I don't have experience with broadcast media (in Spain, especially) but I a little experience on the software side: I could not believe the lengths some people would go to in order to avoid paying even $5-10 for useful software. Hours of work, sketchy cracks, downloading things from websites likely to compromise their system. Some of them would become irate when the software was updated and broke their cracks, spending time complaining loudly on forums and social media or even trying to threaten developers. The strangest part is when they start posting from social media where you can see things like their $3,000 gaming PC build, but if they see a chance to avoid paying $10-20 for something they will take it.
It becomes culturally embedded in some bubbles: If it's possible to find a way to avoid paying and there are no consequences for trying, some people will go for it.
I don't even buy the "it's a service problem" argument either. I have a friend who loves to watch sports games but refused to pay for any services. He will spend 30 minutes jumping from one website to the next enduring crazy amounts of ads, pop-ups, and attempts to get him to install things on his computer until finally getting to a blocky stream that drops out every few minutes. He can easily afford to pay, but getting things without paying is basically a little game he likes to play.
But they don't offer that, they offer difficult-to-cancel ad-laden plans that don't even get you access to the content you want to see reliably (edit: and as another commenters, signs you up to in some cases multiple mailing lists--thanks, The Athletic, for having a separate mailing list for every one of your terrible sub-orgs, I deeply regret paying you a dime). I'll be sailing the seven seas as long as it's viable.
I just don't find these arguments convincing after watching my friend spend cumulative hours upon hours jumping between pirate streaming services trying to find a stable feed for every game.
This feels too much like a post-hoc rationalization. I know I'll never win this argument on Hacker News because every piracy conversation turns into an infinite game of moving goalposts, where there's always a new rationalization at every turn.
I don't think it's worth discussing until we can be honest and admit that a lot of people pirate because they want free stuff. Every HN piracy conversation has a lot of words written to try to avoid admitting that "free stuff" is a big motivator for a lot of people
Well, see, the thing is you're right, but the "service problem" quote actually addressed that. There's a percentage of people who will never pay, it's true - and by never pay, it means never pay. You can't get them to pay by blocking or adding DRM or whatever.
But of the actually relevant group, people who are willing to pay for stuff, then some percentage of them will stop paying if it isn't convenient enough. Now it's a service problem. The trick is getting the full market potential and preventing them from jumping ship. But the service bit only ever applied to potential customers - the other group don't enter the discussion in the first place because they're hopeless.
But yeah usually this argument is at least in part misrepresented.
However however, no amount of blocking will stop that free stuff group, no amount of hoops will be too much, there is simply no way to extract blood from a stone the way that some media companies keep telling themselves is possible. So all the original blocking and shutting down of half the internet is completely counterproductive regardless.
This is also based on extrapolation on top of extrapolation covering only 86 games with "majority" surviving without cracks into week 12 — how significant is the effect if there are only a few games with cracks in early weeks (if it's 43 games across the first 12 weeks, it's less than 4 games per week on average)? How big are their revenues and copies sold in absolute numbers? (I do not have access to the full paper, perhaps it's answered there)
But to be precise, even if all of the above is covered, this is not proof that DRM increases sales, but that crack availability for Denuvo-protected games decreases sales depending on the timing — it is a subtle distinction, but perhaps publicity of a crack availability motivates more people to take that route?
Finally, let's not forget that game companies care about the profit (and revenue is only a proxy): looking at lost sales does not show how much a studio can save by not investing in DRM protection and thus having a higher gross margin or cheaper price to entice more customers.
> But to be precise, even if all of the above is covered, this is not proof that DRM increases sales, but that crack availability for Denuvo-protected games decreases sales depending on the timing — it is a subtle distinction, but perhaps publicity of a crack availability motivates more people to take that route?
The fact that crack availability leads people to pirate instead of buy is exactly the point. I guess it's more correct to say that DRM prevents lost sales rather than increasing sales, but that's effectively the same thing.
Specifically, the conditions this was tested under were always-DRM, always-Denuvo, crack-becomes-available, and conclusions cannot easily be extrapolated to other scenarios if we are trying to be really scientific.
If most games are cracked within days, that sounds like a much better sample set to draw conclusions from?
