Don’t worry, Dana White got the guy a few years back.

Do they fail to realize most illegal streams are run from countries outside of the US? DMCA doesn’t mean shit in some tiny country in southeast Asia.

It feels like what they need is a one-stop licensing shop.

I’ve heard “I’d be willing to pay, but they won’t sell me what I want” entirely too often.

Aside from giving this audience a chance to put their money where their mouths are, this would provide the event providers some exciting data. I know there are definitely some points which could be researched:

• Are people looking to legitimize their consumption of alternate views of the same product (i. e. people who would rather watch a CBC Olympics stream instead of the NBC one because they don’t care for NBC’s presentation?)

• Are they failing to identify specific markets-- on a geographic or technological basis-- that would overperform? Maybe you start getting a lot of unexpected cheques from Slovenia and need to start asking when they got interested in American football. Or people who want to stream events on unsupported platforms.

• Are there logistics breakdowns? I know licensing events for semi-public spaces (i. e. sports showing in a bar) is expensive and an entirely different production number than getting the same service for home; if they see a billion local pubs all hitting the one-stop licensing shop instead of going through the approved satellite/cable providers, maybe those partners are dropping the ball.

They are obsessed with control because they think that’s what makes them the money, but if we can keep their eyes focused on the money for once, then maybe we can at least get the compelling aspects of piracy-- the better experiences and flexibility-- for everyone.