Comments Thread For: Showtime's Espinoza Says Piracy Is Depressing PPV Buys By At Least 30-40%

[Jdasilva2012]

Well Im afraid more than 50% of Boxingscene's users actually are professional pirates.

[Superbee]

Proud hacker since 2008 and the arrival of trusted ******s aggregators ... I actually even buy them "coffees" when they are stable and "long term" (1 to 2 years)... Then they vanish like magic and it's another half hour of seaching "The Internet" ... The trick is to always have a couple valuable ones at hand ...

[Sheikh]

I almost always watch PPV at local bars legally and hardly ever ******. I do not like crappy picture quality so hate the option to ******. I need to have an uninterruptible view of the fight at all times. Sometimes local bars don't have the fights and those are the few times where I order PPV. As Lefty0616 said in the 90's I knew MANY people with a black box. I think some of the reason there is piracy these days, perhaps more then the 90s is it is much easier with the internet. Secondly, a lot fewer boxers are household names. It is hard to sell PPV in high numbers without household names. In the 90's Tyson, Holyfield, De la Hoya, Chavez, Lennox Lewis, Mosley, Mayweather, etc were all household names. These days, ask around and very few people know who the top fighters of today are.

Finally, as someone mentioned undercards suck. The reason for all this is because the promoters have to spend so much on the main event that there is no budget left to have undercard fights. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy where all fighters today are very overpaid. When purses settle back down to earth there will be enough margin to have good undercard fights again.

[Monty Fisto]

Is that even technically possible? Like, putting a watermark on the video and then identifying the one who provided it for a rebroadcasting?

No idea! Back in the days of Napster they did trace down some people for sharing music they hadn't paid for though. Doesn't seem lightyears away in principal. I'm being idealistic, of course, but you never know.

[jqSide]

That's why I would never, ever believe the reported PPV results or figures. They are all fake and exaggerated. I might believe them 2 decades ago when there was no internet.

Nah, not in this day and age. Even the 60K - 90K range are fake and exaggerated. Not to mention this sport has become as niche as ever. I have 4 brothers and we used to watch the sport together. Now they have zero interest in it.

All the reported numbers are fake. They should never be taken seriously. At all.

Espinoza himself have decided long time ago that he will only report numbers if they break 2.5 million buys.

Anything not coming from Showtime is bogus. It's made up.

[jqSide]

Here you go:

Espinoza Explains Showtime's Position on PPV Numbers



Espinoza said the network will only release the figures “if it’s a huge record setter, if we break 2.5 [million buys].” But “the normal course of business” will be to withhold the numbers, he said.

“I don’t think it’s particularly healthy,” he said of having the PPV results released to the public. “We just decided we didn’t want to particularly feed into it anymore.”

[SunDiego-]

The promoters can’t blame people that got tired of paying for Friday night fights labeled as PPV. They got too greedy and plenty of people decided to just ****** events instead. Even if they lower the prices it won’t change a thing, ******s are readily available and people have gotten used to it by now. Myself personally I used to buy almost all of the PPV’s but stopped buying them after the Mayweather/Pacquiao match. I’ll still purchase a fight if the family wants to get together but for the most part it’s either a ****** if I’m at work or I find a bar that’ll showing the fight and have a drink or two without the inconvenience of having to clean up after the event is over

[tophat1]

Make the prices more affordable and limit the number of ppv events. Ppv should be just for the fights that cant be made without ppv money, if they overpay fighters its on them.

[GhostofDempsey]

Try putting on better fights and undercards. Force the best to fight one another.

[MulaKO]

Fugh off you fughin weasel