LaLiga's battle to stop piracy — NFL lawsuits, fan media & power shifts

0:00Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the next episode of Streamtime Sports. My name is Chris Stone. I'm the community lead joined as always by our CEO, Nick Meacham. Now, Nick, this question may be a bit difficult for you as your kids are at the age now that they need more constant entertaining, whereas my five-month-old, I can just sort of sit there, doesn't ask a lot of questions. But Nick, if you were sat at home and you had the ability to do so in the way that you wanted to do, no distractions, what does your setup look like when you're watching sports at home? Just out of curiosity, because I know what my setup is, but just like, what's your setup?

0:29because I've got a segue into this, but I want to know what would your scenario be if you were home alone, you could just watch sports how you wanted to?

0:37Chris Stone:So currently, the main way I play, if I'm at home alone, which is not that often when I am home alone, it would be I turn on the TV and I normally get lost in the smart TV abyss that is my operating system, looking, scrolling through, what is it sometimes, SVT, sometimes DAZN, sometimes Prime, but not really knowing where to go. So I'm going to just pick one channel and see what I can stumble across. And then I'll have my phone by my side and I'll quickly jump on that. Either once I found something or if I can't find anything, I give up quickly and resort to that. Well, see, that's the interesting bit, that last bit there.

1:16Because I'm very similar to you, Nick. When it's Sunday, on the big screen, the bangles are on. On my laptop, I put red zone on. So I keep track of everything else. My iPad, I've got Sleeper Up for my fantasy sports. Then on my phone, I'm going through Twitter. you know did so and so get pulled out of the game because of an injury or you know is the weather really bad and that's why you know my receivers don't have any catches you know so i'm very much similar to you like i'm not one screening i'm looking around at multiple different things multiple different points of information um overload but that that's my sub nick you know i think that second screen stuff whether it's fantasy cell phone is probably pretty common for people watching live sports do we feel comfortable with that assumption i think i

1:57Chris Stone:I think very comfortable with that assumption. My argument I've been making for a while now is that the second screen is actually the first screen. And in a lot of instances, the live sports on the TV is the background to what's happening on the phone. Now, there is exceptions. The NFL, for you in this case, would be one of them. Yeah, well, this is where I'm going to make my segue, Nick. You shared with me a story that I hadn't heard of. Shame on me, perhaps. But I don't live in Spain, so it's not something I would come up with. but it just made me think what if this happened in the u.s or it happened in the uk country i was in and it's actually a really mind-boggling story nick so i'm going to do my best to try to summarize it quickly before we get into it but essentially within la liga and it should be known la liga probably one of the strongest people when it comes to attempts at stopping piracy you know nick they even create their own anti-piracy technology they won an award at the sports pro media awards for their anti-piracy stuff and they rent it out to other leagues they're very much on it they have a team of 50 people on a match day get online and search the internet to find links they take it very seriously and they've recently won some court cases that essentially have allowed them to shut down certain ip addresses and the major one is cloudflare now cloudflare according to my research basically delivers one-fifth of all internet traffic worldwide massive massive you know um internet provider yeah exactly there you go well nick is part of this what they've been legally allowed to do is they've been allowed to shut down ip addresses and in some cases it has been reported that it shuts down eagle websites in spain in an effort and an attempt to block piracy which is just mind-boggling some of those sites include instagram twitter microsoft teams have been shut down all sorts of things that we would just consider normal legitimate things and we just talked about second screen experiences you know twitter shut down on the nfl sunday craziness my sleeper app probably gets shut down by that uh and the league have said 35 of all pirated sources they say they have the information say come via cloudflare so that it is it a legitimate reason to block that and heavier tabas the president goes on to say you know it's it's cloudflare trying to protect their commercial interest over what is legally and morally correct and cloudflare comes back to say that this is an overstretch of litigation and it's bullying but nick i just to wrap my mind around the idea that internet could be shut down um legally um in the effort to combat piracy just seems wild it is absolutely crazy a shout out to robert blaszczak who uh shared this with me who uh i think lives over there uh and uh when I saw the numbers, I couldn't believe it.

4:44Chris Stone:Now, the sources that I've come across range between just people writing about it anecdotally to El Pais, I think, is the media outlet, which is one of the sort of top media outlets out in Spain, but apparently is a serious thing going on. And it's happening on a regular basis. And I couldn't even fathom that happening in more Western markets where media outlets would jump all over that and give that coverage. But I'm guessing because it's in Spain, sometimes that stuff doesn't translate across and is lost on a lot of us. But I think it's absolutely unprecedented. I can't imagine that the big tech companies would be on board with this kind of disruption, let alone the consumer, for starters.

5:25Chris Stone:So something's going to have to change there at some stage because, and I'm not sure, the road looks like all things point to La Liga being the ones instigating this. And if so, that can't be a good look for them either. So they'll have to find that balancing out between being ruthless, continue to be ruthless with piracy and not shutting down the internet. Yeah, and I love talking about piracy. I think it's one of the most interesting, nuanced conversations we have because there's the technical side of things. There's the moral side of things. There's the legal side of things. And I think we can all agree that it is a difficult topic to come and find a single solution for.

6:05But at the same time, Nick, this feels like if you push people this far, I don't know if you're actually because this is where, OK, well, I'm going to start setting up VPNs, which is going to push you further towards piracy. It almost feels like this approach, at least in my opinion, is so strong in one direction, even though they're trying to combat piracy. It almost feels like in some ways you're pushing people there, particularly for just innocent people who are just trying to consume the Internet as they want to. It might not even be legal piracy, but just overall piracy. It seems like such a strong stance to take.

6:38Chris Stone:Well, yeah, it seems a strong one. Look, I think there's more examples of this out there, not necessarily shutting down the internet, but piracy continues to play such a huge role. Perhaps it's going under the radar for a lot of us because we look at the big major stories, but there was something recently, I think it was in Norway, I think from memory, where they announced that they're shutting down their OTT service because it was basically being ripped off by IPTV, pirates basically ripping off the other feed and offering subscription basically for the three for free through their or at a discount through their respective channels uh again another major issue that has a knock-on effect commercially to the sport uh and fans basically just don't care they're quite happy to take it however they can get as long as they can get it for free so this comes back to the innate problem with the business model around sports and it ain't going to solve itself anytime soon without a change in the approach.

7:32No, and to be clear, this isn't just La Liga. I saw a news source from the AP, Nick, where Cloudflare apparently is not just having this issue with La Liga. They've apparently been spoken to by Bundesliga to try to find solutions around this. Apparently, Syria, actually the basically watchdog society of the government, actually presented them with a 14 million euro fine for what they described as lack of action towards feedback and comment. So it doesn't seem like this is exclusive to La Liga. But Javier Tabas is also the one that came out and single-handedly called out Amazon, the fire sticks, for being the single biggest problem.

8:11So Tabas has always had strong opinions. So perhaps that's why this story is getting a little more coverage than maybe some of the other markets. But I remember, Nick, it wasn't that long ago we had our guest on for Mediakon. I think that was the story because Javier Tabas had come out and singly put Amazon on blast for not doing enough to stop piracy.

8:30Chris Stone:Yeah, that was definitely part of it with the fire stick situation. But ultimately, yeah, piracy is not going away anytime soon. It's going to keep eating sports lunch. And it's got some pretty big hurdles to climb. I don't know where it gets to, but at least we've got another enemy or another, what do you call it, like another villain in the industry now. And that's Cloudflare. Glad to see some other people that we can point our fingers at and get grumpy with and blame them for all the problems of the industry, which you'll probably see a lot more of in the near future. once this story gets out.

9:00Chris Stone:So hopefully us spreading the word, and again, shout out to Robert for sharing this with us, might start to spread the message and create more awareness of it. Yeah, well, we'll stick with a little bit of some of the legal stuff and fragmentation and some piracy undertones to it, which is the NFL is currently facing a Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit over its media strategy. Now, basically, I've got some thoughts on this, Nick, why the US Senate is concerned about this while they're about to start World War III. We'll park to the side. I just think there's bigger fish to fry at the moment.

9:31But basically what they're suing over is that they're saying it's too expensive for NFL fans to watch every NFL game. I believe in the lawsuit it says upwards to a thousand pounds. I believe it was front office sports said last year would cost you$748 to watch every single NFL game. Now, Nick, I would be a terrible capitalist. I'm one of those people that doesn't believe billionaires should exist. I'm usually stick it to the man pro union, all those sorts of things. But in this case, Nick, I have to say, I think this has got to be one of the most ridiculous things that I have ever heard. And the NFL, I think, had the perfect counter to this, which is 87 % of all NFL games are available on free to air live broadcast.

10:11Like, it's just, you know, you think about the Premier League. I did the math, Nick. There's 380 Premier League games in the season. 261 of them are shown. That means 25 % of games, even if you wanted to pay for them in the UK, couldn't watch even if you wanted to. not only that zero percent of them are on free to air the fact that the nfl is showing nearly 90 of its content on free to air versus something like the premier league where it shows zero percent of itself on free to air it i just think it's so stupid nick and the other thing i would challenge is like okay how many people have amazon prime from september until december through the regular season and then cancel it to not watch thursday night football how many people signed up for netflix on december 24th and december 25th to watch the games there like they're almost commodities at this point like i just can't think of anyone who subscribed to amazon just to watch thursday night football or anyone who subscribed to netflix just to watch the christmas game so i get those costs are there but like the big one is the youtube sunday ticket which is for premium fans like if you want to watch every single nfl football game that's for the premium fans but not only are 90 % of games available, all games in local markets are available.

11:20So if you're a Bengals fan living in Cincinnati, you're going to get to watch every game. I just, I find it ridiculous, Nick. And like I said, I'm usually not big company sort of thing, but like, I think this lawsuit is just bonkers. I don't know if you have any thoughts on it, but I just, I think it's crazy.

11:32Chris Stone:Well, I think, you know, whether it's in America or other countries, they always like to find a PR line to spin, to make it get, try and get public sentiment behind them. And the whole notion that it costs fans a thousand dollars or whatever it might be, the number is to get access to all the games is a nice way to project that but the reality is yeah there's more than enough content is made available free to wear that people should be thankful for they have access to and that aren't required to get uh the services they need uh pay for premium services just to get access to it it's all being served and they're just paying it through their attention basically i mean that's uh that's a pretty good win i think more often than not so So yeah, sure, if people want to watch every game on YouTube or NFL Game Pass or whatever, that's a different story altogether.

12:18Chris Stone:But for me, this is a bit of a non-starter on terms of the cost point. Now, what is different, and I think is ultimately is, and I don't have any real knowledge on the process that they've taken, but just how the NFL have got to a situation where they can, basically, they've got these long-term deals. At the time, they were groundbreaking in terms of the multiples of them. basically to be able to say, well, actually, you know what? A few years in, we're going to cancel those deals and actually basically submit your, to paying even more than what you did when you initially agreed to pay so much to have the security of the long-term agreements in place.

12:54Chris Stone:Now, those companies obviously agreed to those stipulations at the time, but if I was a broadcaster paying billions, I wouldn't be too thrilled about this concept, I have to say. But NFL is being smart. The notion around advertising in sports has never been higher. The NFL is the best product for it in market. So, of course, they're going to try and rinse the market for all they can. But I'm sure there's a lot of broadcasters really not excited about, particularly when the media industry is really under the pump when it comes to cost management as well as revenue generation. Well, I guess that's the question, right?

13:30Is this smart or is it consumer unfriendly fragmentation? and i think for me you could make the argument that the nfl can keep so many games on free to air because of its fragmentation because it's you know if they only had a singular place you know prices might have to go up because they got to make that money somewhere um i get it might be a little bit annoying for people that there's so many different services but you could make the argument that's also what keeps the the price point and like i said i just i don't buy the argument uh the thousand dollar one for the reasons i stated but i don't know is it smart by the NFL or I don't I don't know Nick I just I struggle to to have too much sympathy here

14:07Chris Stone:oh look at that they're ultimately in the driver's seat right the NFL can do what it wants basically they're they're the holy grail they are still in that position unlike any other sports property where they have a limited amount of games available and that lack of visibility makes every game they have a premium advertising dollars keep going up audience interest keeps going up streaming keeps growing and developing with other competitors coming into the mix. They need the NFL. It's still like a must-have asset for a major broadcast platform. So they can play all these tricks. And it might not be nice for their partners.

14:42Chris Stone:Partners are using voting companies who are paying billions to basically have the right to be called a partner. But they can do it because they're in the driver's seat. Now, if they were, say, the NBA, and there's a little bit of uncertainty about its approach now and what's going on with popularity, although I haven't looked into the numbers of late, and we've talked about maybe covering that at another time, maybe I wouldn't be playing this card. I'd be just making sure we keep our partners happy because the risk could be there. But I just don't think I have any risk to basically pull this lever, unfortunately, for the broadcasters.

