Football and other premium TV being pirated at ‘industrial scale’

41 comments

1. Well yeah, that’s what happens when you make your pricing as hostile as you possibly can for the consumer. No, I’m not paying 3 different companies £30 a month to watch the footy (and still miss out on certain games anyway).

2. Well if you insist on fleecing customers you’re gonna get pirated. Pirated shows are put out without ads, with subtitles and in better resolution. Of course they’re gonna be downloaded.

3. > “Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.”
   – Gabe Newell

   Music streaming and to some extent the games industry (specifically Steam and Xbox Game Pass) understood this and have made their products convenient enough with numerous quality of life features to make it worthwhile.

   Pay TV and video streaming are largely in a state of enshittification. The Premier League in the UK is spread across Sky and TNT with separate subscriptions and not even broadcasting all of the games. I know they don’t have the power themselves to get around the 3pm blackout but when you’re forced to pay for channels you don’t necessarily want for a meagre amount of content, it leaves a sour taste. Also on a technical level, Now TV (Sky) and especially Discovery+ (TNT) are awful apps (and I use both).

   People aren’t necessarily opposed to paying for sports but the current state of affairs makes life harder for consumers. This is where dodgy steamers have the 1-up – one price, one service, all the content. Piracy might be wrong morally but I don’t blame viewers for going down that path.

   > The Amazon Fire Stick is a major cause of the problem, according to the report.

   Cheap device running an Android fork making it easy to sideload apps, despite Amazon’s best efforts. They’re trying to move over to their own proprietary OS that’s already running on some of the Echo devices, but they’re holding back because they know it risks killing their ecosystem as every app developer will need to port to the new OS. They’re already planning their next version of Fire OS based on Android 14. The devices are loss leaders anyway but Amazon make the money back downstream via Prime subscriptions, ads and PPV rentals/purchases. But really as far as Fire TV/Android and piracy go, what came first – the chicken or the egg?

4. 90 odd quid for a shirt. Extortionate and constantly rising ticket prices. Matches on tv increasingly paywalled and divided between providers. Players on £100-200k a week. £100m transfer fees. Club owners rinsing teams for dividends.

   It’s shocking that premier league supporters in particular have let it get this far.

5. It’s way more shocking to me that so many people still pay with the prices the way they are.

   Football used to be a working class interest. Can working class people even afford all the costs now???

6. Sky Sports are making huge losses year after year (hence all the cuts and job losses), so they are looking for someone or something to blame. Their model does not work in todays economy, 3pm blackouts and so on.

7. There’s too many competing services and they’re too expensive, Sky is expensive as a basic package and then it’s all extras to pay on top.

   I think we’re just in a period when everyone is trying to capture the market, eventually some will collapse and a unified provider will appear, the market can’t support them all with Amazon and Netflix putting out their own shows and complaining not enough people subscribe. There’s only a limited number of customers and money to go around, it’s not that people don’t want to watch the programmes.

   It’s like when home recording appeared and there were competing formats that are now extinct, like betamax and others that are forgotten like CED, Atari and Amiga, or more recently HD losing to BluRay.

8. Good. The people of the UK are just treated like cash slaves by business and government. F*ck the system.

9. Oh no! The vital football viewing industry is at risk!

   If this gets too bad then nothing at all will happen as a consequence.

10. When the public are constantly exploited for their labour, they are going to try and get what little ‘wins’ they can.

    Also, just pretend you are Meta (or other businesses) training an A.I., then it’s totally fine that you pirate content – because without all that free content the AI industry would collapse and that would apparently be a bad thing.

11. If consumers aren’t willing to pay your prices it sounds like a broadcaster issue.

12. Good, keep doing more lads., these parasites need to lower their prices.

    If you need movies, tv or live sports would highly recommend taking a look into what i posted below. Great sources.

    [https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/)

13. Is it any surprise when we have to pay for all these services and can’t even watch games that kick off at 3pm

14. I mean look at how successful a platform like Spotify has become. No one is complaining about their pricing, because nearly EVERYTHING is on there. You don’t have to have 7 different subscriptions to access music from different artists.

    The problem isn’t pricing, it’s decentralisation.
    No consumer in their right mind would want subscribe to multiple services to access content.

    Bring everything back onto a single platform at a reasonable cost and see how piracy decreases rapidly.

    Until then, find me in the high seas.

15. We best ban all computers then, it’s the only logical solution .  oh and ban the internet and replace it with a government controlled intranet!

16. Spotify ended music piracy. Ended it. Overnight.

    There is a lesson there I can’t be assed explaining.

17. Until the competition authorities actually get a grip and force these companies to compete with each other I have zero sympathy. 

    Exclusivity is stupid and bad for the consumer. Any company should be able to pay a set fee and show sport, this would force them to actually compete on price and quality of coverage. 

18. We recently cancelled our sky after they put our monthly payment up to £142. Miraculously after the back and fourth it went down to £79. Still refused on principal as I can’t stand the new Sky Q model of deleting recordings when they decide to move something to the sky store. Between sky, Netflix, Disney, Prime, and Apple TV, I was being rinsed so cancelled all but Prime as we use the delivery. If they want to fix the problem then they need to make everything easier than it currently is.

19. Offer a shit service to customers and this is what you get.

20. Oh no, how will all those millionaire players and staff cope?

21. Netflix 10 years ago was amazing. You had almost everything you could want.

    Then every film studio wanted a slice of the streaming pie and took their content off Netflix. You’ve now got at least 7 or 8 major streaming platforms and subscribing to them all would cost you in the hundreds.

