The price of watching the Premier League in Dubai has just gone up, but du say all games will now have an English commentary option.

The price of the beIN sports packages on du and etisalat have just both gone up – with the cost of the football channel packages now Dhs110 rather than Dhs77 per month.

“beIN sports increased their rates,” a customer service representative at etisalat told us. “etisalat has kept the charge the same but the additional charge of Dhs33 has been added from the beIN side.”

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The 42 per cent price increase includes extra channels, many of them not sports related. Here’s a full list of the channels in the package on etisalat and here’s the package on du.

On the Doha-based beIN’s website, you can sign up to a sports package for Dhs90, but that is not available for etisalat and du customers in Dubai.

THE GOOD NEWS?

But the bonus is it appears all games will now be on offer with English language commentary.

A representative at du told us that the “technical issue” of games only having Arabic commentary is a thing of the past, and assured us that all games will have an English commentary option when the Premier League starts on Saturday August 13.

UPDATE: This doesn’t seem to be the case yet, as this weekend’s games were only available with Arabic commentary. There were two audio tracks, both in Arabic. We’ll investigate and let you know. 

We contacted beIN for verification of this but they have yet to comment.

Last year if watching a football game on one of the secondary channels the commentary was often only available in Arabic. On the du package for instance, number 11 was always the English channel, but if any matches were shown on another channel (like 2, 3 or 4) it was a language lucky dip, and the commentary might have been in English or Arabic.

The language issue isn’t the only technical glitch with beIN football coverage, many viewers also see black bars with random letters and numbers appear in the middle of their screen mid-match and experience an occasional loss of picture. We’ve yet to hear if this will be fixed for the 2016 season, but will keep you posted.

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