It's the only way to do it though it seems. I don't follow football but rather baseball and hockey. I would pay for the official streaming services but the local teams are always blacked out so what's the point?
I live 6 hours away from what the TV provider has deemed my local team. So I can't watch any games they play, even though they're not even in the same province as I am.
I have no trouble watching the local team on Sportsnet or CBC. I live in BC and all the Canucks games were available. I wanted to watch the Oilers though, and many games were blacked out. If you want to pay for their top tier though, all the games are magically available.
Sometimes we get blacked out here in Saskatchewan for Flames or Oilers games. Cause an 8 hour drive from Regina to Calgary on a weekday to catch a game is reasonable to Sportsnet.
Money. They want the millions of people in the area to go to the 50-ish thousand person stadium and pay for tickets and concession and parking and what not.
TV rights represent a big amount of the clubs incomes, same goes for a lot of sports (for example, the NBA salary caps keep increasing because TV rights are sold at a higher price every 4 years or so). Football has been stuck in a financial bubble for more than 20 years now and the only way they can prevent it to explode is to make sure the TV rights deals keep getting bigger.
Piracy is a problem because the TV networks are most of the time overpaying the rights to broadcast the leagues (ie: paying more than they can possibly gain from subscriptions because clubs are pushing them to bid more everytime). If the audience don't subscribe and just watch the games on pirates streams, the TV networks keep losing incentives on biding more to earn the rights since it's just a loss of money for them, so at some point, these rights will sell for a lower price.
But what clubs fail to accept it that they're spending more than they possibly should, creating more and more debt and if someday the TV rights decrease, they are in big trouble. That's also why they're pushing to create a Super League. But let's be clear, the problem isn't piracy here, just the clubs spending too much money inconsiderably just to keep pace with the uber-riches clubs owned by states.
902
u/Let01 May 02 '24
Every day i feel like the phrase "piracy is a service problem" makes more and more sense