I love footy, you love footy, let’s watch some footy! Oh, our teams aren’t on 7 and $61/m for Foxtel just isn’t in the budget for a lot of AFL fans (or you just hate Rupert Murdoch so much you refuse to give him your hard earned cash). In this year of our lord, 2017, you’d think you’d be able to throw a few bucks to someone and watch it online, yeah? Not so quick champ, there’s a few gotchas ya need to be aware of.
You’d think the natural place to watch footy online would be the AFL’s official website or app, but it isn’t. On AFL.com.au, you can’t stream anything. There are smartphone and tablet apps, but get this – they’re limited to a max screen size of 7″. Yep, even on a 12″ iPad, the max image size, when made full screen, is 7″. Awful. Plus the quality sucks and you can’t AirPlay, ChromeCast or plug a HDMI cable into your device to watch the game on your TV.
The only thing it’s good for is watching a game on your phone when you aren’t at home. Thank fuck it’s free for Telstra customers as it’s a total rip off if you had to pay for it.
Foxtel Play is Foxtel’s internet streaming service. There’s apps for the Xbox One, PS3 & 4 some Samsung, Sony and LG Smart TVs, the Telstra TV, iOS, Android, Mac and Windows. Costs $39/month and you can cancel at any time and you get a bunch of other Foxtel channels included, which isn’t that bad.
It basically streams Fox Footy and all its channels live, just how it is on Foxtel. Sounds awesome right? Yeah, nah, it looks like ratshit. On the PS4, it’s decent quality SD, but still SD and doesn’t look good. Free to air 7 games look superior. On an iPad, footy is a pixelated, blurry mess. I have 100mbit fibre NBN and it still looks horrible. It’s just how it’s broadcast. Pretty rubbish for $39/m.
Oh, the iOS and Android apps don’t allow AirPlay, Chromecast or HDMI output either. Booooo.
Aussie ex-pats and non-Aussies that realise AFL is the best sport in the world can watch footy online via the AFL’s international service, Watch AFL. This year Fox has taken over the broadcast job and mate, it’s fucking excellent. It is everything you want in an online service.
Watch AFL is in HD. Watch AFL has every game live and on demand. Watch AFL has all the Fox Footy extra content, on demand and live. It works in a web browser without Flash or Silverlight. There’s apps for iOS and Android that support AirPlay and Chromecast and HDMI output. Did I mention it’s all in HD? High bitrate HD too!
The icing on the cake is that it’s just $189 a year, $19 a week or $33 a month. Why the AFL doesn’t just do this for local fans, even if it was $199/year, is beyond me. Watch AFL is perfect in every single way. The only catch is that you need to be outside Australia to watch it. Luckily, that’s super easy to get around – just use a VPN.
You may be familiar with the concept of a VPN. It’s a service that funnels your internet traffic via a different country, so you can pretend to be in taht country instead of where you actually are. Evading geo-blocking is Australia’s 2nd national past-time after AFL! Choice has a good article on how to get around geo-blocks.
I use a VPN based in Singapore and due to its proximity to Australia (Streisand on a Linode $5/m box I do a bunch of other nerdy type stuff on), is a better choice for streaming than the USA. There’s probably not much difference, but if your VPN has a choice of multiple endpoints, pick Singapore.
There’s other services besides VPNs too, like smart DNS proxies – what you use is up to you. All you need to know is that if you’re a footy fan, $189 is well worth it to get access to Watch AFL. It works brilliantly and makes Telstra’s official offering look like a total joke. Also the North Melbourne Kangaroos are the best team in the AFL and will win the 2017 Premiership. Go North!
The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius, who has been hanging around the tech scene in Australia like a bad smell for over a decade.
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