How To Watch the Tour de France This Year?
 

I don't see the the "watch live" package on nbcsports.com/cycling yet, does anyone know if this will again be available? I'm hoping to dump my cable subscription and fill in in other ways, especially with the death of Universal Sports. I have subscribed to cyclingtv and that's great, but will need to find a TdF source and I wouldn't mind paying the tab for it, am just hoping it will be there-anyone know?

Three ways I know of, there may be others.
1. Subscribe to NBC's online streaming for the TdF. This has been available in past years, I imagine it is likely to be available this year too.
2. Go to Steephill.net and watch the pirate feeds. Takes some practice, watch another race first to figure it out. Basically you need to make the image full screen, that usually eliminates the ads that otherwise pop up.
3. Subscribe to a VPN with a server in the UK, and subscribe to Eurosport Player. Costs about $15/mo total. You can watch almost every race this way. I use VyprVPN but there are others. The VPN also allows you to watch other georestricted streams found on Steephill.

Thanks for that, jyl. Does Eurosport Player generally allow one to view on demand? On cyclingtv you can click and play any selection any time, would Eurosport Player work this way or do you have to watch it live?

Thanks again

Depends on the race caliber. On demand replay has varied a bit over the years on ES streaming...sometimes it is just the last 30k-60KM of the 100km they broadcast live. Usually race stages are available on demand for 1 week after the race was run. Something like TdF I think the on-demand the stages as live in full.

However then there's the whiles of network protocol. As a USA Eurosport subscriber using VPN to do it all....I dialed into London to watch Paris-Nice live this morning, and it was buffer-city and utterly unwatchable. Either due to Eurosport or my VPN, or both. I resorted to a YouTube stream of that same Eurosport feed and it was just fine.


Eurosport has also gotten worse about commercials over the years, used to be commercial free...although not as bad as NBC, yet.

Gotcha, thanks Marcus_Ti, as long as I don't have to get up at 3 a.m. or something. Another Forum member had suggested privateinternetaccess.com, which is $6.99/month. I'll check one of these out and see how it goes.

I use PIA, tons of servers. There's currently a special that comes out to $2.99 or so a month. I know as I re-upped my PIA subscript last night Eurosport is another $7USD or so a month. You have to VPN into the UK to their website to create an account and pay, but they don't care where the CC is from. Also FWIW Eurosport VPN'd HATES Google Chromecast IME, the two don't get along at all.

With the streaming issues of ES I've had lately I'm debating not renewing when it comes time in the fall, TBH. But that feeling of mine can change depending on the availability of better working streaming from other sources. Eurosport does tend to cover much of the men's UCI peloton races....but virtually none of the women's races. Which sucks doubly, as men's UCI WorldTour "races" are group training rides for about 80-90% of their distance (until the last 20-30km) and you're streaming watching scenery as nothing happens. Which with some commentators isn't that bad if they know something about the scenery (Carlton Kirby tends to know the locales). But some really don't, and TBH the scenery is half the interest-otherwise we'd all be watching track...whereas the women's races are frequently much more animated.


Also I'll add that Eurosport has noticed that men's UCI WorldTour races are deathly boring for 80% of their length...and has started throwing up "character" content crap filler on the ASO Grand Tours. Especially the last 2 years of TdF. Which pisses me off as 99.99999% of rider and DS interviews are worthless "I'll ride my bike and maybe I'll win" BS but that takes 2-3 minutes to say and translate. Last year they kept throwing up these random 2-3 minute TdF historical snippets about races past years-which pissed me off as damn it there was an actual race going on they weren't covering. Also the damned onboard GoPro footage that is shaky and unwatchable and once you've seen it once or twice you've seen it all-they're falling in love with.



Thing to do both PIA and Eurosport have a monthly subscript you can make yearly. Try it for a month and see if you like it enough and it works well enough to keep.

"99.99999% of rider and DS interviews are "I'll ride my bike and maybe I'll win" but that takes 2-3 minutes to say and translate."

:roflmao2:

IKR.

The ASO Grand Tours tend to be broadcast much differently than the Classics on ES. Discovery Channel (who owns Eurosport) has noticed that the GTs have higher numbers of viewers...so the ads breaks tend to be longer and/or more frequent. Also ASO and Gazetta dello Sport have taken to making them multimedia productions, so in the GTs you get less content due to all the garbage....sometimes the video trailer cuts the commentators off in mid-sentence to throw to the crap. ASO/Gazetta are paying ES to broadcast the junk.


It makes me a bit salty when I'm paying for it, and the people doing it are multi-national billion-dollar media conglomerates who have broadcast commercial and interruption free in the recent past.