How to use WatchESPN / ESPN3 in Linux

So you pay for a cable/dish subscription, and want to be able to use the WatchESPN/ESPN3 website to watch live content. But for some reason it just doesn’t work on Linux. Turns out, the Adobe Flash plugin depends upon the now defunct HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) to assist in mediation of DRM protected content. The solution is to install hal-flash. Note the solution will ONLY WORK on browsers which use the official Adobe Flash plugin (Firefox, Opera, etc). This will NOT work on Google’s “Pepper” flash player in Chrome/Chromium.

Info on hal-flash:

$ eix hal-flash
[I] media-libs/hal-flash
     Available versions:  0.2.0_rc1
     Installed versions:  0.2.0_rc1(17:56:24 11/20/13)
     Homepage:            http://github.com/cshorler/hal-flash http://build.opensuse.org/package/show/devel:openSUSE:Factory/hal-flash
     Description:         A libhal stub library forwarding to UDisks for www-plugins/adobe-flash to play DRM content