Hey, you work hard and deserve premium, high quality entertainment :). (Recent Sky shareholder)
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The streaming controversy from Saturday night's boxing match between Parker and Takam is a watershed moment for New Zealand television sporting history. I expect to see this problem exacerbate over the long term.
Has the sky sports monopoly finally been broken?
It's going to effect all major sporting events from now on. The next All Black game will all be lived streamed for free.
Both Facebook and Youtube have only just recently introduced this new live streaming technology. This is a game changer! The technology is so easy even a 12 year old could set it up within mins!
Before, it was actually quite different to pirate content, you needed a little bit of experince. You had to record it, then recode the video, then upload it. The content would effectively be delayed a few hours, which is basically like viewing a reply. Now it's LIVE, with the added bonus of social interaction, like the ability to make live comments. It's way better!
The Parker and Takam fight wasn't just recorded from Sky. There was a UK version streaming on youtube with about 2000 viewers.
There's absolutely no way SKY or any other content provider can stop this!
I used to have sky but found i had 100 channels of crap to wade through rather than half a dozen. I dont watch much tv so im proably not part of the target market.
But today Spark has given me lightbox for free. No idea what this is but looks like tv with no ads. Also looks like it is High Definition content
Spark also gave me a Tivo for free so I'm ad free as well
Spark are also giving me free fibre to go with my unlimited broadband plan - which they also upgraded year on year at no extra cost.
In essence seems im getting a truck load of HD tv viewing for free. And sky are putting there prices up. Go figure!
A mate of mine was watching Super Rugby and All Blacks games when based in Holland in 2008 via streams... (live) or maybe delayed by about 5 seconds. And good enough streams to be able to see the ball well and invite ppl round to watch the games. The streams were reliable as well. I guess you just need to know where to find them. If sky or the All Blacks had offered a pay per view web based content he may have been tempted but sometimes you just do what you need to do. (Not many places in Holland show the rugby)
Sky need to change their game, more and more ppl I speak to are streaming rugby games and watching it via streams on their own tv's.
The Parker Takam fight was shown free on SKY sports 3 in the UK... plenty of streams from this source too and by all accounts very clear viewing and better commentators too by all accounts.
Lightbox, Neon, and the NZ version of Netflix are all crap. That's why they're effectively giving them away for free.
These models work by having one or two "flagship programs", that are bundled together with lots of low quality/cheap content. This model was first created by HBO back in the late 1990's with their flagship program "The Sopranos".
Sky's version is Soho, in which "Game of Thrones" is their flagship program, which basically carriers the entire channel. It should be called "Game Of Thrones Channel", not Soho. This series is due to finish soon, so Sky is on the lookout for a replacement. If it can't find one, the chancel will die.
The entire Sky revenue model is built around 3 things, the All Blacks, the Black Caps, and Game of Thrones. Everything else is just a "clip on".
Sky raised their prices recently, which is really just a tax on the baby boomer "TV generation", who don't know how to use a computer. They'll be able to suck the blood out of them for a while yet... until they all end up in a rest home.
The Sky "ship" has been leaking for some time now, but on Saturday night she got torpedoed and she's going down like the Lusitania.