Eurosport Player

I've made my feelings known about the Eurosport Player here plenty of times, and now for me the only way to get it on my Smart TV (other than Chromecast) is via Amazon Prime.

Anyway, if you're a Prime Member you can sign up for a 7 free trial, so anyone wanting to catch the business end of the Australian Open for free there's your chance - just remember to cancel. Thereafter it is £4.99 a month via Amazon, so one more month would cover the Winter Olympics.

Directly via Eurosport it's either £6.99/month with no commitment, £4.99 a month if you sign up for 12 months - though why would you do that when you can pay £29.99 for the year up front.

Last year I did get a £20 deal for the year, but with Amazon now having the US Open rights can't see much reason beyond the Aussie Open to subscribe. The Olympics certainly isn't going to drive long term subscriptions for them IMO - indeed have they even advertised beyond their own platforms that they've got the Winter Olympic rights?

They will have the French Open too, although ITV will have secondary rights also.
Hopefully they are keeping some of the other tournaments they have dotted throughout the year also, although a broadcaster for the British grass tournaments have yet to be announced.

There was a 25% voucher code going around last week. It has been as cheap as £14.99 for the year recently, and in November there was a very limited offer of a year for £1 for new subscribers.

It's a shame the old Amazon Fire app doesn't work anymore forcing you to subscribe through Prime if you want to watch on a Fire stick.

It was so much more widely available a couple of years ago. Don't know if it's a Samsung or Eurosport issue but despite it not having worked for 18 months or so the app still hasn't been removed from my TV.

Will credit Europort though for not automatically renewing my subscription at the end of that one year deal.

We can squarely 'blame' Discovery for the mess the player has become. They decided that all players would be co-ordinated on a pan European basis for all of their channels to do that last August they stripped Eurosport SA of the operation and maintenance of the Player and set up National player hubs, into which material is fed. To complicate things further all contracts that were with Eurosport were transferred to these National operations. Complaints therefore became a nightmare. Development was transferred as well. Not withstanding the intention no other content has yet appeared alongside Eurosport from other Discovery Channels.

The Winter Olympics will be make or break for Eurosport, the departure of it's head (see elsewhere) is telling. I gather that their Bundesliga service in Germany has now settled somewhat after an appalling start.

Must say though whenever I've emailed support for Eurosport Player - usually for scheduling issues I've picked up on - I've had a reply within hours, even at weekends (whether they have solved it or not).

I never had a reply to any of my complaints about the withdrawal of service or it crashing at key times.

Just thought I'd give the Amazon Prime TV Channel 7-day free trial a go. I had hoped that a sports channel would run at 50Hz, but no - all the live and on-demand stuff is a horrible 50->25Hz downconversion (the horrible bit refers to it taking place - not that it's a technically bad conversion) I've tried on both on an nVidia Shield running Android TV (configured 4K 50 Rec 709 output) and via the web browser on my laptop...

If iPlayer can do 50Hz - why on earth aren't premium services? Sport is shot at 50Hz for a reason...

If IP platform operators and service providers want us to ditch cable or satellite - they'll need to up their quality.

I get why NowTV runs at a lower quality - they want to be seen as a 'cheap and cheerful' alternative to 'fulll quality, full price' Sky.

I don't get why Amazon - who are pushing 4K and HDR - aren't also pushing full quality TV... Surely they want to be better than Sky or BT, not worse?

So glad I can't tell the difference.

Seriously?

I guess the most common reason for people not seeing the difference is that lots of people haev TVs with Motion Flow / Natural Motion interpolation enabled that attempts to convert 25p to 50p (or 100p in some cases) and thus looks more like a 50p / 50i original - but the artefacts this interpolation introduces are horrible.

Compared to iPlayer - which does full 50p streaming - it's a real shame.

Looks like the Discovery/Eurosport Winter Olympics on-line will be disappointingly in 25p via Amazon (not sure if other platforms are also this reduced quality).

Annoying - as the BBC streams are now almost always 50p. (Checking now and they all are - Snooker, Netball, Alpine all 50p not 25p)

I use iplayer extensively on my 55” Samsung Qled TV and the quality is amazing. I often forget that I’m watching a streaming service at all. As always, the Beeb does things right.

Branding is a mess on the service - sold as the Eurosport Player, feeds labelled as Eurosport Xtra on the menu then the DOG branded as Eurosport 360.

If you contact customer services they tell you that what is branded as 'Eurosport Player' on Amazon isn't 'Eurosport Player' too... They also say that they are not providing the streams on the Amazon service, Amazon are. Be interesting to know if that is actually the case or not... (May have to do some Wireshark work to find out...)