One Stream To Rule Them All
Dispatches from the world of alternative sports streams
This season, the NBA wised up and closed the loophole on purchasing International League Pass with a VPN. Before this season, spoofing your location and purchasing League Pass from somewhere like India was one of the most economical ways to watch as much basketball as possible. International League Pass is both cheaper than its U.S. counterpart and has none of the local or national TV blackouts. This change left the frugal basketball junkie with two options: Take to the high seas or pony up hundreds of dollars for League Pass plus a suite of cable subscriptions.
When I lamented my lack of choices on Twitter someone in my replies suggested I check out HeheStreams, a service I had yet to hear about.
HeheStreams operates like any other “alternative” streaming site, but without any of the obtrusive ads, much higher picture quality, little-to-no delay, and a responsive customer support team that’s active on Twitter and Reddit. The catch is that instead of being free, it costs $100 for the entire NBA season, which is about half the cost of the non-premium version of NBA League Pass.
To be clear, HeheStreams is not affiliated with the NBA and doesn’t have a license to broadcast games. So what you’re paying for is not exactly on the level which means there’s no guarantee that the service will be around tomorrow. That said, I think if your goal is to watch as many NBA games as efficiently as possible then you could do a lot worse than HeheStreams.
I signed up for a free trial on HeheStreams at the start of the season and was pleased to see there were no blackouts. I was able to watch games that aired on NBA League Pass, ESPN, TNT, NBA TV, ABC, whatever. Like League Pass, I could choose which announcers to listen to, but unlike League Pass there was none of the awful UX which regularly tells you a game hasn’t tipped off yet even though the game is already in the third quarter.
I recently reached out to the person behind HeheStreams to talk about the origin of the service and the state of the alternative sports streaming landscape at large.
“I never wanted HeheStreams to be anything more than just a side project,” the founder of HeheStreams (who I’ll refer to as “V.” for confidentiality) tells me over Skype.
“It was meant to be a proof of concept that people accidentally fell in love with so I gave it a little love. My day job has always paid me better, thankfully, allowing me to invest in my side projects as a way to learn more about technologies.”
Back in 2016, V. was browsing Reddit’s /r/nbastreams, a now defunct subreddit that acted as a directory for free NBA streams. At the time, V. was looking for a stream to watch and came across one redditor who was asking for donations to support the high server costs of their stream. V., who is a programmer and web developer, peaked behind the scenes and saw that the redditor wasn’t being honest about the true cost of hosting their stream.
Shortly after, V. launched the first version of HeheStreams to prove that hosting a stream wasn’t that expensive or even all that difficult. “It took me all of a two hour train ride,” V. tells me.
What started out as a personal challenge for V. slowly morphed into a part-time side project as V.’s stream continued to gain popularity on places like Reddit.
“I just wanted to give people an option. I hoped that someone else would take the reins from a technical standpoint,” V. says. “I had no interest in being that person, but regardless of how transparent I was about how the implementation of the stream worked, nobody took it and ran with it in the direction that I thought they should.”
V. tells me that the ten lines of JavaScript they wrote in 2016 to crack the NBA’s streaming protocol, which allowed them to setup the original version of HeheStreams, has been copied and reused on many of the free sports streaming sites today. Chances are the person who setup the free stream you’re watching has used V.’s original code in some way.
“People took the part of my code that made the streams work the way they do and capitalized on how much revenue you can pull in from free streaming, which is absolutely absurd,” V. says. “I know people who are making five figures each week from just doing free streams with ads!”
While V. thinks it’s cool to see their influence on so many streaming websites today, they also wishes there were more transparency among the free streamers.
“Some free streamers run things like cryptocurrency mining scripts without your consent in the background as you're watching the stream,” V. says. “That part makes me sad.”
V. recommends that anyone who watches free streams should use a crypto mining blocker in addition to a standard ad blocker.
I ask V. what separates HeheStreams from League Pass and other alternative streams. V. tells me that by staying small, HeheStreams has been able to put the customer first.
