"If it ever gets too bad, they'll just steal again" should hang on the wall of every media distribution company.
Consolidation efforts like Netflix prevented piracy, but the splintering of streaming services has encouraged it, and sports (and especially football) has become the great fulcrum. Pirating sports is huge right now, because their distribution is an anti-consumer mess. Cable is using them to cling for dear life, streaming services own fragments, and some teams even have their own dedicated networks.
Eventually I think it will break, and somebody is going to have to take a haircut. Likely cable, with a slight shot to the sports leagues who have benefitted from cables desperation and entrenched customers. Consumers may finally getting a reasonable-ish price (maybe $20 a month instead of $65).
I believe Disney is in the best place to execute this: owning ESPN, ABC, Disney+, and enough of Hulu. They've made the largest investment into the NFL of any company, but rights are all scattered between Amazon, CBS, Fox, and NBC until 2033! I could see them acquiring either the rest of Fox and/or CBS (who hold down Sunday slots), maybe work out a deal for RedZone with the NFL, and pull in noon and afternoon audiences, which might be the tipping point that gets consumers on board.
F1's online presence under Liberty Media is a great example of how to do it right. Every race gets same-day highlights on YouTube within hours, along with tons of interview and analysis content. You can be an F1 fan and not spend a penny to watch the entire season. But the premium option to watch full events live is still there, along with merchandising, (quite good) licensed video games, etc. As a result, F1 is growing faster than ever before and is profitable for the first time in years.
I'm not sure about that. The Serie A (Italian football/soccer) also puts same-hour highlights on YouTube within hours, but people still use illegal streaming all the time.
You lose a lot by not following a sport in real time, especially if such sport is part of your social environment, and likewise you lose a lot if you just see highlights.
For an example of a perfect digital play, I think the America's Cup would be it: live streaming, analysis, interviews, replays, highlights.
It competes directly with tv streaming, but it can do that because it has a much smaller following.
Football’s drama plays out over the course of the entire match, with the evolution of play happening minute to minute and any small mistake turning into big moments. Highlights take away from that drama.
The nature of F1 lends itself to this highlight model, as you can get 90% of the experience of a race from the 10 minutes of highlights extracted from 1.5hours of racing.
> "If it ever gets too bad, they'll just steal again"
Is it as easy to steal as it used to be? I'm not even sure I know where to get torrents reliably atm. Last I knew pirate bay was always being disrupted.
And is it easy to rip stuff when the source is streamed? Like dvds, music, software is easy to copy and distribute when it was just a cd to copy and some authentication to work around.
Im totally out of the piracy loop, maybe im wrong and still as easy as getting on to pirate bay and find a decently reviewed torrent?
Yes. The quality is better and it can be easily automated with Sonarr, Radarr et al. Torrents are not the way to go imho, but Usenet is amazing (notably it isn’t necessarily free).
There is content that isn’t available in my region or the legal options are worse in some way (resolution, app UI etc).
I pay for several streaming services (mainly to keep my conscience clear) but watch their shows via pirated means as the experience is better.
As the provider options get broader, the piracy option also gets more attractive as it’s all in one place.
As the sibling comment pointed out, it is SO much easier than it was.
I hopped back into it about 3y ago. I’ve got a NAS running on my local network with sonarr to snatch new tv shows and radarr for new movies.
In practice, if I decide I want to watch a movie I can reliably pull down something high quality within 2-10m (depending on how esoteric it is) and then be watching it on our tv.
When paramount decided not to let lower decks season 1 outside the US, I went to pirate bay and got it. Also had to get some torrent software having not used one for years. Worked flawlessly.
The risk of companies that literally refuse to take money for their products is people will just get them elsewhere, but once you force people to open that door, you knock down a major barrier.
Sports packages should license more camera feeds. Make the normal cheap package like it is now. Add in a deluxe package where you have 4+ camera options to look at. Bars would eat it up. Everyone has a large TV in there home. Very few people have the space for 4 large TVs in livingroom.
Can we avoid the conflation of piracy and stealing? Stealing under the pre-internet definition has very different consequences from the duplication of copyable resources.
At the individual level, you're denying the copyright holder and the dependency chain of rent extractors the money from a purchase transaction they're legally entitled to, if you were willing to pay and jump through whatever hoops were in place as a potential customer. Game of thrones streaming issues showed people don't like hoops or shitty service.
If you're not a potential customer, and don't share the media, copyright holder et al have lost nothing. If you do share, they're out whatever percentage of people who you passed the data to that were potential customers.
If I own something via other distribution channels or physical media, I have no compunction against downloading, nor if I know I will never pay for it otherwise. I have on occasion tried out software I've pirated and paid for a real license after continued use, or purchased physical media despite having the album or movie from a torrent. I have to assume that I'm not an outlier, so it occurs to me that piracy may actually be a net positive influence on media companies revenue. The marketing of content is good in terms of exposure, software reviews and recommendation, and so forth.
It may actually be a social good, depending on the culture at the time, creating more free channels of distribution and communication about content products, and services that otherwise wouldn't exist or would be stifled.
It's not theft. At worst it's cheating at the game of commerce.
Especially this part. Spotify in particular is bad this way, with the artists getting a nearly invisibly small slice of the money. Youtube isn't much better. Reduce the friction that prevents me from giving my money directly to the artists to support their work and I'd be a much bigger paying consumer of online media.
> Pirating sports is huge right now, because their distribution is an anti-consumer mess.
I would watch way more baseball if it weren't for MLB.com. It's got some OK features, but overall the service is a garbage fire technically. They stuck with Flash until the bitter end. But even if they fixed the technical issues, the restrictions on access cripple the service.
Consolidation efforts like Netflix prevented piracy, but the splintering of streaming services has encouraged it, and sports (and especially football) has become the great fulcrum. Pirating sports is huge right now, because their distribution is an anti-consumer mess. Cable is using them to cling for dear life, streaming services own fragments, and some teams even have their own dedicated networks.
Eventually I think it will break, and somebody is going to have to take a haircut. Likely cable, with a slight shot to the sports leagues who have benefitted from cables desperation and entrenched customers. Consumers may finally getting a reasonable-ish price (maybe $20 a month instead of $65).
I believe Disney is in the best place to execute this: owning ESPN, ABC, Disney+, and enough of Hulu. They've made the largest investment into the NFL of any company, but rights are all scattered between Amazon, CBS, Fox, and NBC until 2033! I could see them acquiring either the rest of Fox and/or CBS (who hold down Sunday slots), maybe work out a deal for RedZone with the NFL, and pull in noon and afternoon audiences, which might be the tipping point that gets consumers on board.