Fractured Streaming So Bad Injured NFL Players Turn To Illicit Streams To Watch Their Own Teams
from the set-hike dept
It was only a few weeks ago that we were discussing how, thanks to how fractured streaming has become, watching NFL games is becoming more and more an expensive and complicated process. It’s gotten so bad that ESPN has released an app designed specifically just to help viewers find where to watch the NFL game they’re interested in. But finding it alone doesn’t mean you can watch it, what with the labyrinthian landscape of different cable and streaming providers the NFL has negotiated to show its games. The point is not only that this is getting far too expensive for fans, but that there is a mental transactional cost associated with all of this as well.
And, as it turns out, it’s not just fans. After encountering all of these same challenges while injured, Seattle Seahawks cornerback Tariq Woolen accidentally revealed that he was watching his own team via an illicit streaming site.
All that is to say that it’s not wild to see injured Seattle Seahawks cornerback Tariq Woolen using a pirate streaming service to watch his team’s own games (seemingly first caught by X/Twitter user Doxx). You can put that next to his salary of more than $1 million per year, as NFL news poster Dov Kleiman did, and look for obvious chuckles.
But even with a lot of income at his disposal, streaming a game is just not very easy, even if you play for an NFL team. Witness the numerous knowing and sympathetic replies to Woolen’s coy admission, along with reprimands for revealing his reliable stream source.
As the post notes, Woolen isn’t poor. The decision to go about watching the game this way can’t be a purely financial one. Instead, what is almost certainly the case is that Woolen encountered the same pretzel that is how to watch the game he wanted and gave up, realizing that the illicit streams are providing that service much better than the league in which he plays.
And that’s ridiculous. You would expect Woolen to be mocked or criticized for streaming the game this way when he’s making $1 million a year. Instead, it seems most of the response to all of this was sympathy and irritation that he might get that streaming service DMCA’d.
And what’s more, even for an NFL player, the NFL couldn’t provide him with a way to watch all the league’s games even if it wanted to.
Woolen himself may not have a larger argument with availability versus prices. Responding to Kleiman’s salary/streaming call-out, Woolen wrote: “It’s free it’s for me,” prepended by two “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji. But even if the NFL wanted to provide players like him with a legitimate option to stream every game, from anywhere in the US, on any given day, it could not, because it does not exist.
Except it does, in the form of illicit streaming sites. Sites that are essentially providing what customers demand because the league just won’t. And if that isn’t ridiculous enough of an example for how this is all going to become a wider problem, then nothing will.
Filed Under: football, live streaming, sports, streaming, tariq woolen
Comments on “Fractured Streaming So Bad Injured NFL Players Turn To Illicit Streams To Watch Their Own Teams”
a bit off topic, but I notice that Mike and you, Tim G, are doing what Karl Bode usually comments on.
Pretty soon, we’ll have Mike Masnick writing about police brutality and Tim Cushing writing about trademark abuse.
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Heh, while we don’t fully silo subject matters quite like you might think, I will say I’ve been on the sports streaming “beat” for roughly a decade here at Techdirt 🙂
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So do something useful and make a list of the 10 best pirate sports streaming sites currently active that aren’t streameast.
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Ah, fair enough. I apologize for getting it wrong!
About that ESPN app...
…it’s a great idea. But the execution is 100% garbage. It’s an incredibly bloated web page full of useless, stupid animation, rendered in 17-year-old goth emo teenager graphics, and it eschews basic, simple functionality in favor of idiotic complexity. The web designers (and I use that term loosely) behind this should be fired and escorted out of the building within the hour. Someone else, who understands how to make a functional web page using basic HTML and CSS should be tasked with this, and they should be issued a computer that’s 20 years old and connected to the net via a 56K modem — because there’s ZERO reason why a properly designed and built web page shouldn’t work just fine under those conditions.
TL;DR: it’s hot garbage. Someone else is going to have to do this better because ESPN’s attempt is a 100% failure.
