February 28 – Piracy used to be a problem relegated to the seven-seas, however in the 21st century, the piracy crisis is fought in the airwaves.
DAZN’s, Head of Global rights, Tom Burrows, speaking at The Financial Times’ Business of Football Summit on Wednesday, said piracy is a huge problem for the broadcaster.
“We’re getting to the stage where it’s almost a crisis for the sports rights industry,” said Burrows.
“Media-rights deals have been done on the basis of exclusivity but I think there’s almost an argument to say you can’t get exclusive rights anymore because piracy is so bad.
“In the past, the broadcasters have funded the financial gap (caused by piracy) but I don’t think that’s going to continue and, if we can’t find a way to bridge that gap, it will be the sports themselves that suffer.”
As reported last week on this website, DAZN is currently in dispute with Ligue 1 in France. Last year, the broadcaster signed a five-year deal with the league, however DAZN feels that very little has been done to combat the rampant piracy of content on illegal streams leading DAZN to delay payments and engage in a court battle.
In the UK, the problem of piracy is slightly different as Sky Chief Operating Officer, Nick Herm describes the use of ‘jailbroken Fire Sticks’ as the main culprit as opposed to illegal streams.
“The Amazon FireStick is a big problem here,” said Herm. “We think it accounts for about half of the piracy in the UK.
“People think that because it’s a legitimate brand, it must be OK. So, they give their credit card details to criminal gangs. Amazon is not engaging with us as much as we’d like.”
Co-founder of Enders Analysis, Claire Enders, said: “We’ve had covid and a cost of living crisis in almost every market and that has led to incredible spikes in piracy,” she said. “It’s the number one problem in sport. It’s worth about 50% of most markets and in India it’s more like 90%.”
“Everyone would be much better off if all the rights-holders were much more vigilant in trying to stop what is basically industrial levels of piracy,” she said.
As sports rights fees continue to rise, and the associated costs passed on to the consumer, the fight against piracy is still in its infancy, despite it being a problem dating back to the 1990s and the launch of multi-channel television.
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