You didn’t save anything unless you can show reasonable evidence that they paid properly as a result of your efforts. It’s likely that at least some people never would have paid for the content even if they can’t pirate it.
Didn't read the article didja? Or even click and read the full title?
The $750k figure is the amount of Mux's services they provided in 2021, that were (claimed to be) pirate streams, and were not paid. By taking steps to catch and remove pirates, they are reducing the number of unpaid invoices they have.
Their actual costs are less, yes (in that how much they invoice != their actual costs), but it's reasonable to say saved themselves $750k of their services.
It had nothing to do with converting pirates to paying customers. It had to do with preventing pirates from incurring infrastructure costs for them/making use of their services without paying.
Yeah being pedantic here, but reading the details of the $750k reference, it's (hopefully) nowhere near $750k that they saved:
> That, combined with the fact that these streams usually have large viewership, means we incur a not insignificant cost and have no one to bill. In 2021 alone, Mux had over $750,000 in unpaid invoices due to pirated streams. For an infrastructure company like Mux, this pirating comes with hard costs. Transcoding, storing, and delivering video is not cheap. If these pirated streams were not held in check, they could quickly spiral out of control and have a significant negative impact on our business. By identifying and shutting down these streams, we are able to reduce our costs.
So to actually saved $750k, they'd have to have some combination of:
1. 100% COGS or 0% operating margin. Youch. Probably not, likely closer to 30% COGS, making actual infra/bandwidth cost to them of $750k services closer to $225k
2. Massive growth in attempted abuse. E.g. Their level of attempted abuse grew 3.3x to $2.5M, they stopped all of it, that would have cost them $2.5M x 30% COGS = $750k
But at the end of the day I think they just wrote a clever headline to get upvotes on HN :)
The $750k figure is the amount of Mux's services they provided in 2021, that were (claimed to be) pirate streams, and were not paid. By taking steps to catch and remove pirates, they are reducing the number of unpaid invoices they have.
Their actual costs are less, yes (in that how much they invoice != their actual costs), but it's reasonable to say saved themselves $750k of their services.
It had nothing to do with converting pirates to paying customers. It had to do with preventing pirates from incurring infrastructure costs for them/making use of their services without paying.