15:11Now, the Premier League, if anyone's listening, they're probably sat here and you're like, Chris, could you stop bringing us up? This is a story about the NFL. Leave us alone. What I would love to see is that this story was flipped and reversed, where if a UK member of Parliament came and said, I think it is wrong that the most popular sport in the country is never on free to air where it's going to say hey that remaining 25 percent of games that aren't broadcasted we're going to legislate you have to put them on BBC you have to put them on ITV something like that I think for

15:36Nick Meacham:me Nick the question has always been this is the same thing I've said about the Premier League it's not necessarily always about the cost like obviously if it's extortionate it's extortionate but for me it's about excessive it's accessibility and we've talked about the fact that there are certain games in the Premier League even if you wanted to pay for them you couldn't watch them And that's the 3 p.m. kick out or blackout side of things. For me, it's more about the accessibility of content as opposed to maybe necessarily the cost. Like I said, there's a balance that you can't put the price way too high.

16:04Nick Meacham:But the fact that so much is available, like I would love to see this on the flip side where someone from the UK says, hey, we need at least a Friday kind of the way, you know, Bundesliga does their Friday night football. There has to be a Friday night Premier League game that must be on free to air. I would love to see this story flip the other way, Nick. And like I said, there's probably people in the UK being like, could you just leave us alone, Chris?

16:24Chris Stone:But look, I think, frankly, that ship has sailed because they had the major events. In the UK, they had the major events restrictions. So basically, those major events are ring-fenced. They have to be on free-to-air TV, and those things do exist. But for the Premier League, I think that does become a lot more complicated as a result of basically being too late to the party and there's precedence there that now hasn't been available and there'll be things around, you know, impact on business and alike. So I don't really know how that's going to ever happen in other markets in this day and age, particularly when content's so accessible, but I would love to see that more visible.

17:06Chris Stone:I'll tell you what I think should happen. Anyone that's offering a subscription product, I think I've said this before, but I'm going to say it again. Shift the subscription model. If you're so passionate about subscription, it's got to be subscription. Team-based subscriptions. Yeah. Don't give me access to the Premier League. Give me access to my team's content. Give me that option to just pick the games my team is in. I would probably pay, well, I pay just as much for it near enough to having the full package, right? I just think that that focus, that notion and messaging of like, this subscription helps your team buy the players and so forth is a much nicer notion than like feeding the Premier League commercial machine, which currently sits in place today.

17:47Chris Stone:and I'm still shocked we don't see more of those in motion and in place, that it is basically buying a team-based subscription only. And you can upgrade to the full package, but why not have something in the middle that is just for Manchester United games or Arsenal matches? Because I'm sure that would be a lot more appealing than what I have is this whole perceived wastage of a subscription. Even no matter what price you have, if I think I'm not going to consume 70 % of what I'm buying, then maybe I'm just not going to buy it even if it's worth it.

18:14Nick Meacham:Yeah, that's a really good point. And MLB used to do that, Nick, where you could either buy a team package or buy a whole league package. I don't know if that's still the way MLB TV is structured because that's had some changes through the years, but they did do that. And I think to your point, Nick, there is that perception of like wastage, which I think is a really valid point. So there you go. We've wrapped that one up quite nicely in terms of why we think it's wrong and what we think needs to change. So there's a bit of a breaking news story, Nick, as we were prepping for this podcast, talking more flipping back on the YouTube side of things, which is Gary Neville's The Overlap.

18:45Nick Meacham:has now acquired Manchester United influencer Mark Goldbridge's two YouTube channels. Those that don't know, Mark Goldbridge runs a fan TV channel, essentially, the United Stand. We've seen this become very popular in the UK. We've previously had Mark at our Sports Pro Live, now Sports Pro London event, which if you're listening to this and you're based in the UK and you don't know how to pass, get yourself down there for the event. We've also spoken to people like Robbie Lau with Arsenal Fan TV. So we have seen this sort of movement development, these fan creator communities. And the United Stand has 2.26 million subscribers on YouTube.

19:20Nick Meacham:He also has a second channel called That's Football, which has just shy of 1.5 million subscribers. I don't know what the unique numbers on those, how many of them crossover. But you're talking significantly, probably about 2.5 million subscribers. The overlap, to my understanding, has around 1.6 million subscribers. So they're bringing a significant new subscriber base into that. But it's really interesting, Nick, because essentially Gary Neville and the overlap have just acquired a new program. And I haven't seen the exact numbers, Nick, but it has been reported as a over seven figure deal in terms of how much that is.

