Question about blackouts for Rockets fan in San Antonio

Well... he moved, he's just going to have to be a Spurs fan, hahha, not serious


Anyway, I'm pretty sure using LP he should be fine except when the Spurs play the Rockets, he might need to switch to like fox sports or their other local affiliate channel (if they're showing it locally), at least that's what I experienced in the Austin area and they consider the Spurs our local team/market.

With that said, another option (not sure on your internet speed) might be to setup an older hd sling box for him at your place (the ones before they switched to streaming service). He could then stream to his house from yours. If your internet is decent on the upload speed (I think with their compression it was maybe 5 mb/s upload on your end for a good picture, however if you do a speed test and your max up is like 5 don't do it), I bet the quality would would be alright, and he wouldn't have to deal with the random crap LP does sometimes (if he were subscribing to like their streaming service), it's almost like they want people to look for other means.

With all that said, I'm pretty sure he could get LP streaming or even TV and be fine (other than the local games for Spurs). I mean it was so stupid sometimes, I'd get all the pre-game show and then the tipoff starts - blacked out, I'd then have to channel hop to fox sports (when rockets were vs Spurs) or the local channel, even though the LP was showing the exact same stream/announcers at the time. This whole blackout thing has more to do with local ratings and ad income (so it's understandable if they're trying to attract ads for the local market and get an idea from local market TV ratings, vs the lp broadcast where it's now a National game possibly with different ads, but it makes it a mess for the fan. You'll see something similar during the super bowl, like during the game you'll randomly get a few local ads that are just normal ads, since you have to watch it on your local station (not sure on streaming), but I know locally they get a few min of air time for the local companies to run ads (its not a lot, maybe like 3-5 ads, but you'll know when they do it, the commercials will be normal and targeted to your local area.

Sorry I didn't respond earlier, I missed the part about him not wanting streaming from elsewhere.


Tl;Dr - yes, LP will work via TV as long as the Rockets aren't playing the Spurs (then he'd have to channel hop to the local affiliate). This was awhile ago but I haven't seen any good news for us fans yet.. And if it doesn't work, I think he can just cancel (but I'm pretty certain he'll be fine with LP)

 

I live in San Antonio and I had to get league pass. I used to have AT&T and had the same issue as your brother, constant blackouts for the Rockets games. AT&T also doesn't offer league pass, so if you do want to get league pass you have to buy it through the NBA, which means you can only watch their streams. Those streams were unreliable in my experience. They were laggy, low quality, constant issues with buffering, etc, and this was on gigabit internet. It was really a terrible product. I switched from AT&T to Spectrum which does offer league pass on TV channels, so you don't have to stream it, and that's what I have set up for this season. Looking forward to not having to deal with that headache anymore.