Hmmm, well at least you will get a game live and some others on Thursday. Shouldnt complain to much I guess.
Konferenz rules. I watch most "meaningless" games that way but will DVR the ones I truly want to watch.
So as a person about to have a house and full option of what TV package to pick...hoping for recommendations. I don't like any of the big teams. Hate Bayern, hate Dortmund, hate Schalke. For casual entertainment I like the smaller clubs and any BL 2 coverage is a major plus. For the teams I really like, I think I'll still subscribe to their "Club TV" online service to watch the matches. Coverage in German is preferred, helps to learn the language and get more authentic analysis. Could care less about live coverage. Being on west coast I tend to DVR everything and watch it later. Option 1: GolTV - Seems to be showing 5-6 matches per week. Friday match live, 1-2 early Saturday matches, late Saturday match, 2 Sunday matches. Tends to focus on Bayern, Dortmund and Schalke. Main concern is the channel seems unlikely to survive as a Spanish channel offering Bundesliga as their main coverage. Also, their announcing teams are largely bad. As extra shows you get Bundesliga Magazine (preview and behind the scenes show) and Hallo Bundesliga (highlights show). Option 2: Dish Network - Much less full-length matches but two Konferenz with one being the BL 2. Get the Mein Stadion preview show, and two highlight shows. Only full-length match is Friday though, unless you want to wait until Thursday for some very delayed matches to air. Positive is it is in German. Seems like the logical choice, but I understand Dish had a German channel with 2x better coverage than this previously but for current season ditched it for this shoddier coverage. Makes me wonder if they will keep scaling it back.
My understanding is Dish only has the German package and has taken away some of the channels people like. I think GolTV is one of them. If you can get it in your area, FiOS is awesome. If you subscribe to that you also get access to ESPN3 online as well. They also have a FoxSports package and FSC package. Getting 2.BL will be tough. 1.BL you get 3-4 games a week now on GolTV on FiOS...and not just Bayern and Dortmund.
Thanks to Sky Deutschland I have been able to learn to read German text and on-screen graphics as well as enjoy the match the way it should be, in German. One of my favorite bands is Rammstein (and Megaherz and some of Die Puhdys and soon Unheilig thanks to their big hit "So Wie Du Warst") so that and the fact my trustee to my late mother's trust fund, Doris Loeschen, is originally from Germany, and I myself am part-German, so all of that helps out too to accelerate the process of my learning German too. I have compared both GolTV's English coverage to Sky Deutschland's German coverage over the past 2 years as a Wolfsburg supporter and prefer Sky anytime over Gol, a more authentic flavor with Sky, a somewhat tutorial on German which helps out with my translating German-to-English better (currently I can read German text just not live audio) plus a full and comprehensive half-time (and pregame) show at that as opposed to Gol's coverage of what seems like nothing but endless commercials (such as "call the 1-800" TV offers) and no comprehensive halftime show or an "across the league" show of highlights. Knowing good-ol' "Cheap Charlie" Ergan, the CEO of Dish Network (I have been a Dish customer since 1997), it might not be the only scaling back that they do.
Regarding the Konferenz: It is a blessing for fans of minor or foreign teams who don't have sky but watch the game at a bar. They still get to see (some of) their team. Keep in mind that Pay TV is hugely unpopular in Germany, I think less than 2 million households have a Sky subscription.
Indeed, how would a Buli game look like without the German soccer dittologies: Schwalbe, Spielzug, Rudelbildung....
And that is too bad because the paid coverage is outstanding. I think it is one of the best in the industry and would love to see it done in the US.
Personally I hate the German commentary Sky is offering. I think Sky is, at least for Germans, a luxury item and has the price tag of a premium product. If they do not treat it as such and provide decent commentary they won't see a dime of my money (at least not directly, I like watching stuff in bars). I also don't like the fact that I have to pay for a movie and series package I will never watch (I only use my TV for sports, news, DVDs, Video games and as an extra screen for my laptop), making it even less appealing to me. To all intends and purposes I cut the court (though our free TV market is much bigger than the one in most other countries). But then I am on a student's budget and living with other students who think the same, so my budget for these kind of things will certainly be expanding. Question is where I will put the extra money in the end, sky is certainly not close to the top in that race.
You guys all know that you have been posting in the wrong thread, right? I think there are two TV coverage threads.
1) You should listen to MLS matches...it will make you appreicate Sky much more , 2) Their pricing seems a bit high, but similar packages in the US cost that on cable too. Of course in our model you get Internet, cable TV and the "packages" from one provider so you may pay US$150/month for all of that. Frankly there is too much on cable TV anyway to watch pay movie channels, sports and such. But there is even less on "free" TV unless you like re-runs of Gilligan's Island and crappy local news. Just to keep everyone happy, here's a fashionable German kit...
Bought it myself before EM.... sorry but this one's you posted here is fake. The adidas logo must be lower exactly at the hight where the black stripe goes down. The DFB logo must be a little bit lower.... on the original one there should be no suture right across the shirt.... the yellow color is fake.... Sadly those shirts were produced all across Europe in countries such as Yugoslavia and France so there sometimes is a huge difference in quality.... but this one's fake for sure. A original 22 year old shirt will cost you 200€ and above at ebay....yes, I can tell.....
When you want German language rock, there's nothing better than East German rock. I'd certainly take Transit, Berluc, Renft or Stern Meißen (although the latter turned from prog to Schlager later - "Eine Nacht" is still kinda awesomeish in a Schlager kind of way) over the Puhdys, though.
Hell yeah, or, should I say, JAAAAAAAA!!!!!!! Formel 1 are a damn good band on that track, what album is it on, I definitely want to pick a CD of it up. I myself am an old-school headbanger from the 1980s (and it shows in my still-existant mullet I've had since the 90s that's a little thin in the backend) and they reming me of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden or mabe even Saxon with that sound and stage presence, top notch, is there a file on "Der Edelrocker", this is definitely one band that had it not been for the Wall and the Iron Curtain could've made a huge impact on 80s metal in the Western World, along with the rest of the DDR hard music scene, and maybe even Die Puhdys could've been as big on this side of the Wall as they were over in the Soviet Bloc.
That's pretty easy, because Formel 1 only released one LP (plus a couple of singles) - Live im Stahlwerk. Your best bet to get East German heavy metal is to get the downloads from Amazon - the albums are either out of print, or will be quite expensive to import from the US. http://www.amazon.de/Die-größten-Hi...13187-2726454?ie=UTF8&qid=1350841919&sr=301-1 http://www.amazon.de/Die-größten-Hi..._shvl_album_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350842146&sr=301-1 http://www.amazon.de/East-Metal-Hit..._shvl_album_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350842165&sr=301-1 http://www.amazon.de/Anthology-1986...1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1350842207&sr=1-1-catcorr http://www.amazon.de/Road-To-Nowher..._shvl_album_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350842184&sr=301-1 The singer of Pharao later became a producer, fro Saxon among others. Their latest album Road to Nowhere features Biff Byford (as well as Tom Angelripper) as guest vocalists.
If you are annoyed by the lack of Bundesliga coverage in the Unites States write to DFL SE executives and employees and tell them about the status quo in the US. The DFL SE is in charge of the Bundesliga`s international broadcasting rights. You can contact them via http://dfl-sports-enterprises.com/en/Unser_team.html - all of them should speak English.