The analysis studies pre-crack and post-crack sales, and specifically observed the dip in sales after the crack. The dip was larger, the closer to release the game was cracked. A theoretical day 1 crack caused a 20% drop in sales.
I'm also not sure what you mean by games that are cracked almost immediately are a better sample. You can't measure sales before and after the crack was released because you only have the latter. Sure, if we could somehow measure how the game would have sold in an alternate universe where it wasn't cracked that would be a more robust finding. But obviously that's not possible.
The study focused on denuvo protected games because those are essentially the only games that go for extended periods of time without being cracked. They're the only games that actually offer any insight into how games sell without a crack available.
The point is DRM can get people to pay who would have otherwise not paid.
If a website offers me the choice between "accept cookies" and "more options", I'll manually edit the DOM to remove the popup from the offending website. Some sites disable scrolling while such a "We value your privacy" popup is shown, so I wrote a js bookmarklet to work around most common means of scroll hijacking.
Google is currently waging a war against adblockers, especially on youtube. I currently have a way around that too but should they start baking ads in the video bytes, I'll stop using youtube altogether (though I am willing to look the other way for content creators shouting out their curated sponsors).
There is simply no universe in which I pay for certain types of digital content, and while I can't stop the data collection that ultimately pays for it, I can at least make damn sure that it's unlawful.
With respect to Spain and sports, stadiums are littered with ads, players wear ads, the commentator stream itself has ads baked in and people buy tickets and tapas to watch the game live. If that's not enough, go fuck yourselves!
Then you haven't been through enough cycles of subscribing to a service, using it for a while, then wanting to cancel and realising that the only way to do so is through some baroque direct interaction with someone whose job it is to stop you from doing so, instead of it just being a single "cancel" button. I still pay for things, but I 100% understand why some are unwilling to have to both pay, and then put in the same amount of effort they'd put otherwise, just to stop paying.
Not to mention the bundling. For example, if I only want to watch climbing competitions in the UK, the only legal way is through a £34 per month subscription to a service that offers every sport under the sun. Even though climbing-wise you might have 4 events that month (sometimes fewer). So yeah, f whoever devised the model :)
Even for music, I do spend time looking for DRM free options (eg. Apple only offers iTunes streaming in Serbia and I had to resort to options running a much smaller catalog like 7digital). I always try going first party first (eg. band's site for music), but it's increasingly not an option.
And if I want local Serbian/Croatian/... content, no provider has it at all. As an example, one of local publishers recently started releasing "eBooks" readable only in their own mobile app for Android or iOS: none of my Kindle, Remarkable or Kobo can read them. I did let them know about my willingness to jump on their service if they actually made their books work on my eBook devices, but they did not even honour me with a reply :)
For me at least, it is a service problem.
There were no movie-rental businesses in your country?
The nice thing about piracy is that you can find what you want immediately. You don't have to go to an aggregator site to find out where it's available, and then log on to the streaming platform site to find that the aggregator site is lagging the real availability, or find that certain content isn't available in your country, or that the content is available but only on the special extra++ cost plan instead of the basic plan.
If you want to watch content legally, the workflow looks like this:
Search content -> go to aggregator site -> select streaming site -> enter electronic contact and payment info and physical address (for payment) -> confirm email account -> watch content -> dig around on site to find deliberately hidden unsubscribe workflow -> pass all the "are you sure you want to leave" screens -> monitor your card payment the next month to make sure you actually cancelled
The illegal workflow looks like this:
Search content -> click 1-3 sketchy sites, closing 15 pop up ads -> watch content -> forget about it
Eg. for my HBO GO subscription provided by my cable operator to continue working, I had to disable load balancing/failover between my other ISP for HBO addresses at home or it'd just stop working when it detects I've been switched to a different network. And then you travel and can't access it anymore either. It is completely bonkers.
As a sibling comment said, Netflix won (at that point) because they made service easy and converted a bunch of customers over.
Now that you can just pay 10-20 euros for each of 124293507239841524352 services, one of which _might_ show what you want...
Fixed it for you.
