When it comes to sports and broadcasting rights, it’s like a spy movie. In the past, you could just watch the international matches, the Champions League or the Primera Division – whatever. It was free to watch on television. And if you wanted to watch an exotic match, you had to find a satellite station that broadcast it. But today it’s different and it’s not so easy to watch a broadcast or to get live results. In a globalised world, this is so important for many people.
Why live results are so important
We live in a very international, globalised world. In some EU countries, for example, there is a huge mix of nationalities. Within the EU, many citizens move from one country to another. In addition, hundreds of thousands arrive every year from all over the world. But the newspapers and television do not really react to this. They can hardly watch broadcasts or follow the results of sporting events in their home countries. Therefore, they are often left to follow the live score on their mobile phones and cheer along. During the World Cup qualifiers, even the live ticker can be important. There are international sites that show the results for almost every sport, such as: mzgtv1.com. Even down to the lower leagues of the respective country.
What has changed with live broadcasts?
It’s all about the money. In the past, the public broadcasters in most countries had the broadcasting rights for important major events. But then private television came along and, with plenty of capital, outbid the public broadcasters’ payments. Naturally, they won the bid. What did they do with the rights? They set up pay per view offers or charged expensive subscriptions. This means that consumers now have to pay for what they used to be able to watch for free.
Unfortunately, it is also the case that you can no longer simply watch a foreign channel via satellite. In Europe, for example, Astra is the most common satellite. German television can be received there free of charge. All other countries do not show football there. But if you’ve ever been to the Arab world or Asia, you can see the best games on the screen there. Unfortunately, it’s set up in such a way that we can’t see it here. Basically, it’s a scandal. But in a world where private media are granted such power, such distortions in the market occur.
The only way is to watch international matches via the internet. You can use TOR to set an IP address from a certain region and then access the live stream of free-to-air TV stations. This works. See here this video: