Cord Cutting: Before you read this article:

Posted by Rob Shepherd on Friday, April 7, 2017

Please note that we do not condone the use of any software or any website that violates copyright law. This article is intended for information only and it is your responsibility to ensure you comply with local and international law. Although no-one has ever been prosecuted for viewing streams in the UK, sensible precautions like using a VPN are highly recommended.

A Week of Cord Cutting: Reviewed

Being even an armchair sports fan can be a very expensive pastime! With even the most minimal sports packages costing more than £30 a month. Add a premium sports package or two and the total cost could exceed £100 a month, that’s over £1,200 a year! No wonder many people are looking at alternatives. For this article, I turn my back on Sky and BT for a week and just use the power of google and of course a PC.

It would be easy to dismiss people that search for sport events online as just penny pinching tightwads but there are other things to consider.

3pm Football Matches

When it comes to watching live 3pm Saturday football matches, we are well and truly stuck in the 1950’s. Back then, it was decided that televising football matches would have a detrimental effect on supporters going to see their local teams. What utter tosh! Despite a prohibition style ban, fans still manage to by-pass these rules and watch the games, often in pubs with a dodgy box in it.

A recent poll by the Telegraph targeting supporters of all clubs, big and small, showed that 92% of people who replied were in favour of televising 3pm games. As things stand, footy fans in the UK pay the highest prices in Europe to watch the least amount of football.

The Cost of Subscribing

The cost can vary depending on which platform you use to watch, for this example we will take Sky television costs at time of writing. This figure excludes any promotional discount that may be on offer.

For Premier League games, Sky have the higher number of Premier League games. Sky paid £4.176bn for the rights to show 126 games per season and the lowest price subscription with Sky Sports is £49.50 per month. However, since BT’s aggressive foray into the market, this price will not bring you any European action. As BT acquired these, you would to add BT Sport to see any European ties and BT’s share of the Premier League games. This will add £27.99 per month, bringing your total cost, per month to £77.49.

Different Ways to Watch

There are many ways to watch online sport, the difficulty is finding a reliable source that isn’t taken down after 5 minutes or one that buffers every 20 seconds. We have looked at three of the most popular ways of watching sports online for free and let you know how well it went!

KODI

I have been an avid fan of KODI for many years, KODI used to be called XBMC, this stood for XBOX Media Centre and as the name suggests it was first developed for the original Xbox console. This open sourced program runs on a huge range of devices. Windows, IOS, Android, Linux and even Raspberry Pi are all supported.

KODI itself does not host or provide links to any material, recently KODI has received a lot of bad press regarding copyright infringement but it should be pointed out that KODI has over 985 official add-ons from companies such as YouTube, Plex, Bravo, BBC, Fox Sports.

This week, Amazon has declared they will no longer allow “fully loaded” KODI boxes to be sold, this is quite ironic as most people I know with KODI, use an Amazon Fire Stick.

With KODI you can add video add-ons, one by one or you can install “builds”, these builds come with many add-ons. A quick google search on “KODI builds” will give you all the information you need.

There are a huge range of plug-ins that give you access to an amazing range of ways to watch not just online sports but also TV series and movies.

If you are not tech savy, chances are you won’t have the patience to deal with the cat and mouse game of finding working plug ins. The quality of the streams can vary a lot and you will often experience the dread of a link dropping out midway through an event.

Overall Verdict: 7/10

“Free” streaming sport websites

Websites can be a very quick fix to get your sporting action, a quick google search on even the broadest topic “watch sports online free” will return pages and pages of results you can try. It is vital that you have a trusted Ad Blocker installed (adblock plus is one example but there are many others). The curse of websites offering streamed content is the number of adverts and fake warnings which pop up.

At best these can be annoying, at worst they could contain malicious code that could trick you into installing harmful or invasive programs on your PC. A lot of these sites still use Adobe Flash which you will find will not work on Apple IOS devices such as iPhones and iPads.

Another big issue you are likely to find is that websites suffer from their own popularity. The better a site is, the more people use it and this creates more bandwidth usage than the site can deal with. The result of this is the dreaded buffering or you may even be kicked from the site if they restrict traffic. This may not sound too bad but wait till it happens when your team have a penalty and the stream dies, you then have the panic of finding another stream before you miss too much of the action.

In all fairness though, I have extensively used both Sky and BT to watch their legal live games streamed, unfortunately the quality hasn’t been that much better than the “dodgy” streams and in some occasions, a lot worse.

This needs to change if the content providers are serious about combating the increase of people finding alternative sources.

Overall Verdict: 5/10

ACE Player Streams

Ace player streams work on the same basic principles of torrents, therefore the quality of ACE player streams can be broadcast quality. With a website, as mentioned, there is only a limited amount of bandwidth available. But when using ACE player, the more people connected is actually better.

Ace player is built upon the hugely successful VLC which is an open source, multimedia player that many people will be aware of. The hardest part is finding top quality streams but I’m sure if someone was resourceful enough to Google “soccer streams acestream” then they probably wouldn’t have many issues.

In my experiment, I was able to watch two full football matches and not once did the stream buffer, nor did it ever drop out. The quality was fantastic. If only the “official” channels were this good!

Overall Verdict: 9/10

Is Watching Sports Online Legal?

While I wouldn’t be brave enough to state that it’s legal, it is certainly not a black or white situation.

It is illegal to sell “fully loaded” KODI boxes or set top boxes that are designed to contravene copyright laws and there are quite a few people sat in jail for doing this.

However, in 2014, he Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that internet users who look at copyrighted material online aren’t breaking the law by doing so, citing Article 5.1 of the EU Copyright Directive.

It stated that copies of copyrighted material that appear “on the user’s computer screen” and “in the internet ‘cache’ of that computer’s hard disk” are “temporary” and “may therefore be made without the authorisation of the copyright holders”.

Morally of course, it’s a different matter. Getting something for nothing will of course appeal to a lot of people but if everyone did it then the bubble would burst and there wouldn’t be the money currently in sport.

Of course, the alternative argument to that, is that there is far too much money in sport anyway, paying footballers 300k a week has turned a lot of people off the sport and a fairer pricing system (and access to all games, even the 3pm ones) is the only way to combat this growing trend of cord cutting.

I for one, will be going back to Sky and BT! Not out of any loyalty or morality reasons, in all honesty, it just works! Reliability and not missing a second of action is more important to me than saving a few quid. I will still however be using “alternative” methods at 3pm on a Saturday until the rules are changed to allow these games to be screened. It’s a sad fact that in just about every country in the world apart from the UK, you can watch these games.