YT makes $40B/yr (revenue IIRC) across its 3B customers, or $1.11/mo. $16/mo seems high by comparison. It's very high with reasonable costs of $0.28/mo. Nearly every other industry on the planet is jealous of margins like that.
A normal counter-argument here is that they should be allowed to reap those profits till competition forces them to do otherwise. That's a little at odds with our normal view toward monopolies, especially when the monopoly engages in anti-competitive acts to preserve that edge, but whatever; now you're at least having a real debate about real facts and things you care about.
Another is that YT's expenses in practice are way higher than that because they need to hire a bunch of ML people or whatever to extract even more ad money out of you, and that's a point I disagree with pretty firmly. I'm not sure why my subscription needs to subsidize a company's other predatory tendencies.
sure those who refuse to pay anything will likely always do so but there is a big part of the market who are priced out/fed up with needing multiple sports packages
I'd certainly pirate less if I could afford it, but even if I could, I'd still pirate a lot of stuff because I don't want to worry about what streaming service it's on this week, or because I don't want to contribute to monopolization of some industry. And sure, I'd still pirate some things because I find they're overpriced.
> I know I'll never win this argument on Hacker News because every piracy conversation turns into an infinite game of moving goalposts, where there's always a new rationalization at every turn.
What argument are you referring to, out of curiosity? That some people pirate things 'cause they're poor and make nice-sounding rationalizations about it? Okay, that definitely happens, you win. But I don't think that really takes away from the other valid arguments for piracy?
And digital media is similarly fungible, and media companies owning copyright can produce a single copy at insignificant cost — and illegal copies are usually produced at no cost to them too.
If you would rather not consume content than pay with time and money being asked of you, there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.
Convenience is not a valid reason to violate others' rights.
> there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.
There is a real loss: The owner isn’t getting paid when people consume their product for free and without their permission.
The entire point of copyright is to protect the time investment of and opportunity cost borne by the author when marginal reproduction cost is zero, or close to zero. This is because we as a society value intellectual labor. We want people to invent things and produce entertainment, and we incentivize it via the profit motive.
You can’t write software for a living and not understand this. It’s what puts food on your own table. Don’t try to rationalize it.
I've also worked on complex web applications/systems, where operation of the web site is ultimately the cost that needs to be continuously borne to extract profit from software itself. Yes, someone else can optimize and do operation better than you (eg. see Amazon vs Elastic and numerous other cases of open-source companies being overtaken by their SW being run by well funded teams), but there is low risk of illegal use in this case.
Today I am paid to write software that the business believes will provide them profit that will pay for my services. The software I write is tied to a physical product being sold and is effectively the enabler and mostly useless without the physical product itself.
Other engineers at the company I am at are building software that requires a lot of support to operate as it manages critical infrastructure country-sized systems, and ultimately, even if someone could get this software without paying a license, they'd probably have no idea how to operate it effectively.
Most of the internet infrastructure works on open and free software, where at "worst", copyright protections are turned upside down to make them copyleft if software is not available under more permissive licenses like MIT, BSD or even put into public domain.
Companies that used to pay best SW engineering salaries like Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their software (source code included) was publicly leaked: SW is a tool for them to provide an ad platform or cloud infrastructure service.
> Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their software (source code included) was publicly leaked
You don't know that. Granted, there are other barriers to entry in some markets, but stealing others' control and data planes would go a long way towards building viable competitors without having to expend the same level of investment.
You're cherry-picking the relatively small number of companies that support your argument. Besides all the software they've built, each of these companies has filed for and been issued mountains of patents (though not copyright, it's another IP protection scheme) and will enforce them if necessary to protect their business. I bet yours might have some, too.
I don’t seem to have nearly the same difficulty as you. I wanted to watch the Olympics so I reactivated my Peacock account, paid for a month, then immediately canceled it. I’ve never had consistent issues finding where I could watch a particular game. It is aggravating that my MLBTV subscription doesn’t work when my team plays on an Apple TV broadcast but that’s 1-2 times a year.
Maybe I was not good at piracy but it took just about the same effort to find the right links, deal with constant buffering, etc. But I find it pretty phenomenal that I can easily watch just about any sporting event now with little difficulty
Wait til you hear of this concept called "Dead Zones". The NBA has them.