19:53Chris Stone:Not bad.

19:54Nick Meacham:So Mark is one of the, I guess you could say the OGs, one of the original people to do this. I think, A, you got to give credit to him because I think ultimately, while there are some people that will be the haters that will say he sold out. I think pretty much anyone in this space, either A, he's probably inspired to make content, or he's probably just done what everybody else did. If you knew you could go from making YouTube videos from your house to getting bought for several million pounds, you'd probably take that. And I think it is very newsworthy given some of the stuff we've seen in the UK around BBC partnering up with YouTube.

20:31Nick Meacham:Gary Neville having his mini company buying the Mark Goldbridge channels. What are your thoughts on it, Nick?

20:37Chris Stone:yeah the um well the overlap and mark albridge were the ones that actually acquired the rights of the bundesliga in the uk as well so they obviously have some synergies let's say in their approach to youtube and leaning into live sports more than you know whether it be the alternative commentary that mark albridge does or the the wider day-to-day commentary that maybe uh the overlap presents and the overlap is a show that i think has been backed by sky has a lot of great famous faces to it. It's also in podcast as well. So for me, this deal just makes a lot of sense, particularly, you know, one of the ways of driving revenue and value out of these, out of a marketplace like YouTube or visibility of YouTube is you need scale.

21:22Chris Stone:And if you can get scale, then you can sell advertising and partners into those different channels. And the bigger the scope of that reach, the bigger the deal you can do. And I feel like this is just a simple aggregation play of a whole host of different media assets with a view that they can there do more media related deals advertising and and sponsored deals to have more revenue generation coming into both those respective brands it overlaps part of a bigger strategy uh innately of i think they bought they had quite something else recently from memory as well which was maybe more on the production side um so i think it's something that i don't think it's that bigger deal and like disruption other than it validates that maybe people with a YouTube-led approach are thinking like traditional media outlets, needing more assets, needing more audience, needing more channels to then ultimately monetize more effectively through the reach play with advertising and branding partners.

22:19Chris Stone:And I'm not surprised about this. Now, where Mark goes with it and does that make any impact in how he creates content, I'd be surprised if he would have ever committed to that and I don't think he would be worried about that really you know Gary Neville and the the team there are also critical of like Manchester United as well and they've been critical of each other at times so I think there's a friendly understanding that there's going to be difference of opinions there and I think I just expect a few more of these things to potentially happen over time if they want to keep building out their audience or advertising network which

22:50Nick Meacham:it feels like that's the play here it's completely anecdotal Nick but I do feel like just even on my social channels, you see a lot more leaning towards this in the sense of there's, I don't want to say people are upset, but they're underwhelmed by national broadcasters because often, you know, particularly in America, it's really hard to keep track of every single team across the ecosystem. And, you know, I sometimes hear people, no offense to the overlap. I hear them talk about West Ham sometimes. And it's like, it's very clear to me. You've never watched West Ham play before and that's fine.

23:20Nick Meacham:Not a big club. And I do think these ideas of these community led, I don't even want to say niche obviously man united's not niche but these smaller more focused groups are doing just a better job of connecting with people um because there's so many content options now with mainstream media when you try to cover everything you know some fans that's enough for them but some fans like myself like I don't like listening to mainstream media because they tell me the bangles biggest offseason needs for the drafter exposition I'm like you couldn't be any more wrong and I think having I do agree with you I think you're going to see more of these things and that was what robbie was talking about when they were talking about global fan network where they were trying to essentially replicate the arsenal fan tv model to different fan bases to offer that more in-depth look or more personal look into your teams because sometimes the mainstream media is just not capable of necessarily delivering that more specific feedback or personalized content to your interests yeah uh 100 but i and i think you know could you see

24:20Chris Stone:arsenal fan tv being acquired by overlaps uh ownership base and other requisite channels that have a meaningful follower base 100 you could see this happening i just think when there's a move like this it's normally one of a few i can't see i mean there is a bit that manchester united synergy there but it would make very little sense for me they for them to stop there and keep building that network of of brands and um that are really you know emotional appointment viewing for fans of those requisite clubs and sports. That's where you can get needle moving engagement from audiences. And indeed, therefore, commercialization comes along with it.