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I agree with the sentiment: a web page (ANY web page) should be easily readable over a 56k line (or lower), using a computer built in 1995.
Having some idea of the genre, though, I expect that the web page has a couple of constraints that you might not have considered:
1) Having to know where the reader is physically located, due to media lockouts
2) Having to compose the page dynamically because the media lockouts mean that the minimum number of game stream sources changes.
3) Having web site designers in their early 20s, who have never heard of dial-up service, limited bandwidth, or website simplicity. “What do you mean, the web page has to be downloadable in under 100k bytes? That’s impossible!”
Re: Wrong target
It’s not a developer who decides.
Re: About that ESPN app..
I would be willing to bet that the reason for this is that, as soon as someone suggested creating the app, someone else suggested they make money from it, mining users’ data: the complexity is all designed to facilitate data mining.
"Fractured Streaming So Bad ..."
My first reaction is `Whut? 3/4 of streamers use Twitch and 1/4 uses YouTube, that’s not fractured’… Until I figured out that this article is not about streamers but about internet TV.
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I reccommend reading full sentances before attempting to discern meaning. Phrases like “NFL Players turn to illicit streams” and ” to watch their own games” in combination should have provided enough context to know Techdirt was talking about streaming TV. Its not a new use of the word.
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I did read through the entire article before posting and I know the term streaming is used for internet TV. There are also a lot of people for whom streaming is NOT internet TV.
My comment was about the cognitive dissonance of seeing the term used in an unexpected way. I apologize for not being clear enough.
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I, in turn, recommend checking your own spelling if you’re going to insist on being a dick about someone else’s comprehension.
Else you risk looking a bit of a twat, see.
The entire house of cards the streaming industry is built on is that it was slightly more convenient than piracy.
Was.
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Never mind competing with piracy – content creators and owners now have to compete with their audiences doing without. And that’s an even bigger problem, because with pirates you at least have a chance of converting them into fans and paying customers. You don’t have this sort of opportunity with people who choose to give up on your content. Once a consumer, or a family of consumers, decides that they’re better off not consuming your content at all, good luck getting them back.
All good points. If I were tasked with this, my paper napkin-first design would be something like:
So: pick your time zone, pick the sports you’re interested in, pick the services you subscribe to. The site then generates a grid schedule showing what you can get. Or omit the sports radio button and you see everything you get across everything that you subscribe to.
Maybe add some kind of selector that lets you look at a daily view/weekly/monthly view, or look at particular days in the future.
This doesn’t account – at all – for the use case where someone wants to follow a particular team. That’s why it’s a napkin design. 😉 Figuring out how to cleanly handle teams is hard because there are so many – thousands in US college sports, for example. (Northwestern has a men’s football team, men’s and women’s basketball teams, men ‘s and women’s soccer teams, etc. Multiply by several hundred universities.)
Anyway, the whole thing should be text only: no graphics, no icons, nothing. No Javascript. AND it should allow the user to download the generated schedule as a text file, because text files are the single most useful format on this planet.
Honestly, it I pirate some movies/shows is not because spending few dozen bucks every months is too much but mostly because I can keep the files around, copy them on every devices I’ve got, without the use of internet or shitty apps.
Same goes for YouTube, I download using yt-dlp most of the videos I want to watch often without worrying they will be removed one day of any reason.
Live streaming is different but it’s often worth waiting few days to get the full stream where and when I want, even offline, and be able to skip ads.
Fractured ?
good god man, learn punctuation and some grammar rules before you post these titles.
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Missed the capital G there, bud.
Good god, man, learn punctuation and some grammar rules before you post these missives.
Even pirate IPTV you have to pay for now to get a good stream
Even pirate IPTV is undergoing enshtification. I have to subscribe to 3 different services to get all the channels I want
The only threat I see now to pirate IPTV is the project 2025 porn ban since they do carry porn channels
Since none of them are in the United States, the project 2025 porn ban cannot be enforced on them
Of the ones I have one is in China ave the other in israel
Services in Israel and China are not subject to American laws