With the new season kicking off in just a few weeks, we recently showed you how to stream the games straight to your laptop, tablet or phone, whatever the platform – legally. But that’s just one side to the story.
As you may or may not know, many people choose to stream games illegally over the internet, and increasingly, that’s become possible on phones too. Read on to find out how it’s done.
Live streaming of football games is nothing new. Not every football fan pays for a Sky subscription, and even if they do, you can’t watch every big clash as it happens: the current restriction on airing 3pm kick off games on a Saturday in the UK means many turn to foreign broadcasts of these games, streams of which can be found on websites with just a few searches.
Broadcasters and rights holders try to clamp down on these sites, but like an internet hydra, if you cut off one head, another pops up to take its place. And they’re multiplying.
In the last season for which figures were available, 2008-2009, the Premier League claimed to have dealt with 1,800 cases of illegal streaming.
Christopher Stokes, the CEO of NetResult, a London internet monitoring agency which enforces broadcasting rights for leading sports rights owners, wouldn’t give statistics, but did admit that the trend has continued to grow.
“The negative is that there are more people viewing illegal streams,” he says. “On the positive side there is a greater percentage in the number of streams that can be tracked down and dealt with.”
Increasingly though, with the advent of Adobe Flash video support on handsets and tablets, as well as mobile optimised versions of live streaming video sites, this is becoming possible on smartphones.
NetResult account director Tim Cooper concedes that more fans as a proportion are likely turning to these devices to watch games wherever they are.
“The large sites we deal with now are sites that users can upload their own stream,” he says, pointing to the likes of Justin.tv. “They’ve designed apps that you can have on your mobile phone so you can view the streams on them, so it is highly possible.”
Stokes is quick to point out that these sites are also the quickest to respond takedown requests and work with rights holders to remove illegal streams, but Electricpig has also spoken to fans who choose to stream live football games this way.
“I like to stream the footie mostly when its a 3pm Saturday game and there’s no other live coverage available,” one Chelsea fan who wishes to remain anonymous tells us. “I normally use my PC for this but have started to use my tablet more if I can get a good connection.”
Stokes points out that the solution to illegal streaming is more carrot than stick: legal alternatives.
“It’s great that more and more technology is available for people to watch (live football). On Sky, quite legitimately if you’re a subscriber, people can now watch matches on their mobile, and that’s fantastic. It gives real impetus to all these new applications and platforms. Hopefully that’ll take away any rationale for what is effectively stealing it.”
Until a legal means to watch those coveted 3pm games arrives however, it appears that problem isn’t going to go away.
How is it done?
Android
Many new Android phones and tablets support Adobe Flash 10.3, meaning that any video you can stream on your desktop PC will run on them too. One obstacle preventing this is that some of the most popular sites and technologies for illegal streams of live football, such as SopCast, require a desktop application to work.
One site we found however, Liveonlinefooty.com, for £1 per day or £27.99 per year through PayPal, requires no downloads, and works flawlessly on an Android device. Once we were logged in, we were watching a high quality feed of Sky Sports in seconds, and there were many other streams to choose from besides. That’s pocket money compared to the price of a Sky subscription.
iPhone/iPad
Apple’s famous stance against Flash support means these same sites simply don’t work on an iOS device, and using a Flash converting browser such as SkyFire didn’t work on Liveonlinefooty.com, but it’s not impossible to find the big games on stream through the Ustream (Free) and Justin.tv (£6.99) apps – though these are far more likely to be pulled.
Says Stokes of Justin.tv: “They provide very good support to rights holders…the numbers of people who will be watching it on their mobile is probably going to be very small because they get ripped away very fast.”
Windows Phone/Nokia
Neither platform offers (full) support for Adobe Flash, but both have Ustream apps available to download – which we’ve not been able to test ourselves. The Symbian app no longer appears to be supported by Ustream, but is still available for download at the Ovi Store.
HP/Palm webOS
Most webOS phones also support Flash streaming – while we’ve not been able to test this, any sites that work on Android phones also likely to run smoothly on your Palm Pre Plus or Pre 2.
