GOMtv actively blocking alternative clients? - Page 8

On March 15 2011 02:39 MuTT wrote:
Cmon guys, it's obvious that they exist for esports. If not, then why do they say it every show 20 times. Also all the money they get goes to improve the stream. I don't see anything sketchy about a company trying so hard to convince you of something without any results.

But seriously, that shit crashes all the time and looks worse than 240p. They screw everyone over who wants to watch but can't stay up past midnight. If they truly wanted to support eSports then why don't they like use justin.tv or something and stream in 720p with vods for everybody for free?

On March 15 2011 02:35 darmousseh wrote:
They are blocking it not because it's a way to view the gom stream on a mac, but because it is a way of viewing it on a windows machine. Remember GomTV is a korean country and mac barely exists there at all, thus the cost/benefit of including support for a mac is none. I would guess right now that at least 99% of their users use a windows machine (obviously I don't know exactly but 95% of the internet users use windows, and almost 100% of korea uses windows). Making a player to support 1% of their users is not worth it at all. When someone posts a VLC link and uses a player, most of the people using it will also be windows users and since GOM's business is a vlc player, it is in their interest to block windows users (and consequently mac users) from using alternate players.

No mac hate here, i used one in college, but i will never use one again (mostly because i hate apples software policies since i'm a software developer, annoying interface, and cost double of what a windows would cost without any real benefit).

GOM will probably never support mac, this is just reality, so it is probably in your best interest to find an alternative such as installing windows on your mac.

On March 15 2011 02:43 darmousseh wrote:



Their entire business revolves around a vlc player. That would be like abc using fox to broadcast their stuff.

On March 15 2011 02:35 darmousseh wrote:
They are blocking it not because it's a way to view the gom stream on a mac, but because it is a way of viewing it on a windows machine. Remember GomTV is a korean country and mac barely exists there at all, thus the cost/benefit of including support for a mac is none. I would guess right now that at least 99% of their users use a windows machine (obviously I don't know exactly but 95% of the internet users use windows, and almost 100% of korea uses windows). Making a player to support 1% of their users is not worth it at all. When someone posts a VLC link and uses a player, most of the people using it will also be windows users and since GOM's business is a vlc player, it is in their interest to block windows users (and consequently mac users) from using alternate players.

No mac hate here, i used one in college, but i will never use one again (mostly because i hate apples software policies since i'm a software developer, annoying interface, and cost double of what a windows would cost without any real benefit).

GOM will probably never support mac, this is just reality, so it is probably in your best interest to find an alternative such as installing windows on your mac.

On March 15 2011 02:39 MuTT wrote:
Cmon guys, it's obvious that they exist for esports. If not, then why do they say it every show 20 times. Also all the money they get goes to improve the stream. I don't see anything sketchy about a company trying so hard to convince you of something without any results.

But seriously, that shit crashes all the time and looks worse than 240p. They screw everyone over who wants to watch but can't stay up past midnight. If they truly wanted to support eSports then why don't they like use justin.tv or something and stream in 720p with vods for everybody for free?

On March 15 2011 02:44 Cerotix wrote:

Do you really think that that is the most appropriate business response for GOM to make? Esports is a growing community, but it is still relatively niche as far as viewership outside of Korea is concerned. IMO it would be in their best interests to return the streaming functionality to macs. If you are trying to raise awareness of esports, specifically Korean esports, on an international scene, it behooves them to alienate anybody willing to pay for their service for any reason. I agree with the fact that Korea is a windows dominated country, but if they are only planning on giving support to windows viewers, why make it availible to international viewers at all?
Now, with all the upcoming tournaments that are in the works (NASL, IEM, MLG etc etc.) that are going to be having free live streams (The NASL free stream is reported to be at a higher bitrate than the paid GSL HQ stream), I will be very reluctant to purchase another seasons pass, the incentive for me to not go looking for the free vods has left.
TL;DR - esports is a niche market in terms of international viewers who are willing to pay money for the live stream and the vods, why alienate anybody if you are trying to increase awareness about sc2 and esports in general?

On March 15 2011 03:00 dogmeatstew wrote:
Firstly, I'm not sure why there's so much uproar about incompatibility between a given companies software and unix based operating systems... this isn't exactly something new. With the exception of Blizzard (and very recently select Valve games) the gaming community is generally subject to "have a Microsoft developed operating system of you're out of luck".

