Why do fans still pirate live sports? New research shows that cost, convenience, and gender all play a role — and providing smarter, seamless viewing experiences may hold the solution.
Even in the age of streaming, live sports rights remain the most valuable broadcast content of all. In fact, as streamers now have to be considered in the mix for rights auctions with Apple’s $750m purchase of F1 rights in the USA just the latest example, they are potentially becoming more precious than ever.
Sports fans are among the most valuable subscribers a streamer can have. They spend an average of $88 per month on streaming services, compared with $64 per month by those who don’t watch sports.
Inevitably, this means that live sports is also the most targeted by pirates. Illegal video’s pivot to offering live content has helped see video piracy move from a marginal activity that needed a degree of specialist knowledge to a mainstream one that is as plug and play as any legitimate TV service.
Why people pirate content is a complex subject (see our earlier post The psychology of video piracy... for a brief introduction to the subject), but recent research has identified three important factors currently driving the trend. These are cost, convenience, and gender.
Below, we sketch out the problems and outline the possible solutions.
Gender and the Social Psychology of Piracy
New research from the University of Portsmouth in the UK looking at attitudes towards pirating content has revealed both a distinct gender bias towards piracy and a perhaps surprisingly negative reaction to anti-piracy messaging.
First of all, more men pirate content than women. On average, we know that 21% of men’s total live sports consumption is pirated. This compares to just 7% for music. Crucially, both rates are almost double those reported by women.
Lead author, Kate Whitman, from the University of Portsmouth’s Centre for Cybercrime and Economic Crime, said: “We know already there are lots of gender differences in piracy as men tend to pirate more than women - they think it’s more acceptable and low risk. But what we wanted to look at in this research is whether the messages to tackle piracy had a different effect on men and women.
They did. Three messages examined in the study were verbatim copies of three real-world anti-piracy campaigns. Two of them used threatening messages to try to combat piracy, while the third was educational in tone.
The study found that a single threatening message influences women to reduce their piracy intentions by over 50%. However, the reverse is true with men who actually increase their piracy behavior by 18%. Rather dismayingly, the educational messages had no effect on either men or women.
What is going on? The researchers theorise that messaging emphasising how normal piracy behaviour is can backfire. In short, the reasoning goes, men think that if everyone is doing it, they might as well join in. However, when researchers tested perceived social risk, they found that men who worried piracy might damage their reputation by looking ‘cheap’ were less likely to engage in it. This pattern did not appear for women.
“Legal threats have limited impact unless they are effectively followed through, and norm-based approaches can backfire,” says Whitman. “But framing piracy as something that damages your reputation, especially in male-dominated environments like sports, could prove far more powerful.”
The conclusion? One size does not fit all, and the better the knowledge of your audience and the more precise the segmentation you can achieve, then the more effective any anti-piracy messaging will be.
Cost and Fragmentation Fuel the Problem
Sports rights inflation and the fragmentation of streaming packages have made following even a single league an expensive endeavor for many. In many markets, fans must subscribe to multiple services just to keep up with their teams. This situation becomes worse when widened out to entire sports or even in households that follow multiple high-profile leagues and events.
In the UK, for example, Ampere Analysis presented research showing the cost of watching the 15 most-popular club football competitions on a traditional pay-TV package has increased dramatically over the past decade. In 2014/15 it cost £60 ($78) and was spread between three providers. In 2024/25 it cost £140 ($183), and was spread across over five. An inflation-only increase would only have been to £93 ($122)
“The fragmented rights landscape has created a confusing and costly environment for fans, where pirate services can aggregate league broadcasts in one place,” observes Ampere’s Daniel Monaghan. “When we consider the motivations for pirating, in the UK, Germany, Spain and the US, ‘already paying for a legitimate service and therefore not wanting to pay for another’ comes out as the primary driver.”
Affordability is just one aspect of this. Fragmentation also creates confusion with too many platforms, inconsistent user experiences across them, and differing device compatibilities. As legitimate access becomes more complicated, illicit alternatives gain appeal for all the reasons that aggregation and bundling are popular in the legitimate market: not necessarily because they’re cheaper, but because they’re simple.
How do rights holders and distributors combat this? It highlights the need for aggregated, flexible offers that remove barriers to entry and ensure a seamless process for the consumer. Dynamic content packaging, personalized subscriptions, and ad-supported models can all contribute to the process, widening legitimate access while offering a fundamentally better service that is also easy to navigate.
Convenience and the User Experience Gap
One of the fundamental planks of our most popular blog posts ever, 6 Ways to Stop Digital Piracy, is to remove the incentive. To re-emphasize the point above, one of the main ways to combat piracy is to provide a better service than they do.
This is not always easy. Even when legitimate content is available, convenience often decides the winner. Pirated feeds are constructed without many of the constraints that legitimate businesses have to follow. They tend to offer one-click access, no geo-blocks, and minimal delay. Legitimate platforms, by contrast, can frustrate viewers with authentication steps, app switching, or latency.
Parks Associates data suggests 31% of sports viewers aged 18-24 cited poor video quality as an issue when it came to streaming live sports, while 20% complained of lag.
Convenience is therefore becoming one of the primary new frontiers of content security. The key takeaway here is that the technical protections that need to be put in place to safeguard content (and that are incidentally often insisted on by rights holders nowadays) need to integrate with a superior user experience. Dynamic watermarking and other forms of real-time content tracking must not add latency to any video delivery system, and at all times consumers need a frictionless experience.
It is perhaps an oversimplification to say that every extra click that is needed to access a game is an extra invitation to pirate. But the industry needs to remember that reducing viewer complexity and maximising viewer convenience is not an optional goal.
Building a Multi-Layered Defense
These three drivers behind sports content piracy are all interlocking. While it is tempting to find a single motive that fits a single solution, the real-world situation is more complex than that. Gendered behavior, cost pressures, and convenience gaps all interact.
There are other factors in the mix too, including availability and rights gaps, content localization, ad aversion, and more. Addressing them all therefore requires a nuanced hybrid approach that combines real-time technology, data-driven insight, and audience-aware communication.
Enforcement is important, crucial even as the seconds ebb away in a live pirated feed, but the response to piracy needs to be more multidisciplinary than that. The industry needs to take a more holistic approach. It must make legitimate viewing both easier and more rewarding, and work to blend robust content protection and enforcement with seamless access, personalized discovery, and transparent value to consumers.
