Serie A TIM and DAZN, respectively the biggest annual football championship in Italy and the only affiliated legal livestreamer, recently launched an anti-piracy campaign on social media.
The campaign features a poster image, picturing a dilapidated stadium, and two text lines reading "Piracy kills football. #stopiracy".
The operation has resulted in people reacting with sentiments of anger and mockery against the streaming giant - and, rightfully so, considering the current scenario.
It's far from the first time that DAZN, a lot more than other proprietary streaming platforms, shows itself as inadequate and abusive to its users.
Since its introduction in Italy, people have been complaining about every kind of problem with the platform, from login issues to full-blown streaming hiccups with very high latency - which, for live sports events, is unacceptable, from a service selling itself for no less than €29,99 a month.
Last Saturday, the Serie A started as a fiasco, with people being unable to login in time to watch the first match of the season.
To try and remedy the issue, DAZN set up temporary servers, of which they posted links on social media platforms for people to open. The rudimentary solution only worked for an handful of users, which were still obviously dissatisfied for being unable to watch the game on smart TVs, as the links only opened in Web browsers.
Issues with the platform have gotten so bad and common that, at the end of the day, one has a better chance of actually being able to watch Italy's big matchs by scavenging the Internet for pirate, free restreaming sites, rather than giving out hefty sums of money to a monopolistic corporation that, just in May 2019, generated $11,5 million in revenue - only to get a bad service in return.
Despite the huge issues making DAZN, the only legal platform, almost unusable for anyone, Serie A TIM recently had the audacity of creating and sponsoring their just mentioned anti-piracy campaign that likes to state, with big arrogance, how piracy would kill football.
People are not stupid, and they will only take so much from an abusive corporation, before they get tired of it. Piracy will never kill football, and that is demonstrated by the fact that millions of enthusiasts still like going to the stadium - and they pay for it. The only thing effectively killing football nowadays is predatory capitalism.
Edits: corrected some spelling mistakes and clarified that the campaign stems from Serie A TIM