What's that? It's where you live in the streaming blackout zone and get a nice message saying "watch this on your regional sporting affiliate", but you don't live in the TV zone for that team, so "your regional sporting affiliate" doesn't cover the game. So you get to watch... national games... and you can watch your team's games, on 24 or 72 hour delay.
And the NBA will tell you they can't refund your League Pass subscription because of that - you can watch the game, just not when it's happening. You can watch it after you've almost certainly heard the results. "But you'll get to see it with no breaks because we clip the commercial breaks!" Yayyyyy.
Take Steam, for instance. You get fast downloads, cloud saves, mod support, etc. Yet games released on steam are still pirated. Because people are willing to forego good service in order to avoid paying.
I'm sure for some people piracy is a service problem. The example Gabe Newell gave when he said that quote is Russian localization. If the only way to get a Russian localization of a game is to pirate it, then sure that lack of service incentivizes piracy.
But there will always people who want to consume media without paying, regardless of the convenience of legitimate options.
What OP describes is still very prevalent in eastern EU/Europe too, people pirate and do stupid stuff just to save few bucks. But then if you earn <1000€ monthly you start looking at prices in very different optics. Mindset comes from the past and doesnt feel the need to change for 2026.
I come from such an environment, partially still affected by it. I would blame it on communism and russian influence but then Spain never had one so there goes my cheap and usual way to push blame.
Currently on vacation in Dominican republic and I can see hints of same mentality here and there... maybe its just 'undeveloped societies', for the lack of better term.
In any case, in Spain the level of penetration of streaming services seems high. Although you will always find people who pirate (it was very common when Canal+ existed, etc., then it decreased with the arrival of Netflix, HBO, Spotify and Prime) and now with prices continuously rising I hear a lot about IPTV and pirate decoders.
Although I believe that in the specific case of LaLiga, much of the fault lies with the prices imposed. The dominant and more traditional operator (also the most trillero) only offers you the service through convergent Megapacks with attractive prices when hiring and crazy when renewing. The arrival of DAZN has softened it but I don't think it will improve the situation in the medium term. It is very curious that they then reach agreements in emerging markets to offer the price-drawn product (China) and in no case the income is reflected in a more competitive League.
Radically changing area, in the field of software there is the culture of paying the minimum. If it can be zero better, even if it means visiting dubious sites and risking your data and credit cards.
My vision may be biased. In fact it is ;-)
I used to pirate video games, but Steam basically ended that for me. The sales no longer make it worth it for me to pirate a $60 game, instead, I can buy it for $12 on sale.
For software, I used to pirate Adobe products and Sony Vegas, but there are alternatives for those now.
For something like sports, I think the cost can be hundreds of dollars per season. I watch the NFL and NHL, and to watch every game that I'd like to watch, it would cost me something like $600+ per year. There aren't really viable alternatives. I'd have to get three services to watch all of the NHL games I want to watch, and I don't even know how many services I need for the NFL. Amazon Prime, Sunday Ticket, CBS, Fox? Or cable/YouTubeTV with additional packages?
I'd happily pay $100 or $200 per year to watch all games in a league for a year if it was through a single service. Or a lump sum for all sports. But in the same amount of time to enter my payment information, create an account, etc. I could have easily found a stream and have it on any TV in my house.
That time was well spent for the knowledge I gained, even if it wasn't worth it to save a few bucks.
Sigh, fine, I'll pay for NBA Leaguepass. I don't live in your country... great, random blackouts. Fine, I'll try and use a VPN (hell, I literally used tailscale to a friend's house for a bit).. but then those games are blacked out too, at random?
I'm literally paying you for the service. So yeah, giving some insanely sketchy crypto website $5/month for unlimited whatever that just always works, is worth it. 10/10 will definitely do again. I'm sick and tired of fighting with the NBA, the CFL, or G-D only knows what just to try to watch the things I'm paying for.
I live in an NBA "dead zone". I'm in the streaming blackout zone. But not in the TV zone (even if I did pay for TV, which I'd almost consider).[1] And then I VPNed to Canada for international LP, but that wasn't much better. Then Mexico. And then ...
