I have been watching football matches at all levels for almost 40 years. Despite not having played the game at any significant level above school or works teams I can usually tell within a few minutes of watching a televised game how balanced both teams are, which is the more likely to struggle, and which has the better chance of winning.
If you are going to bet on matches that you cannot ordinarily watch live on terrestrial or satellite TV, then bookmaker or betting exchange live video streaming services are invaluable. Several betting firms offer live streaming of football matches via their sites and this updated article will investigate nine of the best.
All live streaming services are invariably restricted to signed-up and logged-in customers of each site and most require a positive balance in the account before games can be accessed. This is of course a small sacrifice in order to watch the action, especially before committing to an in-play wager.
Effectively, you could have an annual subscription to matches from around the world purely for the cost of your initial deposit. In some cases this can be as little as £5 or £10 GBP (or your equivalent currency), which is far better value than all of the satellite packages available!
Top Betting Sites for Live Streaming Football Matches
1. Bet365
Bet365 offers a mixture of audio only and audio/visual live coverage of several football matches on a daily basis.
Being a UK based company, it has no access to any broadcasting rights to show live UK domestic football matches and all of the games it shows live are foreign feeds. However, matches involving UK clubs are regularly transmitted as audio only to UK customers. Bet365 uses your IP address to determine which events are available to you (for using a proxy server located in a foreign country to get around these restrictions see our article How Do I Hide or Disguise My IP Address?).
You can watch different matches being broadcast simultaneously by opening up the Bet365 site again in a separate window (multiple streams will play subject to the speed of your computer processor and the strength/speed of your internet connection). Each match begins two minutes before its scheduled start time.
In the ‘Sports’ tab of the site click on ‘Live Streaming’ at the top of the page (see red arrow in the screenshot below). A pop-up window opens showing the schedule of live events being broadcasted on the site and also a handy FAQ’s tab – scroll down this to answer all of your technical queries (see yellow arrow). Click on the image below to enlarge it in a new tab:
Bet365 Live Streaming Service
The live streaming service relies only on the viewer/listener being logged into his or her Bet365 account, which either shows a positive balance or has been used to place a bet within the 24-hour period leading up to kick-off of the desired stream.
Minimum system requirements are: Windows 2000, XP, Vista or Mac OSX; Web browser IE6 or above, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari or Opera; Broadband internet speed of at least 512 kbp/s; Adobe Flash Player version 9.0.115 or later.
