Bosses from two of the world’s leading sports media businesses have warned the industry that it faces a financial crisis unless it gets to grips with rampant online piracy.
Speaking at The Financial Times’ Business of Football Summit on Wednesday, DAZN’s head of global rights Tom Burrows said piracy was a “huge problem” for the London-based sports streamer and, therefore, a problem for everyone involved in professional sport.
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“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.”
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DAZN has become the world’s biggest streamer of European football and owns domestic rights in four of Europe’s ‘Big Five’ leagues: Germany’s Bundesliga, La Liga in Spain, Ligue 1 in France and Italy’s Serie A.
DAZN is currently in dispute with Ligue 1 over the value of the five-year deal they struck last year, with the French league’s response to the piracy crisis being one of the streaming platform’s main complaints.
The situation is not believed to be as bad in the UK but Sky’s group chief operating officer Nick Herm also told the FT event that tackling piracy was a “never-ending battle” for the pay-TV giant.
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When asked to estimate how much piracy was costing the business, Herm said it was difficult to quantify as very few people are willing to admit they are accessing pirated content but he suggested the total was “hundreds of millions of dollars” of missing revenue.
DAZN is a major broadcaster of European soccer (Fred Tanneau/AFP via Getty Images)
The main problem in the UK, Herm said, is not illegal streams but ‘jailbroken Fire Sticks’, which are smart TV devices that have been modified so they give users access to premium channels for free.
“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.”
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Claire Enders, the co-founder of Enders Analysis, a leading British research firm, was even more apocalyptic in her assessment of the piracy epidemic.
“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 per cent of most markets and in India it’s more like 90 per cent.”
Enders believes that one of the reasons the Premier League’s media rights continue to grow in value is that the league, in partnership with its broadcast partners, police and Britain’s leading internet service providers, has been much tougher on piracy than its counterparts elsewhere.
She was particularly scathing about French football’s decision to ditch its long-term broadcast partner Canal+ in 2020 and described Italy’s efforts to fight piracy as “slack”.
“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.
(Top photo: Naomi Baker/Getty Images)