Then I found a site that had an actual Roku app (at least) that took payment in Crypto or Amazon GC but was absolutely uninfested, no ads, no garbage, probably at times more reliable than even the NBA's app. But they got shut down.
Not to mention LP refused to refund me though my subscription was effectively useless because I "could still watch the games, and without commercial or timeout breaks, even!" - yeah, 24 to 72 hours after it was played. Yay. Lucky me.
As soon as they shut the api down I uninstalled the app. The fun bit was the challenge.
Remember when a directtv subscriber bought the annual sports pack because they wanted to watch their team's matches, and just when the game was about to start the transmission was interrupted showing "not availabe in your area", and they called support to ask and were told for the first time by the rep that someone else has the airing rights, and to read TOS?
It is the same thing you are going towards.
Your friend exists, and he is not alone. But the vast mayority of people just want to watch what they were told they paid for, and not paying 10 different people either.
A common phrase used to be "I pirate the software so I can afford the hardware". There's a tangibility to hardware that's not present for software and media, which means many people simply don't feel it's worth what is being charged, especially media intended to be consumed once and forgotten about (e.g. a sports match). Computer hardware is a durable good.
That said, I pretty much stopped pirating things when Steam got decently good and I was working a normal professional job. Prior to that, I really did have to choose what I was willing to pay for, and I really did get a better experience using pirated software vs buying the legit thing. At this point though, I get a better than average experience through Steam on Linux (I just avoid any games with Denuvo or other kernel-level bullshit), and I can easily afford both the hardware and the software, so the convenience and quality of experience + my better purchasing power makes it pointless to even engage in piracy anymore.
I'd like to think I'm a rational actor, sort of, and so are a lot of other people. Paying 79-115 EUR/mo to watch a few matches, in a country where the average monthly take-home pay is around 1700 EUR, you're talking about asking for nearly 7% of the average take-home pay /just/ to watch soccer. To put this into context, the common wisdom is to spend 30% on housing, so La Liga is saying its reasonable to ask a Spaniard to spend 1/4th what they do on housing on just the ability to watch soccer matches. No wonder people would rather find pirated streams.
Spaniards attitudes can be quite different from the American ones, Americans just pay for everything for convenience, in Spain you probably need to match the price of the IPTV to steal their customers.
Apparently IPTV costs 20 to 60 Euros per year, the legal option is over 100 euros per month.
To match the IPTV they need 20x price reduction. This would mean that they need sign in 20x more Spaniards to break even with the current situation. Are there 20x more Spaniards pirating the LaLiga than paying? Even in Spain I don’t think so.
Is it possible the product just isn’t worth the price they want to charge? Entirely likely.
On average at population scale, people are shockingly good at voting with their wallets.
Uh... Huh? How is EUR 20 * 20 approximately EUR 100?
(100*12 months) = 1200 euros/year
1200/60 = 20
so 20x difference between the most expensive IPTV and the cheapest legal option. You can go with the 20 EUR IPTV vs the 200 EUR legal option and it would be 120x difference but probably the quality would be the same so let’s stick with the 20x.
They also sell "business access", so pubs can show the match, since going to the bar for a beer is the go-to choice for those who can't afford to watch at home.
I guess the question I'd have then is the economics of the pirate providers; I'm assuming that they have their own infrastructure costs to provide the streams at any level of reliability. Do they charge some nominal amount for access so that people who aren't willing to pay the full 200 euros for the top-tier official package can get just the sports games a la carte?
The ones I've seen in wide use literally are "load page, click on Stream 1, it starts, if it breaks/looks shit, click on Stream 2 and repeat until good stream found", and also filled with ads, so I'm guessing they mostly run on ad-money. Most visitors aren't really technically inclined, I think I've lost count how many times I've helped people install ad-blockers once they try to get a stream running while a group of people are waiting.
Not usually, it's more like a 90's porn website setup, where you're going to click in a ton of fake links and close popups for a while until you reach a 720p stream.
Think that it's usually a bunch of very temporary services that popup and are taken down quickly, as well as a bunch of not-technically-pirate-themselves hubs that link to the former. There's not enough stability to set up payments, which are also traceable.
