This year makes it 8 years since I stopped watching tv altogether and depend on dvd/blu ray, downloads and live streaming for watching my movies, tv shows and sports events. Well for sports it is just football for now. I watch football on live stream.

Earlier I used a free service called Vipbox but most of the links that they have are really bad and slow even on a good speed package and also most of them are illegal. Atleast I think that they are illegal. But I used that for several years, 2010 onwards I guess. Then recently as last year I found another live stream link called astream.me which was for sure is all illegal streams. How do I know that? Because the links go down every 5 minutes.

So I alternated between using Vipbox and astream for about a year when all of a sudden I got word that Hotstar, which usually advertises their local tv channel soaps and serials being available online for streaming for a fee, also has sports streaming. So earlier this year I signed up for just the sports package at just Rs.299 annually. That is an awesome package. But they didn’t have the World Cup so I signed up with Sony Liv which had the rights for streaming the WC games.

Though I must say that Sony Liv’s customer service on Twitter was pathetic and I had no intention of continuing beyond the month that I signed up for. Once the World Cup was done and two days later my month was up, I ignored their attempts to get me to continue.