    Is it any wonder that people turn to less than ideal sources to watch things?

22. Let’s just look at rugby for a minute.

    Premier games are on TNT, Sky has Southern Hemisphere, autumn internationals and probably the Lions. European games are on Premier Rugby. Amazon have also shown games in the past.

    And things seem to change from year to year.

    Hardly a surprise that people sail the high seas.

23. I would only watch F1, maybe the other formula motorsports too. But I’m not paying £35 per month to watch tv every other weekend. Get fucked Sky sports.

24. Tech firms, police, government have never been able to keep up with the speed of technology to ban. Napster remained, pirate bay changed hosts and all remained despite efforts.

    It’s easier than ever to pirate something (I’m told), and yet they don’t focus on the root cause. Competition authorities decided sky were to powerful, had to split up packages. What they didn’t think was each would charge a premium for their portion, there’s still no competition in the market.

    It’s been said before, but the PL should run its own streaming service, and they’d make far more money because people would pay it for reliability and centralised matches.

25. Media companies take the piss with the number of required subscriptions during a cost of living crisis and make massive profits when a free option is available.

    You know the whole end of piracy phase a decade ago when one subscription would get you all the TV? You broke it, not the consumers.

26. Make it affordable then. These people are fucking stupid… they make it so expensive that hardly anyone can afford it then wonder why people don’t wanna pay it. Streaming is supposed to be more convenient than pirating… IT IS NOT.

27. That’s what’s happens when prices for products get very high, knock offs look like bargains and even if it’s illegal the gains seem worth it

28. If it was £30 a month for every game on one tool, I’d pay it. But fuck paying £100 for a fifth of games

29. I live abroad, so I just can’t access certain things. There is no reliable, legal way for me to watch Leicester Tigers play, I can’t watch some Six Nations or Autumn Series Rugby games. So I stream them illegally.

    If I cannot legally and affordably access content, then I use my VPN and various sites. Same with TV and films. I cannot afford how ever many streaming services exist nowadays, so I have 2 dedicated external hard drives and a VPN so I can watch and re-watch content when I please.

    If a friend laments about a show that just got removed from a streaming service, they give me a USB, they get their favourite show back. Fuck the money-grabbers

30. Decentralised extortionately priced disjointed services are causing people to cancel subscriptions. The people want one reasonably priced media platform service to consume sports and movies etc. Too much greed in the world. Yo ho ho.

31. It’s a service issue. If there was a way to pay a reasonable fee and just watch all of my team’s matches, on one service, maybe with a way to pick and choose a few other big matches involving other teams when I fancied it, then I would pay it.

    But there isn’t, and the current set up is pathetic.

32. How does TNT Sports justify charging **£30** a month?! As much as we piss and moan about the number of movie streaming services, at least they all have tiers below £10 each. Sports is absolute daylight robbery.

    I’ve repeatedly sat down with my Mum to try and cut down the household spending, but her love of both football and F1 is always the biggest barrier. The rights situation is insane, with them being chopped up between the highest bidders, who then charge a small fortune for the scrap they get.

    Heck, you even get football pundits slipping up about using dodgy boxes – if even they’re doing it, of course the average Joe who actually has to keep track of the cost of a pint of milk in their trolley will.

    If someone pirates sports out of desperation, they’ll then get a taste of how convenient things like dodgy boxes are, and start pirating movies and TV as well. I’ve seen that pipeline happen with people I know. So, if companies want to limit piracy, they need to stop taking the piss.

33. When piracy offers a better service at a cheaper price then of course everyone is going to do it. I’ve been pirating stuff for 20 years (remember limewire) and there is no way of stopping it. Paying through the nose for media is essentially optional at this point.

34. I’m convinced that if the 3pm blackout didn’t exist in the UK the Premier League would have its own streaming service, and probably a global one too. Either PPV like buying an actual ticket for the match, or doing something like la Liga TV, with matches and bonus content. I would genuinely pay for this. The demand is there, just not the supply. Slicing and dicing between 3 separate platforms is unsustainable.

35. How many of the football matches referenced are the 3pm blackout? We pay hundreds a year for channels to watch our team and can’t watch half the games because of the 3pm blackout in the UK, but people across the world can watch as they please because they’re still broadcast.

36. I love to read. I buy books from Amazon to read on my Kobo.

    Except now I can’t because Amazon have removed the ability to download books (which I could convert to epub) which means I’m forced to use kindle. Which I can’t because kobo readers use epub files.

    So now I have to pirate the books I want.

    When companies make it difficult or impossible for us to actually own content we purchase, they shouldn’t be surprised when we walk away.

37. If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t steeling. I will not ever pay for a media subscription.

38. Id happily pay £40 a month if I could watch all Liverpool games but I can’t so IPTV is where I went, for the UK blocking 3pm kick off being televised is stupid other countries have the games so here I come to the lovely NBC/ peacock or the opta sports in Australia….. They should sell you a season ticket stream your team’s games go direct to consumers

39. If it’s ok for AI to pirate everything then it’s ok for people to as well copyright is a thing of the past now

40. That’s because of corporate greed at an ‘industrial scale’

41. But it’s OK for these clubs and broadcasters to rob the paying folk? It’s they charged reasonable prices then they wouldn’t have this problem

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