In a Yahoo Sports article published today the author writes that on "[a] recent Sunday visit to one streaming site, whose owner told Yahoo Sports he transmits around 500 games per day, turned up functional feeds of second-division Guatemalan soccer, Polish women’s basketball, Canadian high school hockey and college baseball. A Tuesday visit to another site presented 49 different links to streams of a Champions League showdown between Liverpool and Bayern Munich.
The evolution is a product of many trends, from the progression of broadband to the growth of social media, to a generation of teens and young adults accustomed to enjoying content of all kinds for free. Together, they have birthed a burgeoning industry, propelled by an accelerating feedback loop. And they have enabled profit."
According to Ira Rothken "Illegal streaming is related to the options that one has to watch legal streams. In order to reduce the amount of illegal streaming, one has to have a society and culture that makes available legal streaming at a reasonable, affordable cost. … I suspect that content owners will provide better experiences, paid experiences, or free authorized experiences for users, and that will then lower the amount of piracy.”
The entire article can be found here.