Now we are back in the Premier there will be more chance of seeing a live stream of us, as all 380 Premier league matches are made available for live broadcast. We did have it pretty good last season with 23 out of our 49 Championship matches being broadcast live.
However whilst we are back in the Premier and every match is broadcast live somewhere, the League have been cutting back on multiple 3:00pm Saturday matches being broadcast live in Europe. They are trying to restrict it to 1 or 2 matches and then forcing the commentary to be in the native language of the broadcaster. The commentary is not a problem as Abu Dhabi Sports Channel broadcast to a large ex-pat community so always have an English commentary. This means that LiveOnlineFooty were restricted at the end of last season and only able to broadcast 1 or 2 Saturday 3:00pm matches - all the other Sky/ESPN ones are not a problem. This also means that pubs might not get all of our 3:00pm matches.
Premium Streaming Sites
http://www.liveonlinefooty.com/ (LOF)
If you want a replacement for Sky Sports and ESPN - or you live abroad and can't get a subscription, then LOF is good value. They typically have the other Sky Sports & SSN channels during the day for cricket, golf, F1, etc and will have the build-up and pundits for any Sky/ESPN matches. LOF take their feeds from a satellite broadcast - Sky/ESPN or one of the European/Middle East stations that they can receive.
Works on anything that supports Flash, no problem with any Windows browsers, Mac, PS3 or Android 2.2+.
It costs £27.99 for a 12 month season ticket - if you've had a LOF season ticket in the past then you can renew from now until 5th July. They were announcing subscriptions for new subscribers until 30th June but they seem to be restructuring their set-up and not currently accepting new subscriptions. If this changes you'll get to hear. If they do open up to new subscribers it's worthwhile doing as they typically don't allow season ticket subscriptions at other times and for much of last year would not allow any new subscribers at all. Alternatively you can subscribe for 60 days for £6.00 or £2.00 for 2 days
http://FlashSportStreams.tv (FSS)
They take live broadcasts from a network of satellite dish owners around the world that feed to their servers for onward streaming. Have more channels and many other sports streams from around the world than LOF. Unknown as to how many Saturday 3:00pm Premier matches they will be showing but with feeds from around the world should be able to show most of them. If they only show a few, they will give priority to Stoke and Sunderland matches (they’ve built up a relationship with their forums and have a strong following as a result). They show 20+ sports channels all day, including all the Sky channels including F1 and a number of US-based sports channels. They also show BBC, ITV, Sky 1 and Sky Movies channel.
Works on anything that supports Flash, no problem with any Windows browsers, Mac, PS3 or Android 2.2+. They also have the popular channels available for Apple iPad, iPhone.
It costs £49.99 for a 12-month subscription, £19.99 for 3 months, £6.99 for 1 month or £2.99 for 1 day. Payment is by Google Checkout only, although you can sign-up at any time.
http://livefootballstreams.tv (LFS)
LFS is a new service that started towards the end of last season. They are somehow taking their feeds directly from Premier League productions which is the broadcast used internationally. This means that they are able to show every Premier match with English commentary, but no pre-match build-up or pundits. The broadcasts start 5 minutes before the kick-off but have highlights at half time and full time.
They only support Chrome and IE browsers (not currently Firefox), but each match is streamed in high, medium and low quality so depending upon your bandwidth should have a suitable picture. Their HD streams are not quite up to LOF or FSS HD quality but still good.
They are currently stating that they will be offering it as a free service although the original intention is that it should be a subscription service. If they continue the free service they'll probably have an annoying pop-up that either disappears after a few minutes or you have to 'like' them on various social media sites.
They also show French and Italian leagues as well as the live Championship matches and Champions League.
Free Streams
Stream listings for any sports are available at
http://www.wiziwig.tv/ although the actual streams are not listed until an hour or so before the broadcast.
Another good stream listing site for football is:
http://www.freefootball.org/Radio - If you are abroad, TalkSport has acquired the international rights outside of Europe to broadcast live commentary of every Premier match and will be syndicating this out to local stations internationally.
*** Note - As UTJ has hinted - the Premier League are pro-active on chasing down websites that publicise streaming so this thread might not be here by the time the season starts. Copy and paste this somewhere - or bookmark all the sites listed.
