game rights among different competitors, so that if you want to watch every game you have to spend >100€ monthly (that's very high for our economy). To this, add the facts that there has been a major hit to illegal streaming piracy and that football games are getting extremely boring in our country (compared to the Premier League or our Serie A of…

Currently having this fight with hockey in the US. If I want to watch all of my team's games it's $65/mo split across 3 separate services

NFL and NASCAR are similar.

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#156
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never agree to this. But it doesn't strike me as particularly unethical, either. So long as both parties understand what they're agreeing to, this seems perfectly fine. If, for example, the NFL ever did this, I would just not watch.

I'm not sure about other sports, but for the MLB, there are some very strange policies that make it difficult to watch games even if you want to pay for it, mostly stemming from the local broadcasters of the games. Even if you sign up for the subscription service to stream games, they'll "black out" the games that they expect you to be able to watch by getting a cable subscription, which not only is ridiculous (since…

Why doesn't he just save himself the time, money and hassle and just watch the highlights or highlight clips.

I understand why the NFL is going the stream route given how popular it is already. They can afford to inconvenience people. But MLB has been stagnant or declining for so long. You'd think they'd make their content more accessible to grow the fan base.

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#157

Related (7 years ago): https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/8q1j0o/la_liga_uses... - Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month. - The official app, with over 10 million downloads, asks you for microphone and GPS permissions. - La Liga remotely activates the microphone and tries to detect…

> - Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month. This is common in Europe in general, also for copyrighted music. If your establishment wants to play recorded music, even just playing the radio or Spotify on the background, a copyright royalty fee has to be paid. Applies to all venues and even…

In most EU countries private copying levies are paid to the copyright mafia any time you purchase a hard drive, printer or even a blank cassette. Because you know, you might copy something using it.

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally fine. Still no need to spread FUD/misinformation.

Misrepresentation, yes. Neither FUD nor Misinformation when it's quoted out of the article

Next time just don't misrepresent stuff so I don't misrepresent you misrepresenting stuff. :)

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#160
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't they sue LaLiga for damages? Only because a court grants you some power you aren't absolved from the responsibilities that come with that power, or are you?

Cloudflare are https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2025/02/19/cloudflare-takes-... What complicates it is that the ISP, Telefonica, is also a Soccer rights-holder. How they haven't sued La Liga for defamation is beyond me though; publicly condemning Cloudflare's role in enabling piracy by knowingly protecting criminal organisations for profit. https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/official-statement-in-rela... Traditionally…

Sports have the kind of cultural power that you'd ordinarily only see from an organized, centralized, and probably Abrahamic religion. As a result they're able to commandeer the state in ways you'd only expect from an actual political party or an invading military force.

For example, it's common for sports teams in the US to browbeat cities into building them new sports-related infrastructure. Because they can threaten to move to LA, and then the public comment forms all get flooded with angry people who have no political opinion besides "WHY ARE YOU TAKING AWAY MY $SPORTSBALL_TEAM". This is papered over with a lot of excuses about "stadiums generating business revenue" (they don't lol) and people don't look too closely because nobody expects the sports people to be eating off the public dole like this.

The thing is, politicians also like sports because it's something that keeps people looking away from what they're doing. That's how sports leagues got to demand expensive stadiums in the first place. And every organization grows to fit its niche, because no one wants to take a paycut. So once sports leagues got used to having billionaire teams buying top talent to play in lavish taxpayer-funded stadiums, this sort of insane copyright nonsense becomes inevitable. LaLiga's business structure is too top-heavy to tolerate any amount of piracy. Anyone who isn't paying their tithe to the church of sportsball demands investigation, and anyone who obstructs such investigation is a threat to the sport.

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