Non-Spectrum options for watching the Blues

[Brian39]

40 years ago most teams didn't broadcast all of their games. 20 or so years ago there were very few games available out of market. Now sitting in Houston I can watch basically any professional sports game if I am willing to pay just a little bit for it. For hockey, I can watch nearly all merely for the price of ESPN+ (which can be bought bundled with HULU and Disney for under $20/month). Not to mention that games are in HD and large TVs are much cheaper than before. This is dramatically better situation than ever before as a fan (whether hockey or basketball or baseball or NFL) and we should celebrate it rather than bemoan it.

Being an out of market fan is fantastic. ESPN+ is great. $100 a year to stream around 70 Blues games is fantastic. I'd agree that there is nothing to bemoan if that was the experience for all sports fans. But it isn't. That isn't remotely the experience for in-market fans, which is exactly the thing we are talking about.

I could watch damn near every Blues game for less than $200 a year when I lived in Colorado (and that is now $100 a year with ESPN+). Know what I couldn't watch easily and affordably? Avalanche games. Altitude is only available through DirecTV in Colorado. It is not available on DISH Network or Comcast, which are the other two major TV options in Colorado. It is not available on Hulu Live, YouTube TV, Sling, etc. If you want to watch Avs games in Colorado legally, your only option is to sign a 2 year contract that starts at $89.99 per month (plus taxes, fees, and any equipment charges). After year 1, the $89.99 price goes up by $30 and you are contractually obligated to pay it so good luck threatening to cancel service if it doesn't go back to the intro price. Tack on the $12 a month regional sports fee and your at an average of $117 a month before taxes and any other fees. It comes out to well over $1500 a year for the cheapest option to watch Avs games. You will be pushing $2000 if you want a cable box and DVR instead of just gaining access to the DirecTV's streaming app on a laptop/Roku/etc. It's been like that since 2019 and is fully the result of Altitude's contract with the Avs to be their exclusive broadcast partner in the state.

That is absolutely something to bemoan even though you are able to watch all those games for $100 a year in Houston. I think the Avs are the most drastic example of the way blackouts strongarm local fans but it certainly isn't the only market where fans have to pay out the ass to watch their local team.

 

[Blueston]

Being an out of market fan is fantastic. ESPN+ is great. $100 a year to stream around 70 Blues games is fantastic. I'd agree that there is nothing to bemoan if that was the experience for all sports fans. But it isn't. That isn't remotely the experience for in-market fans, which is exactly the thing we are talking about.

I could watch damn near every Blues game for less than $200 a year when I lived in Colorado (and that is now $100 a year with ESPN+). Know what I couldn't watch easily and affordably? Avalanche games. Altitude is only available through DirecTV in Colorado. It is not available on DISH Network or Comcast, which are the other two major TV options in Colorado. It is not available on Hulu Live, YouTube TV, Sling, etc. If you want to watch Avs games in Colorado legally, your only option is to sign a 2 year contract that starts at $89.99 per month (plus taxes, fees, and any equipment charges). After year 1, the $89.99 price goes up by $30 and you are contractually obligated to pay it so good luck threatening to cancel service if it doesn't go back to the intro price. Tack on the $12 a month regional sports fee and your at an average of $117 a month before taxes and any other fees. It comes out to well over $1500 a year for the cheapest option to watch Avs games. It's been like that since 2019 and is fully the result of Altitude's contract with the Avs to be their exclusive broadcast partner in the state.

That is absolutely something to bemoan even though you are able to watch all those games for $100 a year in Houston. I think the Avs are the most drastic example of the way blackouts strongarm local fans but it certainly isn't the only market where fans have to pay out the ass to watch their local team.

That does sound pretty crappy.

 

[DatDude44]

I'm not going to post any websites because it's illegal. but ON the subject, HOCKEY is awesome and everybody should get to watch it, especially awesome blues fans who need to watch the players chase around a DOT on the white ice on their TV....

 

[oPlaiD]

I'm not going to post any websites because it's illegal. but ON the subject, HOCKEY is awesome and everybody should get to watch it, especially awesome blues fans who need to watch the players chase around a DOT on the white ice on their TV....

I really wish I could watch baseball too...

 

[DatDude44]

I really wish I could watch baseball too...

If I played in the MLB, I’d wear number .66 and pray none of my favorite players go on the .IR

 

[Celtic Note]

None of the major networks treat piracy as something that isn't understood. The potential revenue lost from people pirating games is significantly outweighed by the revenue brought in from TV deals. They have determined that the current business model of selling exclusive broadcast rights for hundreds of millions of dollars is more profitable than selling streams direct-to-consumer. I think they are overwhelmingly correct.

