The UFC Should Sue for Piracy but What They Really Need Is an MMA iTunes

iWAMMA

Well actually this would probably work. If you are a bar owner, are you really going to risk this level of liability in front of dozens of random strangers, or will you cough up the money? This is actually the sort of piracy you can minimize, and doesn’t have a lot to do with random internet guy watching a stream over his computer.

But Luke, if someone wanted to create an iTunes for fights/events, we all know that Zuffa would not only not support it, they’d actively try to crush it. That chilling effect keeps there from being the kind of innovation necessary to provide a lawful alternative to piracy.

Did the bar stream a Yahoo PPV stream or a justin.tv type feed?

As someone who has been in various creative and artistic endeavors myself, I understand the need to protect one’s own intellectual product, so I’m all for the UFC going after pirating. But I agree with Luke, they need to provide something better than the UFC Vault. The UFC on iTunes would be perfect. Heck, if they’re so concerned about people keeping video files, they should do it like the movies on iTunes. You pay like five bucks for the film, and you can watch it for a limited time.

Nate and I have both done pieces about UFC’s old web-only Vault/on demand service. Last time I checked, it looked like they completely removed the ability to download individual fights.

The service itself was near worthless. If you downloaded with any sort of volume, the 6month subscription was the best option, but they removed that sometime last year. And charging $2 or 3 for 6 months of DRM protected individual fights is blasphemous. If I’m paying as much or more than I would (theoretically) pay for a song via iTunes, I want that fight until it’s not worth the space on my HDD.

In any event, Zuffa has never been toward-thinking with these sorts of things, so expect them to catch up in 2010.

I don’t think this would do much to solve the problem at hand which is people streaming the live event. People want to watch it live as it happens, iTunes or something like it would have no affect on that.

Or, he could have paid 50$ for the PPV and not be a cheap bastard and show an internet stream…?

there was a fear factor with the whole napster lawsuit. everybody remembers their parents crapping their pants when they heard about it on the news and came home threatening to kill us if the police showed up because their computer was found to have illegally downloaded music on it. so their was a HUGE acceptance by “old people” for a new alternative, itunes. my dad blew like $300 on itunes to update his music library.
though i don’t stream events illegally (i pay for my stuff), i dont like the lawsuits to come from UFC… but maybe there a neccessary step to make an “MMA – itunes” something people would actually pay for and want.

Because those words have to do with car chases and sea battles and canon fire and machine guns, and this is people watching videos they didn’t pay for.

Just because something is illegal does not mean you do not have to compete with it.

If we can stop it, then there is no need to compete w/ it.

Oh, no, wait …

The UFC needs to send a message – to bar owners, websites, people of message boards – whomever – that they are prepared to spend the money to prevent piracy of their product. Through a series of lawsuits and large damage awards that will probably surprise many of you, it will prevent a small portion of would-be infringers from hosting and sharing the fights online. I don’t know if that number is as small as 10-20%, or something higher.

In combination with that, the UFC will need to work with the websites that enable the illegal downloads or streams to get them to proactively prevent the streams. That part is tricky and will likely involve lawsuits against the website owners. That will be an expensive battle, but it can be won where the website owner knows what’s going on and yet does an inadequate job of preventing it (and profits from it).

This will compliment an effort to find other partners to license and distribute Zuffa content online. These future partners won’t want to pay $$ for a product that is readily available for free on the internet.

You’re in the right general direction, but this isn’t a practical solution when you look at the viewing habits of MMA consumers. UFC by and large makes their dough from selling people live PPV events. And as long as that holds true, there will be no innovative online solutions coming.

What most people don’t seem to realize is that the cable companies that distribute those UFC events hold a lot of power. Recently a UFC executive flatly said that they cannot offer online PPVs for a lower cost than the traditional TV service because they are contractually forbidden to do so.

The UFC’s best hope of curbing copyright infringement is an all-encompassing online platform that provides live PPVs as well as the existing on-demand fare to as many people as possible. iTunes, 360 and PS3, Netflix, fuckin Web TV… whatever people are using to stream shit into their TV. But there are only two ways this can happen:

1) Streaming services and live PPVs (in HD) become enough of a mass-appeal platform that they are forced to find a way to make it happen while still paying the cable companies their end.

2) UFC’s PPV fortunes decline to the point that they can actually defy their existing distributors and actually embrace some of these innovative solutions.

Don’t hold your breath on either scenario. As much as some people would like to think Strikeforce is the only MMA promotion with partners to answer to, UFC is also kept in check by their relationships with their PPV distributors. And that likely won’t change anytime soon.

This is a dramatically different from someone at home using pirating a PPV. I completely support going after bars or public venues which pirate a PPV stream. Dana should sue the pants off them and set a message to businesses in America that this will not be tolerated.

Why should an internet stream be any cheaper then a cable stream? It often comes down the same fiber optic and is the same product. The only sliding scale of price is one based on quality (HD costs more), so if you want a cheaper PPV then you should get on Dana to make a crappy internet stream and sell if for $30.

Not sure if they plan to go further but if you have a PS3, you can go to the online media store and download several fights. I think they are like $1.99 a piece. I don’t remember which ones they are, there aren’t many but it would be cool if you could download all the UFC fights for a whole bunch of fighters.

how come everyone jumps all over Metallica but Dr. Dre gets a free pass? Everyone forgot about Dre in the Napster mess? He named names, too, you know.

that this is completely different than an individual dl’ing a song or watching a stream. An individual watches it for his own enjoyment and makes nothing off it except for maybe saving $50. I can tell you this right now, there aren’t many events I’ve watched on a stream that had I been unable to, I would have said fuck it and forked over the cash to watch on TV. Probably wouldn’t have even headed on out to a bar – I tend to spend near that much anyway when I’m out.

Getting back to the point at hand, this story is of a business that actively profited off of a stream by not only skipping the whatever to order the PPV, but skipping the licensing fees as well. I know bars here in Jersey City do not show PPVs because there’s a fucktarded law on the books about having to pay per their maximum capacity. So if a place can hold 200, they have to pay 200×45 to get the event, regardless of how many people actually show up. The prohibitive cost is why nothing in JC ever gets shown and why people go NYC or Hoboken instead. So this place is probably getting sued for a dollar amount based upon their max capacity as well as the initial fee and whatnot.

$50 (one a monthly basis?) for three hours of fights that could be riveting or absolutely terrible and with little to no replay value vs. $15 for a CD/MP3s of a band you already know you like is also an apples to oranges comparison, IMO.

Perhaps Zuffa could think about a subscription model that caters to those of us who order every fight religiously.

Stupid typo.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt offers up an opinion. He follows the RIAA/MPAA lawsuits closely, and notes the DMCA safe harbors that sites like Justin.tv and uStream are protected under. They’ve protected those sites from the movie and music industries, I doubt that the UFC will be the one to break those down

http://techdirt.com/articles/20100105/1831597626.shtml

I think lower costs over the internet is the solution. I think more people would be willing to pay if you could get the event for say 30 or 25 bucks over the internet. Personally, I’d just hook my computer up to my TV w/ an HDMI cable, but that’s just me.

Either way, Joe Rogan said it best. “You can’t fight the internet.” However, I think the golden age of the internet is coming to an end. Companies keep getting more and more pissed that people are stealing software and content. Legislation will come down, at least in the US in the next 10 years I bet that will hamstring the internet. Maybe forcing internet providers to police their customers or something.

I guess the fact that it’s very hard to do, and moreover, who’s going to do it, is the reason it hasn’t been done yet.

I rec’d due to the title, now time to read the article :)