Anti piracy measures are crazy though. La liga has gone as far as to listen in microphones on user's apps in the hopes of catching hidden audio tones that, crossed with geolocation, allow them to detect streaming spots.
It's like gamers with anti cheat, a situation where the measures are both technically impressive and absurd overreach in a legal/moral sense.
I never buy into this. If copyright law doesn't exist, pirate sites will eventually always provide better service than the official channels.
One example is scanlation manga. Chinese scanlation sites have reached the theoretical ceiling of service: just serve images fast with a little nonintrusive ad. No login required. No way the official Japanese apps can provide significant better service than that.
I don't watch sports, but my father watches soccer. He really only cares about 1 team and the national games from our home country. He was spending over $100/month to be able to watch the games, and they werent even in his native language. Now he pays $80/year for a pirate IPTV service and not only can he watch the games anywhere he wants, he also gets native language commentary for the games, national tv channels like news, etc.
When pirates can charge you money and offer a superior service, it absolutely is a service problem. You can claim that the realities of licensing and whatnot don't allow official channels to provide the best service they can, but that's not true in this case. When the same provider is splitting game broadcast from one team into different packages you know they're just trying to extract the most amount of money possible.
IDK the deal with scanlator sites nowadays, but I assume the official sites can provide more timely translations for manga since they can access the source material before anyone has seen it. I know most popular manga gets translated within hours of release, but if you're following some more niche stuff it can be several days. I also know a lot of scanlators have patreon pages so it's not like the demand from paying customers for translated media isn't there.
People save money to buy expensive stuff. Or take out loans. One cannot assume that everyone doesn't care about spending < X dollars, where X is = 1% of the most expensive asset they own (see e.g. $3000 gaming PC vs. $30 software, elsewhere in the thread).
> own an aircraft, doesn't mean you have a budget to pay random EUR 10/month subscriptions.
Still, if you can't afford a €10/mo subscription necessary to operate the airplane safely, when hanger fees are well in excess of that, then perhaps you can't actually afford to own an airplane? Airplanes aren't cheap to own, nevermind the aircraft itself.
Put it another way. I like driving BMWs, but, y'know what, I hate having to pay insurance, and I can't afford to pay that after the monthly BMW lease payment, so I just don't pay it, cause fuck that noise.
I don't think most people's response to someone saying that would be "eh, sounds fine, BMWs are expensive". "So don't drive a BMW." seems like more likely reaction to me.
However, that doesn't mean that if you plug all the holes that they will pay. No. They'll just not use your service.
In the long run it's better to keep these types of people around because they at least advertise your service. But getting any money out of them is a pipe dream.
People often frame piracy as "oh 5% pirated instead of paying!" Well... the "instead of" part is doing the heavy lifting there. The options arent pirate or pay. They're pirate, pay, or not use.
Otoh, maybe Netflix and other streaming video services will start their own sports leagues in order to vertically integrate and own everything end-to-end just like what they did with TV and movie production. It would be tough and expensive but maybe not impossible?
Plus signers and bands earn pennis from Spotify. Practically Spotify did vanished music privacy - by proving how bad a business it is to sell music and pushing the whole industry to personal branding (tours+ad revenue).
Why not? Provide same experience but for logged in users with extra benefits that they feel like it's worth paying for, behind-the-scenes content, WIP, whatever.
There is always a way to stand out and provide a better experience, the very least because all people in the world don't want the same thing, and you can always find somewhat of a niche somehow.
Candycrush (CrunchyRoll of course) had gained the love of the anime crowd. Until they started to "optimise" bandwidth. It wasn't a pricing error as subscription price didn't increase.
They claim the degradation was perceptible. Except that it was.
It was many years ago, and since then candycrush lost subscribers. It won't because illegal streaming platforms got better, simply because the illegal platform provided the choice to go all the way to lossless quality.
For football, imo that's a pricing issue as well as a distribution issue. Basically I need to subscribe to a lock in plan even if I just desire to watch, say, the quarter to finals. Or simply the champions league.
As the other commenter, I also confirm the sub got worse.
Might as well abandon the law.
The worse they make it for legitimate users the more likely they are to just buy the necessary device and move on. The technical battle is not some limitless option that IP owners get to use, it eventually impinges on their core interests.