From the league's perspective, it is not a bug that it costs a lot of money and multiple subscriptions to watch every game. That is a feature. It means more money going to networks, which means that they are willing to pay the league more money for the rights. The NHL makes about $625M a year from ESPN and Turner for their two national US TV deals. They make another $436M a year from Sportsnet for their national deal in Canada. That's $1.05B of revenue before you even start talking about the 32 individual local TV deals. The local TV deals are extremely difficult to find info on, but it is safe to assume that they are very lucrative. Back in 2013, there were already 9 teams with a local TV deal of $20M or more each year. Given the explosion in value of sports broadcast rights, that number has absolutely gone up by a good margin. It is a safe bet that the average value of a local NHL TV deal is north of $20M a year a decade later. That's another $640M+ of revenue by selling broadcast rights. So the NHL is bringing in at least $1.7B of annual revenue by selling their broadcast rights and the thing that drives that value is that the buyer gets exclusive broadcast rights. The NHL can't extract those dollars if they undercut the buyer's product with a cheap all-in-one streaming service.

An all-in-one streaming service would breach all of these contracts and the networks would walk away from all of them. There is simply no way for the sports networks (and the cable companies) to make money off live sports if there is an easy, blackout free alternative that costs noticeably less. Almost all of the value of these contracts is based on the network purchasing the ability to tell fans "pay us or don't watch the game." To make things easy on the fan, the NHL would need to immediately start generating a couple billion dollars of annual revenue off their direct to consumer streaming service.

I don't think the NHL has the fanbase to make up that revenue. NBC Sports was an abject failure and their business model was largely hockey-focused. The US market resoundingly refused to upgrade to a higher cable tier in order to get national NHL broadcasts and viewership was brutal when compared to the numbers the NHL immediately saw upon its return to basic cable. Expecting a mass subscription to a several hundred dollar service to stream the NHL seems unlikely. I think the current TV deals are massively inflated by cable companies and networks clinging to a failing business model. To match these bloated contracts, the NHL probably needs 10M+ North American subscribers to a direct-to-consumer streaming service priced at $200+ per year and I'm not remotely convinced that they could get that. That's more than the US and Canada combined viewership of Stanley Cup Final games that aired on over-the-air network TV.

The current environment is horribly anti-consumer and I'd love to see legislation prohibiting exclusive broadcast agreements for any league/team that takes a dime of public money (either directly or via tax waiver/benefits). Because unregulated, pro sports broadcasting has every financial incentive to keep on the current path unless/until it crashes. The potential revenue lost from the small minority of people who pirate is nothing compared to the revenue brought in by putting live sports behind several layers of paywall.

The current environment is both anti-consumer and anti-employee for just about everything. No one should be surprised by this but everyone upper middle class and lower should be enraged. At some point, possibly soon, it will reach a boiling point.

 

[oPlaiD]

If I played in the MLB, I’d wear number .66 and pray none of my favorite players go on the .IR

I would be too, except MLB has banned that number...

 

[ChicagoBlues]

Can you f***ing believe the bullshit of this? Not only do you have to pay to see games but you have to pay multiple times to see all games. Splitting games between espn and tnt is f***ing stupid. Then you have to deal with blackouts to top it all off and they wonder why people choose piracy? WE TRY TO PAY YOU MOTHER f***ERS and you just make it harder to see the f***ing games.

I pay $0.00 and watch as many games as I want.

 

[ort]

Has anyone been trying out the Bally Sports streaming app? How has it been? People keep saying it's really bad on twitter, but who knows.

If I use my spectrum cables login to use the Bally sports app to stream games, is the experience identical to using the paid standalone service? My guess is yes... I may try this for a week or two and see how it is.

 

[Majorityof1]

Has anyone been trying out the Bally Sports streaming app? How has it been? People keep saying it's really bad on twitter, but who knows.

I've been using it for about half the blues games since Bally took over. Its not great but serviceable. It also depends on the platform. On my main TV and bedroom TV, I stream through my Xbox since LG didn't have a native app when I first used it, and its become a habit. My other TV is a Amazon Fire TV, so I steam through a native app off the Amazon store.

