> "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem"

I never buy into this. If copyright law doesn't exist, pirate sites will eventually always provide better service than the official channels.

One example is scanlation manga. Chinese scanlation sites have reached the theoretical ceiling of service: just serve images fast with a little nonintrusive ad. No login required. No way the official Japanese apps can provide significant better service than that.

Official sites make things worse on purpose after getting any sort of traction because they can't stop chasing profits.

I don't watch sports, but my father watches soccer. He really only cares about 1 team and the national games from our home country. He was spending over $100/month to be able to watch the games, and they werent even in his native language. Now he pays $80/year for a pirate IPTV service and not only can he watch the games anywhere he wants, he also gets native language commentary for the games, national tv channels like news, etc.

When pirates can charge you money and offer a superior service, it absolutely is a service problem. You can claim that the realities of licensing and whatnot don't allow official channels to provide the best service they can, but that's not true in this case. When the same provider is splitting game broadcast from one team into different packages you know they're just trying to extract the most amount of money possible.

IDK the deal with scanlator sites nowadays, but I assume the official sites can provide more timely translations for manga since they can access the source material before anyone has seen it. I know most popular manga gets translated within hours of release, but if you're following some more niche stuff it can be several days. I also know a lot of scanlators have patreon pages so it's not like the demand from paying customers for translated media isn't there.

It doesn't have to be significantly better. If the service is stable, cheap and hassle-free, people will pay for it.

When Spotify came along, music piracy all but vanished. It has already been proven in other media, it needs to happen with sports and streaming in general, then media piracy will be a thing of the past.

> just serve images fast with a little nonintrusive ad. No login required. No way the official Japanese apps can provide significant better service than that.

Why not? Provide same experience but for logged in users with extra benefits that they feel like it's worth paying for, behind-the-scenes content, WIP, whatever.

There is always a way to stand out and provide a better experience, the very least because all people in the world don't want the same thing, and you can always find somewhat of a niche somehow.

Except that it isn't true.

Candycrush (CrunchyRoll of course) had gained the love of the anime crowd. Until they started to "optimise" bandwidth. It wasn't a pricing error as subscription price didn't increase.

They claim the degradation was perceptible. Except that it was.

It was many years ago, and since then candycrush lost subscribers. It won't because illegal streaming platforms got better, simply because the illegal platform provided the choice to go all the way to lossless quality.

For football, imo that's a pricing issue as well as a distribution issue. Basically I need to subscribe to a lock in plan even if I just desire to watch, say, the quarter to finals. Or simply the champions league.

Can they try providing equal service to that? Ie, localized into English at the same time as the fans group, fast loading site, etc. In my experience they're usually noticeably behind in those areas even with a subscription active.

But copyright law does exist?

I mean you just proved that it's service problem.

I read this as you are in fact in agreement with the statement. If that's the ceiling, provide the same level of service and gain more of the market. In which you have all the means to be faster, non-intrusive, and less faulty so that you can be always better.