A Prize Fight Over What Media 'Wants'
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The heavyweight fight between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor may have been the most-pirated event ever. Is that because the distributors don’t understand the fundamentals of the media business?
Crowd Companies CEO Jeremiah Owyang privately wrote on Facebook, in a post that he allowed me to publicly share, “Many people were live streaming the fight on Periscope. All media wants to be freed.” (While media has no inherent desires, people can’t resist the tendency to anthropomorphize it.)
Owyang’s clever twist on the clich puts the emphasis on media wanting to be “freed” rather than “free,” but the implication was that the $99.95 cost to view the fight in high definition in the U.S. prevented this event from reaching everyone who wanted access to it. This led people to seek alternative ways of viewing the fight. For some, that meant a trip to the pub, but for others, it meant engaging in or abetting some form of theft.
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