The same app runs infinitely better on the Xbox. The Amazon app forces me to rewind or FF 8 seconds at a time. Like hit the button, wait a second, Commercial skips 8 seconds, then I have to hit the button again. It also randomly crashes or jumps forward to Live (I like to start watching 40 minutes late and fast forward commercials and a lot of the talking heads). So I'll be watching with 15 minutes left in the 2nd and suddenly its intermission and I know the score going into the 3rd. Overall, on either platform, it gets the job done if that is your best way to watch. But if the Fire TV app was the only way I could watch it, I would be much more annoyed.

 

[shpongle falls]

I’ve used the Bally Sports+ app for every game and honestly I like it so far. I like that you can start the game from the beginning regardless of what time the live game is at. Have had no issues with it at all.

I will say though it seems to matter what streaming device you have, I’m using a basic Roku player and it’s been totally fine. My dad has been trying to stream games with it using Amazon fire tv or something and it’s wonky as hell and barely works.

 

[TheDizee]

Has anyone been trying out the Bally Sports streaming app? How has it been? People keep saying it's really bad on twitter, but who knows.

If I use my spectrum cables login to use the Bally sports app to stream games, is the experience identical to using the paid standalone service? My guess is yes... I may try this for a week or two and see how it is.

yes i did the free trial then sub'd for 19.99 a month (only doing monthly instead of yearly unless they get the Cardinals on the package, hockey season only last 6-7 months).

streams at 60fps with no issue. my only complain is they stream the pre/post game shows as seperate feeds from the game, so after one ends you gotta back out to the main menu and pick the next feed. hope they fix this moving forward.

 

[tfriede2]

My only issue with Bally + is getting the game to play. I’ll be logged in, go to the live game, click on it, and it then shows a black screen with a play button in the middle; hitting that play button does nothing. Forcing the app to stop then restarting has done the trick, but it’s frustrating.

 

[rumrokh]

My only issue with Bally + is getting the game to play. I’ll be logged in, go to the live game, click on it, and it then shows a black screen with a play button in the middle; hitting that play button does nothing. Forcing the app to stop then restarting has done the trick, but it’s frustrating.

I can't say this for certain, but I suspect it does this when it can't play the advertisements, even if the ad failing to load has nothing to do with you. I've had this happen on multiple platforms. I think they were experimenting with it during the preseason because during one game, I kept getting thrown back to my main firestick menu during play breaks. Everything was up to date and it hasn't happened since.

It's a little janky - more than it should be - but it hasn't actually interfered with my ability to watch regular season games.

 

[Majorityof1]

The same app runs infinitely better on the Xbox.

I jinxed myself. Went to start the game 30 minutes late so I had runway to fast forward commercials and intermission. The app wouldn't start the game at the beginning and won't let me rewind. I missed the first 12 minutes of the first. So I am changing my vote to the app sucks on all platforms.

 

[ort]

So, tonight, the very first time I decided to use the Bally Sports app to test out the experience and they failed literally 2 seconds in. I almost always start watching games late after the kids go to bed, so I'm starting this one after the game had ended and what's the first ****ing thing the stupid app shows me? A stupid video right at the top of the page called "Berube after Blues' loss to Jets:..."

I mean, what the **** are you doing Bally Sports? Are you really this bad at this? Can I not start games after they've been played without immediately having the outcome of the game spoiled for me? What the hell.

Boo.

 

[Brian39]

yes i did the free trial then sub'd for 19.99 a month (only doing monthly instead of yearly unless they get the Cardinals on the package, hockey season only last 6-7 months).

streams at 60fps with no issue. my only complain is they stream the pre/post game shows as seperate feeds from the game, so after one ends you gotta back out to the main menu and pick the next feed. hope they fix this moving forward.

It's been that way going back to Fox Sports Go and the entire time it has been branded as Bally Sports. I wouldn't expect a fix.

 

[Brian39]

So, tonight, the very first time I decided to use the Bally Sports app to test out the experience and they failed literally 2 seconds in. I almost always start watching games late after the kids go to bed, so I'm starting this one after the game had ended and what's the first ****ing thing the stupid app shows me? A stupid video right at the top of the page called "Berube after Blues' loss to Jets:..."

I mean, what the **** are you doing Bally Sports? Are you really this bad at this? Can I not start games after they've been played without immediately having the outcome of the game spoiled for me? What the hell.

Boo.

This is another 'feature' they have had going back to the launch as Fox Sports Go. The most recent content is always at the top and often has titles that spoil the outcome of games.

