But why should anyone have to break the law to watch the Mets?
I think the reddit streams pages (RIP /r/nbastreams, /r/soccerstreams, etc) were the peak of stream accessibility and quality for me. I have some go-to sites now, but those subreddits were so convenient and easy.
Agreed, those subs were easily the best.
A lot have moved into Discord, which makes these things even more difficult. In general discord servers are insular little clubs. They tend to have strange unique rules and require you to jump through so many hoops to get initiated.
The Discord format is like plugging into a stream of consciousness, so doesn’t exactly lend itself to info-seeking like the forum format does.
I fucking hate discord. I know they also created a NBA discord once the reddit crackdown happened ads and at the beginning you’d get stream links in the chat, but now even that is banned, so usually I hurt Google stream, but it’s a crapshoot
/r/soccerstreams was the best of times. I mostly watch Dutch football which has way fewer streams than the big European leagues. Since /r/soccerstreams closed I haven’t been able to find streams nearly as easily.
For a couple seasons, there was a private subreddit where they had extracted the official streams of every NFL game, and you could just open it in a web browser and watch in full quality for free with no ads other than what was in the actual broadcast. And for a while, there was a promotion in a few European countries for free NFL Sunday Ticket access, and if you started the stream over a VPN connection into one of those countries, you could turn the VPN off and it’d continue working. Then some online magazine published the trick and it stopped working the next week.
These posts are fucking cancer and are literally just beacons saying “HEY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OVER HERE”
Yes… But then again how can other people know… It kind of sucks, I would have never found some steam sites w/o others sharing… But I get what you mean.
I don’t have a problem with sharing…but when these mainstream news sites out these places, there’s usually blood in the water coming. The same thing happened with a free VR piracy repo after Bonelab came out. It was shared by a mainstream game site and then tiktok. Afterwards, they had to go dark and switch to a paid / VIP only.
Same effect happens with Nintendo fan games.
Mark my words. It’s going to come to a point where you have to subscribe to your team each season to watch them play. They will throw in some bullshit extras like exclusive player interviews but it will all be a play to make you pay each season.
You say this like it’s a bad thing. If I could get away with just paying for my one hockey team, instead of the legit, 3 fucking services you have to have currently to watch an entire season, I would do it on a heartbeat.
3?? Lol, I only watch Hockey and look at this shit. I have to pay $250 CAD just to get NHL while I don’t give no fuck about anything else. Fuck that. I used to pay for NHLTV but now they don’t sell it in Canada anymore. So fuck’em.
Oh, forgot, they also have blackouts on certain games/regions.
They actually would be nice, but my soccer team, all TV rights are owned by corps that want to sell you 200$/month packages, so my team can sell me access to watch their games NON LIVE. Meaning I can watch them… After they’ve been played which is bullshit.
I wouldn’t mind paying 5$/month for my teams games only, but it’s not really an option, so pirating it is!
A team I support did exactly this and it was quite successful. I believe it was $60-$70 for the whole season and included ALL home games (League, cup, and Europe) with replays posted on the same day. For me, it was worth it but I watch almost all their games
I mean if you’re going to break the law at least do it for a decent team.
Interesting to have a big magazine that is The Atlantic this topic in this light. People are absolutely fed up with the fragmentation of services and then how many restrictions there are around viewing LEGAL streams.
When illegal streaming ends up being more convenient, easier to setup and have more features, it’s not at all a surprise that people flock to it.
