Among the most-engaged fans who watch sport every week, 83% access illegal pirate streams, primarily via internet-based IP streaming, according to research of more than 6,000 sports fans in ten countries, conducted by Ampere Analysis, and released by Synamedia.
With more than half of all fans regularly watching sports content from pirate sources, the industry faces a pressing challenge to reduce illegal consumption and protect the value of sports rights.
Why? Because accessing pirate streaming services is easy, cheap, convenient, and fills programming gaps that consumers deem to be too expensive to add by subscribing to “yet another” legitimate channel.
Piracy can be reduced by applying some key principles, including:
- Understanding the motivations of engaged fans who complement legal services with illegal content.
- Using effective antipiracy technology and legal action, monitoring and intelligence to disrupt piratestreams
- Applying anti-piracy measures equally in every market, to avoid weaknesses that can lead to piracy elsewhere
- Maximizing collaboration across rights holders, broadcasters and platforms; and sharing responsibility for implementing and enforcing anti-piracy measures
- Addressing economic triggers prompting consumers to use illegal content services with pay TV product and pricing innovations
- Addressing availability and usability triggers with multi-screen and OTT-only access, and bundling deals to minimize rights fragmentation and maximize reach of legitimate content.
The report also ranks the effectiveness of anti-piracy deterrents and targeted anti-piracy strategies.
Read the Report (fill out the form for download)
Why it matters:
This report further demonstrates that technical countermeasures against piracy are but part of an overall anti-piracy initiative, which is to complement technology with marketing and with collaboration across the media and entertainment ecosystem.
Sports programming is arguably the most valuable form of content, due to its immediacy and its exclusivity in distribution.
This makes sports programming both the greatest target for pirates, and the best genre to learn from as you evaluate your own anti-piracy strategies and mitigation tactics.
[ Note: Synamedia is a Sponsor of Piracy Monitor. Opinions expressed in Synamedia’s report are those of Synamedia and Ampere Analysist. ]
