Would make sense.

And yes Adam - With the amount of people who use their service you would think that they would do that...

Well for those of you who have the full OverPlay service I've managed to get AJS unblocked using the advanced options of OverPlay's VPN software, I've only done it once and not sure I can repeat the settings in a post here without rechecking a few times the settings I've put in place, fiddle around with these settings and most of you should get it going.
If/when I'm confident this will work in future circumstances I'll invite pm's to tell you what I did,
sorry if this sounds selfish rather than posting it all up in public but at the mo I feel any method that works posted up somewhere as public as DS forums is going to make AJS's job very easy to block us again.

Good comment

So its not worth renewing my subscription then?

I watched the whole Liverpool match on AJ using Hola (I let my Overplay sub expire yesterday and didn't bother renewing) and apart from drops in quality for the pre-match coverage, the match itself was fine for me. Picture froze on about 85 minutes but a quick refresh sorted that out.

I'm glad I didn't take the AJ season pass just in case this method fails further down the line. My monthly sub was up for renewal yesterday and as soon as I renewed it via PayPal I unchecked the auto-renew option. At least that way I've only lost £10-odd if I can't get access further down the line.

If you forget to uncheck that option you can't do it during the period however you can immediately or later cancel your sub which remains active until the due date. You can then renew on expiry or later with same logon.

Alan

By the look of things, this is going to be a "cat and mouse" thing from now on. It looks like it took Overplay most of the day to generate a work around this time. How did the other large DNS services like Unblock.us and Unotelly do?
I think we may have to accept the fact that no service will be 100% reliable from this point forward.
I presume Hola isn't that big at the moment, and that's why it hasn't shown up on AJS/PL's radar yet, but that will happen.

Sky and the PL seem to be going to even further lengths to clamp down on illegal streaming too.
I watched the game at my mate's place tonight, on his regular Sky HD setup, and around the 85th minute, a 9 digit number appeared in the top right corner, above the score, for about a minute... I can only assume that this is a unique code for each subscriber, so Sky can identify people streaming their satellite broadcast.

That 9 digit code is their viewing card number.

Yes you are correct - if they see this displayed in pubs or on streams they kill the card.

If al jazeera decide to do the same thing with their cards then a lot of the iptv boxes that have been sold will become useless.

Dave

You can fully appreciate their reasoning though can't you. Sky want to protect their investment and the Premier League want to prolong their £3 billion bubble they live in.

Re the number appearing on Sky screens - you're spot on. That's precisely what it is. They've been doing it on their football coverage for a good while now. Surprised it only appeared as late as the 85th minute though because it used to pop up all the time. You could get around it by pausing it and when you pressed play again it'd be gone.

As for matches being beamed into the UK - for as long as the Premier League sell 380-match packages to other countries we'll always be able to find ways to watch them in the UK... Just seems that they're now making it as hard as possible! We all knew it was going to happen eventually.

It's not the viewing card number. The digits don't directly relate to the paired card. People have tried working out what it relates to but always come back stumped. Pretty clever on Sky's part.

As an addendum I've tried explaining to OverPlay via emails the issues and what I've done to resolve them as clearly and succinctly as I can but I'm obviously not getting through and the replies coming back are telling me to try using their smartdns service!
I have a couple of weeks left on my subscription with them but after a couple of years as a customer of theirs I'm not confident they'll resolve this I feel I'll be hitting the cancel button on their site and reverting to plans B and C to keep AJS going.

I watched the whole liverpool game using overplay smart DNS with no problems on my Ipad

I haven't been able to watch anything since yesterday afternoon, tried usual workarounds.not expecting to be able to watch champions league later on.

Did people have problems with overplay then last night then, strange that mine worked

Is there something wrong with my AJS quality: https://www.dropbox.com/s/b9uky0ewe5..._Bloodzeed.jpg

My specs: intel dual core e8500, win 7 x64, 8gb ram, ATI Radeon 6770, 100mb internet cable connection, browser Safari. That is not HD with AJS or is it? Something wrong with graphics Card settings?

Nothing wrong, but youre not on the highest possible.

No way! Really? Nothing to do with it?

Something to consider.

This thread has surpassed 50 pages in little over a month. Most contributors have a subscription, of one type or other for the football. A number of work-arounds have been trialled and have had limited/good/great results.

AJS and Sky are actively working on blocking access. Perhaps a big part of the reason, are the various open discussions going on in forums like this. I'm sure they are taking note.

Maybe it's time we took a step back and suspended, or stopped posting to the thread. We could continue to use PM's and contact the work-around companies directly, to work out issues. It is very much in their interests to get things right.

Perhaps if the success of AJS (when it works) in bringing football to the fans, wasn't made so public, the pressure exerted on AJS would not be so intense. In fact, I'm sure they would be quite happy to leave things as they are. They have received a nice boost in subscriptions over the last month. But if Sky are sending them links, to this and other forums, they have to be seen to be doing something.

Discuss!

Is there a reluctance to using hola? As far as I can see it works every time and can't be shit down because it's peer to peer so ips must be completely realistic. I dunno though, I made all that up!

Hola isn't peer to peer - their Egyptian proxy is at 196.46.190.89 which seem similar to the address used (and blocked) by unblock-us

Watched the Liverpool game last night without issue. This was the first time I'd used it this season and was pretty impressed with the quality and the smoothness of the video. I did use a recommendation from a user here to rewind 5 minutes at the start and watch it from there.

Using HT-PC and Overplay.

It's nothing to do with things like this. Domestic viewing has been going on for many years and a blind eye has always been turned to it.

The issue is the broadcasting of 3pm matches in licensed premises first and foremost. The Premier League aren't idiots - they're fully aware of the situation whether forums like this exist or not!

Al Jazeera will only be actively blocking the likes of Overplay because they're being forced into it by the Premier League in a 'sort it out now or lose the rights' kind of way. You can't tell me AJ haven't been aware of what's been going on before they were informed by the Premier League!

I've noticed Richard Keys has recently told a few people on Twitter that it's illegal to view AJS outside MENA whereas previously he was telling people it was extremely easy if you knew how and if you didn't know how, look on Google. Things like that will be far more damaging than a DS thread.

Completely correct.
It's not illegal to watch foreign streams of EPL matches at all. Public showing of the PL's intellectual property (not the games themselves, but things like the graphics they use and possibly the studio stuff), without the permission of the PL is illegal. The case with the Publican, Mrs Murphy outlines this.

Most Pubs used to use various European satellite broadcasters' signals in the last few season, but now that they're only allowed to show one 3pm game,Pubs have resorted to the streaming method that we use. It's easy, with very little capital expenditure, so it's a no brainer.
I'm sure that, if AJS successfully manage to block us streaming in the long run, these pubs will resort to getting a big dish and try to pick up the AJS satellite signal.

What I don't really understand is, if the PL are serious about clamping down on public broadcasts of games, they should just setup teams of people who go around identifying pubs that do this... It's more labour intensive, but that's the only way they will be able to limit/eliminate it.

It's a nice thought and appreciate the sentiment behind it however I pretty much echo Promo-only's thoughts on this.

What is interesting is for once we are actively paying for content rather than free dodgy quality streams which I think says a lot.

I have Sky but really what I want from my Sports Package is a Season Ticket to watch my teams away games, i could & would probably do away with 80% of matches currently shown however not sure I could do without the Cricket Test coverage!

The trouble with Sky is you don't get these sort of choices and it'll probably end up being ultra expensive. At least AJS has come in and seemingly given Sky, FAs & subscribers etc something to think about.
Last edited by saintalan : 17-09-2013 at 14:26

Pure speculation!!!