What 25yrold said was that we should be docked points because of who our owners currently are (A consortium of Icelandic banks) and for paying inflated wages. That is just plain crap.

Don’t let anyone tell you anything else, West Ham officials knew just how dodgy the deal that bought Tevez and Mascherano to Upton Park was, they deserved automatic relegation for knowingly breaching the rules the way they did.

you can`t watch footy from the country you are in. I live in Japan atm – I can watch the a-league. If you are in oz, you can`t watch the a-league, but you can catch j-league, k-league and the korean league.

a bit of a fuzzy stream, but i am happy enough with what i paid for it.

However, in checking that, I noticed this article: http://www.foxsports.com.au/story/0,8659,26344526-29437,00.html

Foxtel will (from next season) screen EVERY Premier League match of the season. (It doesn’t say LIVE in the article, but I’m guessing it would be), so, more great news for (Premier League) Football fans!

The problem I see with internet streaming being the major source of watching matches is the infrastructure behind it. In Australia, to watch a match in high quality, you are probably taking up to 2gb of downloads to watch a full game, with the internet pricing structure like it is here (unlike in the US, where you pay for speed, and no matter what speed you buy, you get unlimited downloads) it will be very hard to work through this internationally.

As for being docked points, are you a Sheffield United fan by any chance? That’s the only possibly excuse for your petulant post. How can you say that a team should be docked points for paying inflated wages and transfer fees? At the time, we could afford them, but then the greatest financial meltdown since the Great Depression hit.

No-ones happy with our financial situation. But the fact is, the banks don’t want to sell West Ham for anything short of (approximately) 100 million pounds, and are simply burdening us with more debt.

As a 20yr old male, that sure sounds like a boring night in – I know its Saturday night because Viewer’s choice will always be able to provide for West Ham games on a Sunday.

I can only hope you’re placing bets on these games – then I could understand why you’d want to spend 2 hours watching a game on a computer when most young people are out socialising with others in the same age.

Very strange way to spend a Saturday night – presumably you don’t invite the guys around to watch streaming West Ham matches on your computer?

One thing I would add about West Ham is that they are basically insolvent and should be forced into administration and docked 10pts for cheating the system bby paying inflated wages and transfer fees they couldn’t afford. Its a disgrace that the people of Iceland (who are suffering enough from the travails of their banking) are essentially paying the multi-million dollar salaries of a bunch of West Ham players.

Absolute disgrace.

But back to your point, of course matches should be streamed through the Internet – and they will be, all it requires is a little bit of patience for all the legal issues to be worked through, and it will happen. Won’t be long either.

Quality is getting better now, and a decent broadband connection can be as good as TV quality – just have a look at TVAnts some time. I hate watching pirated feeds, partly for moral reasons and partly because I often spend the first 20 minutes of the game hunting around for a good signal, and often have to change in the middle of a game when the feed gets blocked or exceeds its viewer limit. So come on guys, start embracing the new media instead of criminalising it, and you’ll be surprised at how many people will jump at the chance.

either way, the streaming on the internet is the future

It shows A league, K league, J league and CSL matches. I have never seen it in action though.

It does seem the way fo the future but my only concern is the loss of the shared experience. If we have 1 million options then the audience will be very fragmented. Although I guess the big sports will still attract the audiences because they will have the existing quality and production values.

What all TV-Companies need to do is realise that these “illegal” practices are here to stay and rather than trying to just sue everyone that they find (often individuals like yourself, sitting at home being nice enough to stream for others) breaching their rules, actually joining in and legalising it. Look at iTunes, Napster was huge before someone came in and made it legal.

ITV in England, STV in Scotland and SAT1 in Germany all do a pretty good job of streaming and SAT1 in particular of monetizing their services. When you enter their stream you have to watch two 30 second adverts for example and I don’t mind that at all, particularly as their streams are generally at around 700 Kbps which is pretty good quality and completely legal.

Sometimes going to a pub is just too inconvenient and not all the games one wants to see are broadcast live, hence streaming is there as a low-cost solution, tv companies, advertisers and fans should all make the most of it.