Full game replays are always a couple rows below. I've gotten in the habit of actively looking away from the TV when the app boots up and just scrolling down a couple clicks before looking back. it isn't a perfect system, but it works fairly well for avoiding the game being spoiled. The exception is when the stream randomly boots you back to the home page without warning.

 

[ort]

Yeah, I have pretty much resigned myself to the fact that this is just how it's going to be...

But I tell you what, the experience of watching (including fast forwarding, skipping, rewinding) a game taped off cable on my TiVo is SOOOOOOOO much better than streaming.

Streaming seems fine if you just hit play and watch, but if you want to skip commercials, or skip the intermission, or rewind and see a play again, it SUPER SUCKS.

I watched some of the game last night and just skipping thru the intermissions was a pain in the ass. Both times I ended up like 2 minutes into the period. It's just so unresponsive. If the overall smoothness of navigating a TiVo is a 10/10, streaming is like a 3/10. It's like slogging through mud vs ice skating. The difference is just striking.

 

[ValHaller]

Are you guys using Bally on your desktop or what?

 

[Brian39]

Yeah, I have pretty much resigned myself to the fact that this is just how it's going to be...

But I tell you what, the experience of watching (including fast forwarding, skipping, rewinding) a game taped off cable on my TiVo is SOOOOOOOO much better than streaming.

Streaming seems fine if you just hit play and watch, but if you want to skip commercials, or skip the intermission, or rewind and see a play again, it SUPER SUCKS.

I watched some of the game last night and just skipping thru the intermissions was a pain in the ass. Both times I ended up like 2 minutes into the period. It's just so unresponsive. If the overall smoothness of navigating a TiVo is a 10/10, streaming is like a 3/10. It's like slogging through mud vs ice skating. The difference is just striking.

To be clear, the issue is not 'streaming' as a general concept. Streaming things on Netflix works great. The video player on most pirate sites works extremely well (it is the abundance of awful/scammy/porny ads that fund the site which are horrible). The video player on my plex server works incredibly well.

The issue is that Bally Sports (and most networks) built a shitty streaming app. The problem isn't that streaming is inherently clunky. It's that every content/rights owner wants to put that content on their own platform without spending any money on the platform. So the platform sucks and they don't pay for enough server space to properly handle.

I can boot up my Xbox 1, log in to ESPN and stream 4 games simultaneously in their app. The streams are stable, you can consistently start from the beginning (or join live), replays are up quickly and when I stop watching a replay and move to another TV, the app on that device always remembers where I hit stop. Fastforward/rewind works well and they let me choose whether I want to see or hide scores from the stream selection area. It's easily better than any cable service I ever had.

Then I go to watch a Blues game on Bally Sports and it feels like they have a personal disdain toward my patience.

 

[ort]

Some streamers are better for sure, but none of them can come close to the smoothness of TiVos interface.

This isn't really a fair fight I know and a using TiVo in 2022 is kind of like using a horse and buggy as your primary mode of transportation... but still. For my money (and I spend a lot more than I should just to watch the Blues) Cable + TiVo really is the best experience. It just is starting to feel more and more wasteful. Watching hockey is literally the ONLY thing keeping me with Charter. I could dump the rest in a second and not care.

 

[Brian39]

Some streamers are better for sure, but none of them can come close to the smoothness of TiVos interface.

This isn't really a fair fight I know and a using TiVo in 2022 is kind of like using a horse and buggy as your primary mode of transportation... but still. For my money (and I spend a lot more than I should just to watch the Blues) Cable + TiVo really is the best experience. It just is starting to feel more and more wasteful. Watching hockey is literally the ONLY thing keeping me with Charter. I could dump the rest in a second and not care.

As a whole, I agree. Tivo+cable is a better/smoother experience than sum of parts that make up the streaming experience. If you watch a combo hockey, football, basketball, movies, and shows then you are going to get a better experience with a maxed out cable subscription running through TiVo. I just can't justify the price.

With that said, for just hockey I would take an XBOX1/AppleTV with ESPN+ and a VPN over cable and a TiVo. ESPN has dialed in their app and being able to double/triple/quad box games is a smooth experience. Having 4 games running on my screen at once with the ability to easily select the audio I want playing on the fly is a truly great way to watch a busy night in the NHL. Being able to throw NCAA hockey or football into the mix on weekends is also great. Watching the Manningcast during MNF with a couple hockey games on the side is fantastic. The only complaint I have with it is that Blues games get blacked out in St. Louis unless you use a VPN to change your location (and ESPN is pretty decent at detecting VPNs).