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Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

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Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#311

Post by iamzenitraM »

embedding-shape wrote: post #217

Ironically, I live in Spain, and at this very minute, there is a football game going on (Atlético Madrid vs Barcelona) which I literally just learned about because I could just hear my neighbors scream about the 0-1 score, and with Vodafone ISP I'm not experiencing the block of Cloudflare right now. https://hayahora.futbol/ also shows "NO" incorrectly (if you're being strict about the title+domain). I'm guessing it's…

The site tracks not football matches, but when blocks occur, and, right now, there are not any.

(The whole joke about the site is trying to detect football happening via internet blocks, as otherwise myself personally I wouldn't know at all otherwise about matches happening)

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#312

Post by Manuel_D »

PowerElectronix wrote: post #280
Manuel_D wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piracy isn't a service problem. Many people just want to consume media for free. It's true that poor service can exacerbate piracy, but even a good service isn't enough to dissuade pirates. Games that are completely convenient to download on Steam are still pirated. Some people are pushed to pirate on account of bad service, sure. But plenty of others are more than willing to tolerate worse service to receive a produ…

You are always going to find fringe users that would pirate everything no matter what. Hours of search, bad quality, bad audio? They don't care, they rather watch that shit than pay a buck for it. But they are fringe, an anomaly. Most people will happily pay for stuff if it's confortable enough. Don't focus on the tail end of the human behavior distribution. Steam makes a lot of money, the devs publishing there, too.…

To the contrary, data suggests that games lose about 20% of sales if they're cracked on day 1. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game...

Good service is still hard to compete with zero cost.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#313

Post by FireBeyond »

elijaht wrote: post #261
quacked wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a service problem. Every new service is a colossal headache to set up payment, remember to cancel payment if you only wanted to see the single event and have no need for the service the rest of the year, find what's playing on what when, deal with their bullshit when they add ads onto an ad-free plan that you bought only because it was ad-free, yadda yadda yadda. The suits could have had 10x as much money out of…

I pay for a ton of sports content across a ton of platforms. I used to pirate a ton of sports across a ton of platforms. I don’t seem to have nearly the same difficulty as you. I wanted to watch the Olympics so I reactivated my Peacock account, paid for a month, then immediately canceled it. I’ve never had consistent issues finding where I could watch a particular game. It is aggravating that my MLBTV subscription do…

> I don’t seem to have nearly the same difficulty as you.

Wait til you hear of this concept called "Dead Zones". The NBA has them.

What's that? It's where you live in the streaming blackout zone and get a nice message saying "watch this on your regional sporting affiliate", but you don't live in the TV zone for that team, so "your regional sporting affiliate" doesn't cover the game. So you get to watch... national games... and you can watch your team's games, on 24 or 72 hour delay.

And the NBA will tell you they can't refund your League Pass subscription because of that - you can watch the game, just not when it's happening. You can watch it after you've almost certainly heard the results. "But you'll get to see it with no breaks because we clip the commercial breaks!" Yayyyyy.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#314

Post by FireBeyond »

cik wrote: post #240
Aurornis wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom I don't have experience with broadcast media (in Spain, especially) but I a little experience on the software side: I could not believe the lengths some people would go to in order to avoid paying even $5-10 for useful software. Hours of work, sketchy cracks, downloading things from websites likely to compromise their…

It's absolutely a service problem. I can pay for the local sports rebroadcast packages.. but oh wait, you just don't feel like this week, playing the Raptors game, because there's a local thing you think people will watch? Fair enough, subscribe to DAZN, and pay there.. oh sorry, we've opted to stop carrying . Sigh, fine, I'll pay for NBA Leaguepass. I don't live in your country... great, random blackouts. Fine, I'll…

> Sigh, fine, I'll pay for NBA Leaguepass. I don't live in your country... great, random blackouts. Fine, I'll try and use a VPN (hell, I literally used tailscale to a friend's house for a bit).. but then those games are blacked out too, at random?

I live in an NBA "dead zone". I'm in the streaming blackout zone. But not in the TV zone (even if I did pay for TV, which I'd almost consider).[1] And then I VPNed to Canada for international LP, but that wasn't much better. Then Mexico. And then ...

Then I found a site that had an actual Roku app (at least) that took payment in Crypto or Amazon GC but was absolutely uninfested, no ads, no garbage, probably at times more reliable than even the NBA's app. But they got shut down.

Not to mention LP refused to refund me though my subscription was effectively useless because I "could still watch the games, and without commercial or timeout breaks, even!" - yeah, 24 to 72 hours after it was played. Yay. Lucky me.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#315

Post by wyan »

jwr wrote: post #9

This is incredibly stupid, but don't laugh at Spaniards: your (and my) lawmakers are equally likely to enact similarly stupid laws. It's mind-boggling how stupid the world can be sometimes.

Not lawmakers in this case, but judges having no understanding of what they're ruling on.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#317

Post by pessimizer »

numpad0 wrote: post #258
embedding-shape wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a native Swede and I've said the same about Swedish to, don't really care if it's Mandarin, English or Spanish, just that as many countries as possible go together and unify under one language. Obviously both for Netherlands and Sweden, English would be the way to go, but imagine if you could learn just 3 languages and speak with 90% of the world's population? I thought globalism would take us there eventually so…

FWIW, Mandarin is not the universal spoken language of China. It's just the lingua franca of China as the region. They actually have something like a dozen major groups of dialects with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility. The place read as Shang-hai in Mandarin is apparently read Zan-he in the local "dialect" spoken there. I think one could say Koln and Cologne sound closer together.

Did anyone say that Mandarin is the "universal spoken language" of China? IIRC, >90% of Chinese people speak Mandarin as either a 1st or 2nd language.

I don't think as many did 20 years ago, but China is consciously Mandarinizing, and English has lost its spot as the standard second language with the vastly increasing hostility from the West.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#318

Post by betaby »

wyan wrote: post #315
jwr wrote: post #9

This is incredibly stupid, but don't laugh at Spaniards: your (and my) lawmakers are equally likely to enact similarly stupid laws. It's mind-boggling how stupid the world can be sometimes.

Not lawmakers in this case, but judges having no understanding of what they're ruling on.

That's why one company should not be allowed being an ISPs and a media company.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#319

Post by stackghost »

nozzlegear wrote: post #148
stackghost wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USA consistently ranks outside the top 10 countries in Quality of Life by any reputable metric.

Any metric that treats the US as one single data point instead of 50 should be taken with a grain of salt. Denmark has 6 million residents, Minnesota has 5.7 million. You can't compare an entire continental nation, whose 50 states all set their own 50 different health, education and public spending policies, against e.g. Sweden or Spain. That's a bad comparison.

Why do we judge other geographically large and politically divided nations like Canada, Russia or China in aggregate but the USA gets special treatment that conveniently provides an excuse for facing the reality that America is not actually a very good place to live unless you are very wealthy?

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#320

Post by littlecranky67 »

iamzenitraM wrote: post #308

Oh hi HN, I'm one of the folks behind https://hayahora.futbol , we monitor the blocks via a varying set of homelab infrastructure to at least try to make a bit more transparent when they occur and what gets blocked (which isn't public, and we have to guess). Feel free to AMA!

Thanks for the website, really usefull - hopefully it will save me quite some time I am trying to debug a network issue on another sunday afternoon!

My question is - as someone on a sibling thread pointed out - it just showed "NO" while the champions league Madrid game was on. And that match is particularly mentioned in the above news article as to be the first match where these new changes come into effect. So were there no blocks, or did they change blocking scope? Or is it just a measuring issue, perhaps?

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