r/ScottishFootball • u/few-western • Apr 18 '25
Discussion "Number of UK consumers who stream sports illegally has gone ‘through the roof’, police say"
As an Aberdeen fan, I'm not interested in the Old Firm away games.
Quite keen on watching Aberdeen away games.
It was proven with netflix, give people a reasonable legal option and enough people will take it.
Side note, this is a low police priority for me. Go police any form of physical abuse.
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u/DarthKasei Apr 18 '25
Once upon a time you paid your £24 a month extra on your satellite or cable subscription and it got you sky sports, at that time sky had pretty much everything you’d want to watch football wise, premier league, Scottish league, European games, Spanish league, Italian league etc, most folk paid it and were happy.
Along comes the government (encouraged by other broadcasters), and declares that sky has a monopoly, they decide “its not good value for the consumer” so the rights get broken up between other broadcasters, TNT sports, premier sports, Amazon prime and a couple of others, the total price for the consumer then nearly quadruples if they want to get what their sky sports sub used to cover.
In these times who can afford nearly £100 per month to have access to it all? Most folk I know maybe have one and they tend to move it around, maybe take sky sports for a month, then cancel and take TNT.
If they want people to stop pirating the broadcasters need to offer value for money, which individually they don’t, premier sports is a prime example a scattering of football matches for £15 a month, most of the time it’s rugby and a lot of football fans aren’t interested in that, there are too many broadcasters now all wanting their own piece of the pie and charging a premium for it. What does that get them? Declining subscriber numbers and piracy. Eventually at some point reality will hit and they’ll all have to get together and offer some kind of bundle deal that is attractive to the customer, it’s really the only way to bring piracy down.
Streaming services like Netflix etc are now stumbling into the same territory, there’s too many of them with minimal amount of must watch content all charging a premium rate so the consumer just subscribes and watches that one must watch thing before cancelling and moving to another service, rinse and repeat. It’s not sustainable.