As such, it shocks me a little that on a site dedicated to gaming we're having a discussion about how terrible it is that GOM doesn't have mac or linux support for their product. Honestly, in the software world this is pretty common, its a lot of extra coding to make your product cross compatible for what continues to be a very small audience (especially in the gaming community...).


On the other hand, there are some pretty easy workarounds that haven't been mentioned, for Linux users, try using Wine, with a fairly basic understanding of the linux architecture you can get the GOM player running through this no issue on *almost* every major linux distro (for some reason I feel like Wine doesn't work on Suse but I could be crazy...). Otherwise, VM's are always an option...

As for Mac users, if you're not willing to use a windows VM or have an alternate OS installed for the purposes of running incompatible software then realistically you can't be that dedicated to running a large percentage of existing software. If you play any other games chances are you're going to need a Windows OS so again, this issue is hardly GOM specific and I don't really see how we can blame them for it.

Plus I'm sure eventually they'll come out with a working Mac version, but seriously, coding mac applications is hard .

On March 15 2011 03:17 darmousseh wrote:


Yes, this is the best business decision because the cost of developing and maintaining a mac player will not be equal to the amount of extra revenue from users who only use mac (or linux or some other random os), however, they do support the iphone. I have an android phone and am hoping they will come out with a player for it, but as of right now, iphones are what gom has developed for. I have posted requesting on the gomtv site that they make an android app, but I don't go talking about it on the forums mostly because android again is a niche market and gomtv will gain almost 0 benefit from me being able to view the stream on an android.

The problem in development is cost/benefit. As a software developer I have to pick and choose which platforms I will support. The websites I develop all work on google chrome, opera, safari, firefox, and ie8. I do not support ie6 or ie7. I had to make this decision because the development time in order to support those browsers is not worth the cost.

This is also a problem with esports. Esports must invest in the platforms which provide the most benefit to their target audience. In korea, this is windows users using ie8. gomtv constantly has problems with their javascript in firefox and chrome and being a developer I knew how to go around it, but if i didn't, I would just use ie8 when viewing gomtv.

If gomtv were an american company, i'm sure they would support mac since a lot of laptop users use mac, however, gomtv mostly supports korea.

The OP is seeing a symptom of a much larger problem.

On March 15 2011 02:35 darmousseh wrote:
The OP is seeing a symptom of a much larger problem.

On March 15 2011 02:35 darmousseh wrote:
They are blocking it not because it's a way to view the gom stream on a mac, but because it is a way of viewing it on a windows machine. Remember GomTV is a korean country and mac barely exists there at all, thus the cost/benefit of including support for a mac is none. I would guess right now that at least 99% of their users use a windows machine (obviously I don't know exactly but 95% of the internet users use windows, and almost 100% of korea uses windows). Making a player to support 1% of their users is not worth it at all. When someone posts a VLC link and uses a player, most of the people using it will also be windows users and since GOM's business is a vlc player, it is in their interest to block windows users (and consequently mac users) from using alternate players.

No mac hate here, i used one in college, but i will never use one again (mostly because i hate apples software policies since i'm a software developer, annoying interface, and cost double of what a windows would cost without any real benefit).

GOM will probably never support mac, this is just reality, so it is probably in your best interest to find an alternative such as installing windows on your mac.

On March 15 2011 03:16 Cynoks wrote:

Right because Justin.tv gives away hundreds of thousands of dollars every month while paying for a very high quality studio and an large venue during finals. OH wait. Justin.tv offers a free service and GomTV is running a business get over it.

$10 for a whole season is dirt cheap, if the quality and time zones bother you that much then the option to buy it is always there.

I complain when restaurants give away free food too, they never give you enough or exactly what you want!

Anyways I'm sure GomTV is working on making their media player available to Mac users as fast as they can. It would be less business for them if they didn't. If you really want a solution contacting GomTV would probably be a better idea than complaining here.

On March 15 2011 03:29 PraetorianX wrote:
I don't really see the problem here.

GOM Player is the best media player in the world. Why would you want anything else?

On March 15 2011 03:28 Bumblebees wrote:


I can understand what they're doing. The problem is that they already accepted payment for this service that people have come to expect. There has been no communication that I'm aware of to indicate that it was problematic or prohibited, and there has been no communication as to it's cutoff.