Football e altra TV premium che vengono piratati su “Scala industriale”

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).

> “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?

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???

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.

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

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

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

Everyone is leaching. The licence fee itself is £15 which is insane. More piracy.

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.

Spotify ended music piracy. Ended it. Overnight.

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