An important National Football League game on a recent Saturday night was dark on millions of television screens, but it lighted up an untold number of laptops.
Millions of U.S. fans could not watch the game between the Baltimore Ravens and Dallas Cowboys on television. Yet they could watch any number of illicit live streams on the Internet.
The major U.S. professional sports leagues are finding that pirated feeds of live games are now common and that they could soon become a menace to their businesses, which are themselves ever more reliant on Internet subscriptions services.
“We never felt that the jewel in our crown, the live games, would be vulnerable,” said Ayala Deutsch, senior vice president and chief intellectual property counsel at the National Basketball Association.
The tangible effect on the leagues’ business today is small, but the stakes are large: Each sells the rights to its live games to broadcasters for billions of dollars. And each is trying to increase revenue by selling rights for games on mobile phones and the Web.
Major League Baseball has perhaps the most advanced online business among the major sports and offers a season of games streamed online for $79.95, a price that league executives say will be reduced slightly in 2009. Robert Bowman, the chief executive of MLB.com, said that piracy hurt business but that “it’s embryonic: It’s not widespread, and we have a distinct advantage in that we have a better product.”
Deutsch was host recently to a gathering of sports leagues around the world to discuss ways of combating live-game piracy. “We view it as an international issue,” she said.
This is because sports leagues abroad face the same issue, and because the pirates themselves, the hubs of the peer-to-peer networks that facilitate the illicit streaming of live games, reside mostly outside the United States….