“I go out of my way to make sure that if someone is dissatisfied that I really learn what went wrong and try to do better the next time,” V. tells me. “This doesn't mean giving them free service, but instead working with them directly to solve their problem. That makes them feel like they have a degree of ownership or that they impacted the product directly. When you're a small team, it's easy to do this without the red tape that comes with being a bigger team.”
I can attest to this personal level of customer service. Before ever reaching out to V. for this story, I let my free trial to HeheStreams expire. Shortly after, I received an email with the subject line “hey there, what went wrong?”
Inside the email the sender asked why I didn’t convert to paid subscription and what, if anything, they could have done differently to change my mind. The email ended with, “I'm constantly working on improving the product and overall experience. If you could let me know in a reply, I'd really appreciate it.”
Compare that to the email I received from the NBA that waited until I canceled my League Pass subscription before offering me a 20 percent discount (which I’ll note is less than the 25 percent discount that’s being offered to anyone today).
HeheStreams is not the right choice for everyone. It’s one thing to watch a free alternative stream. It’s another thing to pay to for one — even if the quality is significantly better. But the existence of HeheStreams is a nice reminder that NBA League Pass doesn’t have to be as crummy as it is.
When I ask V. why they continue to put the time and effort into HeheStreams even though it’s nothing more than a side project, they reply, “I don't like bullies and I don't like consolidation of power. People should have a choice.”
The New Seven Seconds Or Less Suns
Recently, I was flipping through pbpstats.com and saw that Chris Paul has the lowest Shot Quality score out of anyone who has played meaningful minutes this season. Shot Quality is a metric created by Darryl Blackport which estimates how efficiently we’d expect a league average player to score based on things like shot location and play context.
It turns out, for shots outside the restricted area, one of the most important factors in estimating a player’s Shot Quality score is the amount of time that has passed since the play started. That’s bad news for Paul who takes nearly half his threes with seven seconds or less left on the shot clock.
Paul is not shooting particularly well on these bail-out-threes (just 25 percent on 28 attempts). His overall three-point point percentage (33 percent) would probably see a nice bump if he wasn’t having to hoist up a three at the end of the shot clock so often.
Despite his so-so shooting percentages on these attempts, there are few players I’d rather have the ball in their hands when the shot clock is winding down. Clearly, Paul is comfortable in this role as well. The chart below shows the percentage of a player’s three-point attempts over the past two seasons grouped by the amount of time remaining on the shot clock. No other high volume three-point shooter takes as many late shot clock threes as Paul.
I don’t have much more to say on this other than that it’s a clean illustration of how to look under the hood of a metric (in this case, Shot Quality) to see what is the driving force behind the bottom line number. For more information on shot quality metrics and expected results, I’d recommend Seth Partnow’s ongoing series on the topic over at The Athletic.
Free Money
Over the weekend, I held the inaugural F5 monthly lottery where I gave away 50 percent of what I made from paid Substack subscriptions to a randomly selected premium subscriber.
This month’s winner is Stephen Oates, who asked that I donate his winnings directly to the Effective Altruism Funds. Thanks to Stephen and his charitable approach, the lottery will now follow this approach. Going forward I will donate 50 percent of the Substack subscription revenue to the 501(c)(3) organization of the winner’s choice. And if the charity of choice is you.com, well that’s all right with me too.
Winners of the monthly lottery also get to request a Goldsberry-style shot chart of the player and season of their choice. Stephen requested Duncan Robinson’s shot chart from last season when he lit the world on fire from behind the arc.
Editor’s Note: In the F5’s first month, I gained 55 paying subscribers. This was very nice and exceeded my expectations for this newsletter in its first month. Because I receive the revenue for annual subscriptions in full within the first month, I did what Michelle Roberts could have done with the salary cap in 2016 and I smoothed things out. The monthly lottery will reflect subscription revenue by month, dividing the annual subscriptions across the year to better evenly distribute monthly winnings and donations.
In the Robinson shot chart, are the dots that are touching the 3P line 3s or long 2s?