Bars with sports on television ....
 

What does a bar owner have to do if anything to have live sporting events on the bars television screens? Do they have to pay for college sports, NFL?

Are commercial rates for cable/satellite a lot higher?
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commercial accounts with the provider

Does that commercial rate take care of any fees for the NFL for example? Is the commercial rate a fixed price over residential rates? Or is it based on the occupancy rating of the bar?

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not sure if it helps or not but direct tv offers their nfl package to bars and such. also, i've been to bars to watch boxing matches and paid ~$30 to get in to watch, i figured the establishment was paying for the broadcast rights of the fight but could be wrong.

PPV sports is either based on how many tv's are setup, or how many people can be in there at one time watching. Gets pretty pricey.

Made me think of the time I was at Rachels which is an upscale strip club in Orlando and the owner used to have PPV boxing. Downstairs was topless and upstairs was nude. $20 cover and if you wanted to watch the PPV Boxing on the big screen you had to pay another $60 to get upstairs.

I was in there the night of a Tyson fight and I watched as everyone went upstairs to watch the fight. It was packed to capacity and everyone was happy. Then Tyson knocked the guy out about 43 seconds into the 1st round and the fight was over. I've never seen so many pissed off guys coming down those stairs and the only one smiling was the owner :)

My favorite place to kill time before going to the airport.

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They used to have some great steaks and nice lunch buffet. We used to go there at least once per week for a great lunch.

They do enforce it for PPV, by the way. In order to legally investigate hacks I got licensed as a private investigator. Technically it's a felony to offer investigative or security services without a license. Anyway, as a private investigator I've been asked to check as many local bars, restaurants, etc. as possible on event nights. There is a nice bounty for catching businesses showing PPV content without the right license from the content producer. They look at it about the same way most content producers here feel about people ripping their stuff off. It was kind of interesting to do for one weekend, taking the fight against content piracy local. It wasn't really my thing though.

do you know any site with a list of sports bars?

The bar is charged by how many people it can seat. With DirecTV there are 2 rates. One for mom and pop and I don't know the actual count, but lets say 48 persons. Then another for everyone else no matter how many you seat.

Many bars remove space to fall into the "dive bar" rate.

The difference in price is huge. Not sure on the particulars, but the rate might be $290 for an MMA fight for the small bar and $1250 for the large one.

This is why only very large bars will do PPV and then sometimes very small ones will do it too. Everyone in the middle can't afford it.

The NFL, etc packages are the same way too and so is the "basic cable" packages.

Most providers offer a bounty for turning in a bar if they illegally get the fight. So many very closed bars might use their card from home to get the home rate of $60 for a fight and then close themselves to everyone but the most loyal, close knit clients.