Who Are The Real Pirates?

The core component of boxing’s business model in North America over the past two decades has been pay-per-view television. Fights which used to air for free on broadcast or cable television now cost the consumer 50 bucks or more per pop.

Not coincidentally, boxing in North America has declined and been marginalized over this same period, as the product took itself out of the public spotlight and protected it behind this pricey wall. We now have an entire generation in these parts which has never seen a major world title fight live on television.

In Europe and Asia, where most boxing is still on non-pay TV, the sport is growing, often drawing huge crowds to arenas and sports stadiums, a phenomenon not seen in North American in decades.

At the same time, HBO, the principal architect of this business model, has become an incredibly profitable business, annually bringing in about $1.2 billion in profits – that’s just profits, not revenue.

Even with competition from satellite TV and now Verizon’s FiOS, cable TV rates keep rising, and disgusted consumers are caught in this profit assault.

Working around these profiteers used to be difficult. You had to buy a pirate box and hope it worked as promised. Soon, the cable companies would find a way to disable it, often through upgrading their own technology.

Now our beloved Internet has changed all that. All you need to do is find a web site which streams whatever you want to watch. Some of them require you to download a media player, but some others do not. All you have to do is go to a web site, just like you went to this one or any other site.

This is rarely discussed by that technophobic bunch known as boxing writers, most of whom grope around for a letter-opener when told they have an e-mail. Ask them what they have downloaded recently, and they’ll say their doctors told them it wasn’t serious.

We speak the truth here. It is not our task to protect whoever’s business model is being rendered obsolete by the growth of technology and the Internet. We just tell it like it is.

One of the most popular sites streaming these shows is SopCast.

You will see all “seven dirty words” in a row on these boxing “news” sites before you see that name mentioned.

What is being streamed is openly discussed on forums like the MyP2P Forum, which has a special section for fans of various combat sports.

That’s the reality, like it or not, legal or not. They may be offering pirate streams which violate copyright laws and which offer no compensation to their owners, but they also generally do not charge or make a profit from these streams.

When faced with the growth of peer-to-peer file sharing a decade ago, instead of adapting to the new technology, the music industry decided to declare war on consumers. That is leading to the destruction of the traditional record companies, with popular artists like Madonna distributing their music directly online, or though alternate services like iTunes and others.

The boxing business first has to get a clue that this is happening, which is not even likely until it is too late for them. The only major promoter taking seriously using the Internet to stream fights, and possibly for free, is Don King. Thus far, however, his DonKingTV.com seems more experimental than anything.

True, it will take some time before these p2p and other services can handle mass traffic. But storage and bandwidth are becoming cheaper and more plentiful all the time, and Internet users are becoming smarter as well.

There is almost no discussion in our obsolete boxing media about the obsolete pay-per-view model. One article which does refer to this phenomenon, “Do Not Pirate This Saturday’s Pay-Per-View” by John Chavez on BoxingConfidential.com, oddly argues that it is OK to pirate most boxing shows, but not Saturday’s Miguel Cotto-Antonio Margarito showdown: “If you call yourself a boxing fan and choose to pirate this Saturday’s Pay-Per-View bout, in essence you’re telling HBO and the other major players in boxing that exciting style match-ups still won’t entice you to purchase the event. To support this weekend’s match is to support boxing as a whole as it will point to the fact that we are educated fight fans that know good from bad.”

I would respond that it is better to be consistent, and either eschew pirating altogether as unethical, or eschew pay-per-view altogether as unethical pirating of the consumers.

Granted, something in-between may be more practical for many people, but once you open the door to pirating as acceptable, it is hard to argue that sometimes it is OK while at other times it is not.

In the end, different groups of people just have different economic interests. And many of them may be pirates of one sort and size or another. You just have to choose, or realize, which type, if any, you are.

Knockout Reporting

All you need do is search for the words “Obama knockout Clinton” in Google, and you will get a plethora of news articles and headlines comparing tonight’s Democratic primaries to a boxing match. We get them from coast to coast, and in print and online.

The New York Times reports, “Spending Heavily, Obama Attempts Knockout Blow.” MSNBC.com titles an AP article, “Obama seeks knockout, Clinton bids for revival.” The Honolulu Advertiser writes, “Final punches thrown before fateful voting.” By the time you could list them all, the primaries would be over.

These are not merely the product of cliché-mad writers having to grind out headlines day after day. They not only reflect the reality that boxing can be seen as a microcosm of life. What they signify is that interest in fighting, in struggle, in battles, is as high as ever. We also know that the same cannot be said about the sport of boxing, at least in the regions that the media obsessed with these primaries operate.

Yet most of these media outlets make little or no attempt to recognize the connection of boxing to the rest of life from the other side, and cover this universally compelling sport. The New York Times, for example, on the same day they were writing about Obama’s attempted “knockout blow,” had absolutely nothing about the previous night’s fight of the year candidate between Israel Vazquez and Rafael Marquez. All the news, indeed.

Part of the blame, alas, has to lie with the way boxing positions itself. Besides weekly bombastic cons that every televised fight will be a great one, little is done to connect the sport to the rest of life, save in a few unimaginative areas like appealing to crude nationalism, sentimentalism about dying relatives, or just cheap trash talk borrowed from the fake pro “wrestling”.

What parades itself as the boxing media follows in kind. It does not take a sizable budget or expense account to ask fighters more than just how they plan to beat their opponent or who is next. This sport is obviously completely different from those where you hit or throw a ball. What does it mean to these athletes to hit each other and get hit in return in this sport? We rarely ever find out.

The drama inherent in such a sport is incomparable to any that can be produced in the non-combat sports, at least in my estimation. While the clock ticking down in an intense, close game, or a full count with the bases loaded and the score tied in the ninth inning, might be entertaining to some (and it is at times to me), the stakes in those sports are entirely different from that in sports like boxing. A batter may strike out, a receiver may drop a pass, or a basketball player may miss a free throw, but those are all in different galaxy from getting knocked out.

I, for one, wouldn’t mind all these politicians knocking each other out, for real. I would settle for writing and reporting of the sporting knockouts which had the equivalent depth that the sport itself does. For that, just like we cannot rely on the politicians for anything other than passing gas, we have to go beyond what our lame, established boxing media is doing and produce it ourselves.