[jdminhbg]

> On the other hand it’s trivial for content streams to contractually bar venues from modifying the content and that would supersede the overall right to do so.

Given the number of bars or restaurants I (used to) go to using some employee's Spotify stream as their music provider, I think the problem is that enforcement by the providers is basically impossible.

[nradov]

It's not the providers like Spotify doing enforcement. Music licensing agencies like ASCAP and BMI literally send their employees out as undercover investigators to bars and restaurants. They record which songs are played, then send a demand for payment (with penalties) along with threatening a lawsuit. Obviously they can't check every bar but they try to hit enough to scare the others.

[filmgirlcw]

Exactly. And all it often takes for a small bar/restaurant owner is to get one of those demand letters to scare them to settle. Of course, it can depend on the size of the bad/restaurant too. A small place with a capacity of 30 or 35 people might not care about an ASCAP demand letter that caught them using Spotify. But your larger places and especially anything that is a chain or franchise are going to take that stuff seriously. And the reality is that for music, there are a number of inexpensive sources that are licensed that a place can use. It won’t be as convenient as Spotify, perhaps — but those MusicChoice cable channels are often targeted to bars or other businesses because they don’t charge an additional mechanical performance license — the business just pays whatever they pay the satellite or cable provider.

The problem for businesses that want to go around those types of regulations isn’t that there isn’t a market for business owners who don’t care about music or broadcast licensing. There is one. The issue is the real target market for something like this startup is going to be a high-revenue/capacity bar or a chain. And those places tend to care a lot more about compliance.

[Invictus0]

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?

[filmgirlcw]

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.

[hash872]

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...