21–30 of 241 posts
Sigh... f*ck sports leagues/governing bodies. The reason some honest people pirate streams for sporting events is because they make it so annoying to pay for them. Some examples... I live in the US. I briefly took an interest in the EPL. If I wanted to watch all EPL games (or have the option of watching any particular EPL game), I'd have to subscribe to Peacock _and_ Fubo -- and I'm still not sure that gets me all ga…
Sigh... f*ck sports leagues/governing bodies. The reason some honest people pirate streams for sporting events is because they make it so annoying to pay for them. Some examples... I live in the US. I briefly took an interest in the EPL. If I wanted to watch all EPL games (or have the option of watching any particular EPL game), I'd have to subscribe to Peacock _and_ Fubo -- and I'm still not sure that gets me all ga…
> If you want to "stop pirates", make it easy for them to give you money and watch their favorite sport. I don't disagree, but that isn't something Mux is in a position to do. They just provide video streaming infrastructure -- they're in no position to demand that various sports broadcast rightsholders change their policies.
But some of those people are also PAYING to watch plenty of games in whatever sport they are "pirating" streams for. Calling these people "pirates" fails to acknowledge that they are also "paying customers" who are frustrated with how complicated it has become to pay for the product they want to watch.
Sigh... f*ck sports leagues/governing bodies. The reason some honest people pirate streams for sporting events is because they make it so annoying to pay for them. Some examples... I live in the US. I briefly took an interest in the EPL. If I wanted to watch all EPL games (or have the option of watching any particular EPL game), I'd have to subscribe to Peacock _and_ Fubo -- and I'm still not sure that gets me all ga…
I remember growing up it would be really common for people to split the cost of a PPV fight and VHS recordings would be passed around. It seems pretty similar.
Community-based media sharing is great. I wish it was possible for me to lend all of my Steam games when I'm not using them.
Mux is a streaming infrastructure provider. They provide services for companies who want to stream video to their users -- news web sites, video chat services, etc. Kind of like web hosting, but specifically for video. They are not a video content provider; they do not sell subscriptions to end users.
Mux's problem is that pirates will sign up for their service to restream pirated video content, like live sports streams:
Official stream --> pirate --> Mux --> viewers
When this happens, Mux usually gets stiffed on the bill, and if the stream stays up, Mux gets legal nastygrams from the content owners. So it's in Mux's interest that they detect these pirates quickly and terminate service before they run up too much of a bill. The blog post explains how they do that.
Sigh... f*ck sports leagues/governing bodies. The reason some honest people pirate streams for sporting events is because they make it so annoying to pay for them. Some examples... I live in the US. I briefly took an interest in the EPL. If I wanted to watch all EPL games (or have the option of watching any particular EPL game), I'd have to subscribe to Peacock _and_ Fubo -- and I'm still not sure that gets me all ga…
> If you want to "stop pirates", make it easy for them to give you money and watch their favorite sport. I don't disagree, but that isn't something Mux is in a position to do. They just provide video streaming infrastructure -- they're in no position to demand that various sports broadcast rightsholders change their policies.
Gaben is right. Piracy is a service problem.
Sigh... f*ck sports leagues/governing bodies. The reason some honest people pirate streams for sporting events is because they make it so annoying to pay for them. Some examples... I live in the US. I briefly took an interest in the EPL. If I wanted to watch all EPL games (or have the option of watching any particular EPL game), I'd have to subscribe to Peacock _and_ Fubo -- and I'm still not sure that gets me all ga…
They don't want to cannibalize in-person attendance where fans pay for $300 tickets and $20 pints of beer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, NHL blackouts are idiotic. Hard to imagine they are selling more arena tickets that way.
NHL blackouts (at least today’s NHL blackouts) are not for getting fans into arena seats. They exist because local cable broadcasts own the exclusive rights to broadcast games in local markets.
This is entirely the fault of the leagues in question. They set up a shitty service, no surprise that many people will pirate rather than paying for a service that only partially meets their needs.
Sigh... f*ck sports leagues/governing bodies. The reason some honest people pirate streams for sporting events is because they make it so annoying to pay for them. Some examples... I live in the US. I briefly took an interest in the EPL. If I wanted to watch all EPL games (or have the option of watching any particular EPL game), I'd have to subscribe to Peacock _and_ Fubo -- and I'm still not sure that gets me all ga…
There's a common polycule meme where every new member pays for a different digital media subscription service and it's shared between everyone. If you get together with a few friends it's possible to split the costs of all these services. If you're sufficiently tech savvy, each person can run a VPN from their home so it doesn't look suspicious from the streaming service's end. Here's a video showing how to do this wi…
You can do that, actually. It has some pretty big caveats, but if you are not actively playing anything on Steam then your library can be lent out to others... all you have to do is sign into their computer using your Steam credentials.
Sigh... f*ck sports leagues/governing bodies. The reason some honest people pirate streams for sporting events is because they make it so annoying to pay for them. Some examples... I live in the US. I briefly took an interest in the EPL. If I wanted to watch all EPL games (or have the option of watching any particular EPL game), I'd have to subscribe to Peacock _and_ Fubo -- and I'm still not sure that gets me all ga…
This is why I won't give the NHL or MLB any money for their video services.
You didn’t save anything unless you can show reasonable evidence that they paid properly as a result of your efforts. It’s likely that at least some people never would have paid for the content even if they can’t pirate it.
> That, combined with the fact that these streams usually have large viewership, means we incur a not insignificant cost and have no one to bill. In 2021 alone, Mux had over $750,000 in unpaid invoices due to pirated streams. For an infrastructure company like Mux, this pirating comes with hard costs. Transcoding, storing, and delivering video is not cheap. If these pirated streams were not held in check, they could quickly spiral out of control and have a significant negative impact on our business. By identifying and shutting down these streams, we are able to reduce our costs.
So to actually saved $750k, they'd have to have some combination of:
1. 100% COGS or 0% operating margin. Youch. Probably not, likely closer to 30% COGS, making actual infra/bandwidth cost to them of $750k services closer to $225k 2. Massive growth in attempted abuse. E.g. Their level of attempted abuse grew 3.3x to $2.5M, they stopped all of it, that would have cost them $2.5M x 30% COGS = $750k
But at the end of the day I think they just wrote a clever headline to get upvotes on HN :)