Surely there must be some mechanism for tracking this: I've heard the cost for a sports bar to stream a UFC fight is in the thousands, whereas for individuals it's like $60. Can anyone weigh in on this?
There are a few ways. First, if you’re a business — especially a bar or restaurant, you need to get a business satellite or cable setup — you can’t just call up Comcast or DirecTV and get a residential setup. You can try — but the cable/satellite companies are good about sussing that out. They’ll have their own required contract lengths and provisions for business accounts that will include additional terms if you are going to be broadcasting to the public. The sports packages like NFL Sunday Ticket and the like are charged based on bar/restaurant capacity. If your bar can hold 150 people, you’re looking at about $5k a year for NFL Sunday Ticket. Compare that with the $600 or so a consumer would pay, sans any discounts or promos.
The same is true of pay-per-view fights. They charge based on capacity and it’s a multiple of whatever the residential rate is.
Now, enforcement isn’t perfect but there are people that do spot checks and if a bar is advertising a fight for example, that’s a surefire way of helping ensure there is a visit to make sure there is compliance. I have to think social media has only made this easier, as bars and restaurants use Facebook and Instagram to drive customers.
All of this is to say — although it sounds like this particular startup isn’t infringing on anything (at least not as we’ve seen in the other commercial skip/replacement lawsuits against Dish and the like), I would think guess that any sports bar paying for a premium sports package probably has something in the contract prohibiting this kind of behavior.
If I were a bar or restaurant owner, I certainly wouldn’t want to risk pissing off the multi-billion dollar leagues and corporations I rely on in part for my business. But that’s me.
Somehow in between the actual cable companies and the UFC is a distributor called Joe Hand Promotions. They employ freelance private investigators to go to any bar they find advertising UFC fights, sit in the bar and witness that the fight is being shown, check against their DB to see if they've paid the commercial rate, and then have aggressive attorneys shake down the bar for high four or low five figures. It sounds crazy but every PPV night Joe Hand has a number of freelancers out there, following up on any bar advertising that they have the fights on Facebook or what have you. Here's an investigative piece on it: https://www.bloodyelbow.com/2016/9/12/12586828/zuffa-anti-pi...