See old school satellite piracy for a clear example of where this is headed.
I don't know much about them but it seems like part of the problem might be that LaLiga is acting both as the distributor and enforcer? e.g. Universal Music Group might be among the RIAA members, but that doesn't stop UMG from having a distribution relationship with Spotify if it benefits them more to capture those sales directly vs. depending on the RIAA to be a legal watchdog. If all LaLiga has to do is lean on existing infrastructure to block sites that bother them, they'd seem to have no similar incentive to provide better paid service.
Which, just to add some context, is exactly how people/groups who want to watch football at home does with football streams today in 2026 in Spain, except now also with a VPN of course. Regular football fans who have no idea how/why these streams work or where they're coming from and couldn't tell you the difference between a website and a desktop application, know the website addresses and the know-to about how to access them. Which is why you're seeing the reaction from La Liga and the courts.
> problem might be that LaLiga is acting both as the distributor and enforcer?
Isn't this true in movies and other areas too? HBO and other distributors send DMCA requests left and right like everyone else, as far as I can tell, aren't they too then "the distributor and enforcer" or is that different somehow?
> Isn't this true in movies and other areas too?
That's a good point, though now I wonder if there's something particular to the content being live vs. VOD. By the time a DMCA request or equivalent pulls through for live content it might be too late to prevent the primary "theft" of the stream's value, vs. a movie distributed by HBO that has a longer tail of interest.
+ Most people are not savy enough to pirate/are unwilling to do it for fear.
+ The more fear they instil, the keener those people are to pay.
+ Most bars where it is available will rise prices to sustain their loss. It starts at 300Eu/(month screen) (notice the product in the denominator), and having.
+ Woe to you if you own a bar and the police get you pirating. Woe indeed, the fine will be unimaginable...
Monopoly does this to the markets. Movistar (Telefonica) is the de-facto owner of high-stakes sports in Spain. This means Football (Spanish league, Champions League), Tennis (all the Masters and Grand Slams), Basketball, you name it.
They are also the main telco in Spain, so they own the service and the channel.
Some people are pushed to pirate on account of bad service, sure. But plenty of others are more than willing to tolerate worse service to receive a product for free.
But they are fringe, an anomaly. Most people will happily pay for stuff if it's confortable enough. Don't focus on the tail end of the human behavior distribution. Steam makes a lot of money, the devs publishing there, too. Spotify makes a lot of money. Netflix makes a lot of money...
Piracy is easily reduced to anecdotical as soon as you don't offer absolute shit service for a lot of money, as LaLiga does.
Good service is still hard to compete with zero cost.
Wondering which of the 8 providers has your show is lame.
Yep, but there is a solution. Buy physical media and rip it. You get basically the best quality available _and_ a backup at the same time. You don't have to resort to piracy to avoid streaming services.
Last time I tried to watch a dvd I rented it. I tried to watch it on a projector from my laptop. DRM prevented me. So I tried to watch in a standalone dvd player. It was region locked to a different region.
I’ve pirated ever since.
I subscribe to a fair few services but don’t watch stuff there. My *ars provide a better experience. It’s more expensive with the various services and hardware but it works.
My conscience is clear, I tried the ‘correct’ approach.
I expect this will only get worse in the future - physical media is an increasingly niche product.
I don’t doubt you can watch one stream for 9 Euro. What happens when the game you want is with the other provider?
100€ for leisure and entertainment is already a huge sum of money when filing the tank of their cars to earn their salary cost them 2 to 3x 80€ already.
And for that, there are three options: piracy, pay many services, constantly juggle sign ins and sign outs.
I’d gladly pay money for it, but that’s not actually possible. The main cost of not pirating would be time, which is unacceptable because I’m neither a teenager nor poor.
Similarly, as a rich person who travels a lot, official sports streams just aren’t available for me.
Just for fun, I tried to Google and find an official site to watch LaLiga games:
“DAZN ISN'T AVAILABLE IN THIS COUNTRY”
“The request is blocked.” -https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/where-to-watch-laliga-easports
Movistar plus is in Spanish, probably not for me
But yeah, even fucking googling “laliga official stream” brings zero working paid alternatives for very very rich me.