Sports

Ben Simmons leads the 76ers to a thrilling finish vs. the Trail Blazers | 2019-20 NBA Highlights

Watched a couple of games on Saturday: the University of Oregon Ducks college football team against the University of Southern California Trojans, and the Portland Trailblazers professional basketball team versus the Philidelphia Seventy-Sixers. Both games held a couple of surprises.
Both games were playing at the same time, so we switched back and forth between them. The Ducks trounced USC. At one point we switched over just in time to see USC kick-off, an Oregon receiver caught the ball on the goal line and proceeded to run straight for the other goal and score a touchdown. I don't think any of the USC players managed to lay a hand on him.
The final seconds of the Blazers game was also surprising. The Blazers started the fourth quarter with a good size lead (10 points maybe?), but the 76-ers managed to whittle that down. In the last minute of the game the lead changed four times. The 76-ers pulled ahead and with something like 10 seconds left, the Blazers got the ball and managed to sink a shot and get the lead back. That left something like 4 seconds left. Surely the 76-ers aren't going to be able to score in that short amount of time, but they did, which left something like half a second on the clock. The Blazers managed to inbound the ball and get off a hail mary shot, but it missed. Actually not sure if Damian Lillard got it off in time.

I don't like my cable bill, but it gets us what we want, so I pay it, but YouTube has been advertising YouTube TV and it sounds like you can get all the sports stations you want, but you can't. The NBA has their market sewn up tight. The only way you can get your local team is through your local station, unless it is being broadcast nationally, or it's the 3rd Sunday after a full moon. I got cross-eyed trying to sort out all whose-its and where-fores, but eventually the line about local stations sank in, and then I realized that the only way to get what we want is by paying the cable company a bunch of money.

Except there is something called nbastream. It used to hosted on reddit, but reddit isn't doing it anymore. Not to worry, the torch has been picked up by the nbastream website. They blather on about how they have all the games and they are free, and so on, but there is no mention of where they are getting their feeds. Are we really depending on some big hearted guy uploading his cable feed to this website? Actually, a dozen guys would have to be doing it every day to keep the demands for nbastream satisfied. The world is full of sports enthusiasts and computer aficionados, so I could see that there could be enough people that were both that they could be the source.

So, I could drop cable and get the Blazers off of nbastream, but what about the college football games? There is a probably a similar site that provides the same service, but I'd have to go dig them out. And what happens if the NBA gets excited and decides to bring the smack down on these pirate sites? And what happens if that happens right before the game starts? I don't think the cable company can reconnect me in a matter of minutes, I would expect them to take days, which kind of screws our game watching. Actually, they could proably connect me in a matter of seconds, but being as it's a giant, soulless corporation, I doubt whether anyone there cares whether I get connected now or in a week.

Now it might be that the NBA knows about the piracy but lets it go for the same reason that musical groups (mostly) stopped trying to take their stuff down from YouTube - the exposure leads to more sales. Having more people watch the game increases the ciritical mass of people ensuring that everyone will hear about it.