How piracy will also change professional sports (and media, of course)
Let’s have a look to what is going on with sports, because it is paralel to media business. Sports teams and players are content creators.
Sport, as a digital content, is mainly one shot. If you miss the final of a world cup and you know the result, your interest for the content is much lower. In the other hand, quality is important, but not critical, so, a decent streaming can perfectly provide you with the service of watching that game you want to see.
In the other hand, sports leagues have grown mainly on TV rights revenues. All others revenues are minor compared with the cash generated by selling content rights.
These two factors combined with the growing speed of Internet access easily provides us with a complex scenario for professional sports and media business exploiting them.
In the USA, the lack of agreement between cable operators and leagues resulted, occasionally on availability for the content online through piracy instead of being available through “legal” means. In fact, it was one of the first mistakes of music industry, it was not just that you would not like to pay for the content; it was mainly that you couldn’t find it. That pushes people to other ways of getting contents they want and once they get used to those alternatives paths, changing this dynamic gets more challenging.
The need for having live sports streaming available as soon as possible is increasingly urgent… but… it won’t stop other ways of getting those contents for free. It won’t be a solution by itself, it is already too late because people got used to enjoying contents for free.
Are we going to see footballers or NBA players, like musicians, campaigning against piracy? Probably not, but we will see audiences fragmented into many different sports and probably much less incredibly highly paid superstars. Will advertisings budgets grow to compensate previously pay per view models?
With journalism moving to citizen journalism + aggregation (according to most radical views), we may well see a similar process in professional sports players. In fact, if you follow the logic and apply to other professions, you may reach the conclusion that we tend to amateurism (to some extent, or, hyper specialization) and copy-pasting or further analyzing by others.
I got no objections to the new model of managing our intellectual property. On the contrary, I think it will speed up human kind knowledge and evolution, but, let’s assume it when making up our business plans for the future.
