The link between piracy and hypothetical profits has never been hard science, but when it comes to televized/streaming sports, a lot of this pirating seems to happen because people aren't allowed to watch it legally in their area.
This is a self-inflicted problem.
> This is a self-inflicted problem.
By this, I don't mean businesses shouldn't put substantial weight on their profits, but rather that when push comes to shove you have to ask which matters more: profit or product? You will constantly be faced with some choice of sacrificing the quality of the product in favor of higher profits or sacrificing profits in favor of the product.
Certainty we want to maximize both, but this isn't always possible.
I think part of this has come through our runaway problem with shareholders and hyper fixation on the short term. Many shareholders are happy to trade product for profit because they believe they can exit during the market lag. It is statistical arbitrage. They have no interest in the long term value of a company or product, only until the time of exit.
It's worth noting that being too focused on the short term will damage the long term sustainability. Many times you have to put off profits today for profits tomorrow. That's the same problem. But there will be significant pressure against this if people driving don't care about tomorrow.
Every league should offer something akin to a season ticket "firehose" (all games streamed live with hosted replays) like MLS does on Apple TV or Gallagher rugby on the Rugby Network.
They've already crossed the threshold where this is no longer profitable. The next licencing deal will likely be so expensive, no Norwegian or Scandinavian company could possibly be able to turn a profit from it.
Of course, the CEO of the company has been in the media talking about how IPTV funds criminal networks and such nonsense*, calling for bans, yadda yadda. They're not listening to the market at all. Just using illegal streaming as a scapegoat. And I've decided, as long as this is how it's gonna be, they're not seeing a single dime of my money.
* I find the concept absurd. No matter where we spend our money, some of it ends up with criminals and various other despicable people, who will use it for evil. No one has the ability to prevent this. There's no reasonable expectation in current societal and economic structures for the consumer to somehow keep track of all their money once it leaves their wallet. This is no more the case for IPTV than it is when I buy a burger from some hole in the wall, which unbeknownst to me is a money laundering front. Or when I buy some chocolate and most of the money ends up with some white rich guy and not the children in Africa who harvested the cocoa. The whole argument is so intellectually dishonest and morally pathetic it pisses me off. And I don't even pay for IPTV.
Before this, it was much easier for ISPs / DNS providers / VPN providers to push back against governments wanting to censor the internet because the companies wouldn't have the tools installed to do this kind of blocking. The companies can then argue it is a burden to be forced to implement the tools. That is no longer the case in Europe, and the use of these tools is likely to expand outside the sports domain.
One must only imagine the outcome.
The question is exactly how much is copied, and how obvious it is.
Streaming services have dramatically reduced piracy by making it way easier and way cheaper than ever before to consume content.
I don't live in Europe, but if it is like US sports, you need to jump through hoops, pay through the nose, and have 14 different accounts to watch all the sports you want.
But the RSN doesn’t show all the games across the league, nor will it show playoff hockey. So you need to also subscribe to a big streaming service like Sportsnet.
It gets worse: your RSN may not offer a streaming service. So you need an old-fashioned cable package to get it. The cost becomes ridiculous, just to watch hockey.
I would have gladly paid, but there was no opportunity.
Content fragmentation and some sports rights not being bought and resold by anyone is also a big problem.
I dont watch soccer. But if you want to watch soccer with a decent exposure (national league, Champions league etc.) in some EU countries you pay easily 100 Euros. And for Europe, this is a lot!
It’s not even that. Just to watch the games for one sport and one team requires this. “Remember, next week’s game is available exclusively on ShitStreamTV.” Of course, ShitStreamTV is a Brand New Streaming Network that you’ve never heard of and need yet another subscription for. Then they can’t actually handle the traffic and crash halfway through the game. Trying to get your $24.99 back? Impossible. “Terms of Service mumble mumble blah blah.”
As a consequence people have gone back to illegal streams where you can find all the sports on one menu.
If you're unwilling to sell it, then someone else will.
Behind all these reasonably priced or easily accessible arguments for digital goods is the plain threat "Give it to me on my terms or else I simply take it for free"
They want people to pay to watch, and that’s fair. But if they make it too difficult, too expensive, or outright exploitative, they should fully expect that people will find ways to watch without paying them directly.
If you look for something cheap, AirVPN hast a sale going on: https://airvpn.org/ It works okay for me or my current needs.
mullvad vpn is double the price of AirVPN. And Astrill is double the price of mullvad vpn.
There's no good outcome if people don't fight for their internet freedom. In Russia the providers block OpenVPN and wireguard already. In China it's probably so much worse
Meanwhile Facebook stole all the books on the planet and it's not forbidden at all. It's very hard for me to take them seriously.
so using vpn provider with some other DNS provider should be enough
there is also tor that is free and cannot be controlled in this way
I believe Russia is doing it like this, trying to connect to a VPN provider's website will fail - interestingly NordVPN's app uses SSO to login, so blocking their main site would block the app's ability to log in.
https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2025/02/19/cloudflare-takes-...
(Article from 2025, but last year it was already happening here)
VPN providers are bound to their homeland laws and can be ordered at anytime by law enforcement agencies or by judge rulings to provide whatever is needed, eavesdropping included.
Abroad VPN providers can be blocked with the same means.
So, unless you need VPN for lawful activities, you are just trying to fool around the law.
With that in place, I wonder if that could ever be abused by these pirate sites. Imagine temporarily pointing your pirate site domain name at a valid IP address. When you do that, in theory ISPs (and now VPNs) would automatically block perfectly valid IPs.
This would only happen if the owners of the pirate site domains actually try to do something malicious like that, but I know there are instances in the past of ISPs blocking cloudflare IPs (which is a separate issue, but the scenario I just made up reminds me of it).
All this to protect some industry that is falling appart because they can't produce decent films or music anymore. Everything is calculated for profit and creativity is out the door. Meanwhile the small actual talented creators aren't protected and ripped off by the same industry that wants all the protections.
But in time, it will be as easy as installing Linux on a PS5.
I just hope unverified operating systems won't be blocked on similar grounds.
One is, you want to install Linux on your PS5. A PS5 is basically just a PC, so what are you getting out of that when you could much more easily just install Linux on a normal PC? The incentive to find a way to do it is low. Meanwhile the PS5 is manufactured by a company that doesn't want you to do it, so they make it take effort to do it.
The other is, people want to watch sports. Huge incentive. And they can use any device or service they want, not just one made by an adversarial company. Preventing this is basically having an effective censorship apparatus. The internet is an effective anti-censorship apparatus, because it connects everybody to everybody, and any single path through the network is enough to defeat censorship.
"We'll just block this path they're using over here" is like installing a single fence post in the middle of the ocean. Or worse than that, because that single fence post causes collateral damage to random innocent people (e.g. blocking Cloudflare IPs) which then gives those innocent third parties the incentive to start developing better anti-censorship tech.
No, you've actually missed his point entirely.
He is alluding to the fact that over the last decade or so, consumers have unwittingly slid down the slope of "not having true control over personal electronic devices". Iphones are already there, Android devices are a few years behind, as are most desktop PCs.
Once there's critical mass, it would not be a stretch for ISPs to only deliver internet to endpoints that have a secure element that attests to the integrity of the internet-con ected device. This will of course be done under the guise of "fighting the spread of malware" and such.
Piracy effectively ends at that point.