Spotify is one of those vehicles responsible for reducing the amount of online music piracy, because consumers can find everything they want in one place. “What Spotify did for music was democratise access to music, remove fragmentation and enhance convenience. People are willing to pay for this.”
“Sport, by contrast, is moving in the wrong direction. Why? Because it’s now living in a rights model of splicing and dicing and fragmentation.”
Meanwhile, pirates have become highly effective aggregators; cutting through legitimate models to consolidate seemingly infinite ranges of programming through a single point of access – and offer it for a fraction of the cost.
Read the entire article via SportsPro
Why it matters
Even among those of us who advocate for upholding media rights for individual creative professionals, service providers, TV and movie producers, and other rights-owners, piracy is a dirty secret. While rights holders expand their opportunities by using as many distribution channels as they can, at the end of the day, consumers become frustrated when they can’t find what they want to relax to.
Think about it: Even though many of us take half a dozen streaming services, ESPN doesn’t carry the in-market baseball game that MLB TV won’t let us watch. So, does masquerading your location over a VPN constitute piracy? MLB representatives say yes.
