So here’s an interesting look at Internet piracy you may well enjoy. The English Premier League complained the other day that illegal Web streams of live games (from Justin.tv and the like) were eating into its profits. No profits, no Premiership, was the implied threat. Then explain this to me: WWE ran a pay-per-view event in June called The Bash, and it marked the first time the company aggressively pursued illegal Web streams (again, from Justin.tv, Ustream, etc.). According to the company’s recently released financials [PDF], by way of the latest Wrestling Observer newsletter [that's a pay site, by the way], The Bash was the third least purchased pay-per-view event “in years.”
Why should any of you care? It merely illustrates that, despite the fact that WWE had gone out of its way to snuff out piracy, such actions had no measurable, positive impact on the pay-per-view buyrate (the number of people who buy the pay-per-view). Despite the fact that there were no streams, the buyrate didn’t respond in kind.
And the idea that these jitter-prone streams, which often went down even without the long arm of the WWE’s legal department getting involved, could somehow replicate the effect and utility of actually buying the pay-per-view (in HD!) and watching it with your friends and family is ludicrous.
The Bash was positioned as the company’s bellwether: do these illegal Web streams detract from the buyrate, or is the number of people watching them so insignificant that it’s not even worth pursuing? Or, more to the point, do these streams siphon off business? Well, again, with no streams out there, The Bash didn’t seem to have benefitted at all from all those stream-less people buying the pay-per-view.
Now, WWE’s own idiosyncrasies aside—despite seeing revenue drop by some 16 percent, this past year was its most profitable ever—this whole Bash business, I think, should at least temper the Premiership’s arguments. Justin.tv isn’t going to destroy the Premiership, or any other entertainment venture out there. Saying otherwise is disingenuous.
Of course, that’s how things stand in mid-2009. If 2012 rolls around and the Premiership (or whatever sports/entertainment property you want to mention) still hasn’t figured out a way to make itself legally accessible to the Internet generation, for lack of a better term, then clearly something is wrong. The fact is that you can already purchase Internet streams of Champions League games from UEFA, and have been able to for a few years now. Yes, it requires Windows, but the fact is it’s available, which is something you can’t say about the Premiership.
This comment is completely unrelated to the story:
Nicholas on Ron & Fez with today’s first Ichiban!!!!
Nice work sir….
Number one!
This is their first active attempt to stop piracy. Maybe the pirating public didn’t believe they could do it.
If they continue to do this they’ll either get the subscription numbers up, or lose market… depending on how faithful their followers are, how much value they see in the PPV, and how they react to WWE policing their content so heavily. It’s a slippery slope, as their anti-piracy actions could disassociate them from their fanbase.
The Premier League chairman, chief exec, and BOD, are answerable to the clubs, and the FA to some extent. The league is run for the financial benefit of the clubs, so basically all the Premier League has to do is secure some TV deals then sit back and watch the cash roll in. They’re a lazy organisation, and as an underling of the mightily corrupted FA they’re about as bad as an organisation gets without being criminal. They’ll wait until a company develops the online model, then they’ll sell that company the rights to show games. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for them to do it themselves.
Oh and hiring NetResult, lol, I still watch every game I want online, so I’m guessing NetResult just said thanks for the cash and then left for Hawaii without actually doing the work.
I think this helps prove companies should focus on making their content better (which people will in turn pay for), and quit worrying about the pirates. Folks are always going to pirate, and they will never purchase, so forget about them. Make your content worth people’s money, and the people with money will support it.
I spent a ton of time pirating games when in college. Why? Because I didn’t have much money, and I wasn’t truely interested in playing what I was pirating. “Beating the system” was fun, and if I wouldn’t have been able to do it, I would have found something else to do. I wouldn’t have purchased the games I pirated, with a couple of exceptions. A couple of games were actually good, and as a result I played them a lot. Those I purchased.
Just a quick point from someone who follows such thing is that the Bash was one of their weakest cards this year, this may account for a degree of the total apathy in buyrates.