Just before the company’s first pay-per-view of 2021, UFC president Dana White issued a warning to at least one of the many websites offering illegal pirated streams of the event.

“We got one,” White told reporters at a pre-fight news conference before UFC 257 in January. “We got him. We’re watching this guy right now. All you have to do is turn it on Saturday and we got you, fucker. I can’t wait.”

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As anti-piracy strategies go, this one was a lot more stick than carrot, focusing on a promise of punitive action against one illegal streamer in an online sea teeming with them. It was also difficult to be sure that any of it was actually happening — White never named the streamer in question, or offered any proof of the surveillance — and if so what it might portend for the UFC’s anti-piracy efforts.

Before both UFC 257 and UFC 258, the first two UFC pay-per-view events of 2021, White made similar claims. He had a pirate in his sights and he was ready to take him or her down. At one point he said they would be watching the unnamed pirate’s house and “listening to his phone conversations.”

But in both instances, White’s post-event updates were largely the same. That person he’d been targeting? He or she had opted not to offer up a pirated stream of this UFC event after all. In one instance, White read a statement off his phone that he said had been posted on one of the websites in question, but never named the website or explained whom he meant when he said “we” were on the case.

“Every event I’m going to go after one of these guys — or more,” White told reporters. When he finally caught one, he vowed, he’d show no mercy. “We’re going to catch some of these guys in 2021,” White said at one point. “And I look forward to the crying and begging.”

For a company that’s dealt with rampant online piracy of pay-per-view events for well over a decade, it seemed like a sudden shift in tone and strategy. It also seemed hard to tell how much of it was grounded in reality.

As one anti-piracy expert put it: “I think that makes Dana feel better … but I call bullshit. There’s no way you can tell me these pirates just decided not to stream this one. The 10 or 15 major streaming sites I saw, they all had it.”

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What seemed clear from White’s remarks was that, bolstered in part by new legislation in the U.S., the UFC was taking a renewed interest in combating piracy. And once you start to get a full picture of the scope of the problem and the cost to event promoters like White and the UFC, it’s not hard to see why.

For many fans, it’s become just another part of the fight night ritual. They gather their snacks and drinks, get comfortable on the couch, then fire up their laptops and go hunting for a pirated stream.

It’s not difficult, they say. Most know exactly where to go. Some pay a small amount for subscriptions to IPTV services. Many others pay nothing at all. In the event that one of their streams goes down, they tend to have backups, not to mention Reddit threads and Discord chats where they can share stream information with other viewers. No one seems to worry too much about any form of consequence, or about any ethical issues associated with it.

“I’ve been a fan for probably around 10 years,” said one MMA fan who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I watch almost all the shows, I’ve flown across the country to go to (UFC) events, but I can count on one hand the number of (UFC) pay-per-views I’ve actually paid for.”

This is not an uncommon story. While working on this piece I communicated with dozens of MMA fans who said they regularly watch pirated versions of UFC events. Many opt to stream it live. Some download the events in full from peer-to-peer “torrent” sites after the fact. Most also said they’ve been doing it for years.

When the UFC returns Saturday with UFC 259, which includes three title fights on the main card, almost all said they planned to view it this same way.

“Streaming is way easier than paying for the (pay-per-view) directly,” one fan told me via email, on the condition of anonymity. “There are literally hundreds of sites and they often stream from parts of the world that don’t have ads playing. On fight nights we get to watch all the corner interactions (that are) usually covered by ads. So I get a better product and it’s cheaper? I wonder why I’m not paying for it lol.”

For a company that was essentially built on pay-per-view, viewing habits like these have the potential to force major upheaval. Though the UFC’s reliance on pay-per-view revenue has decreased over the years thanks in part to various broadcast rights deals at home and abroad — the current multitiered agreement with ESPN is reported to be worth in excess of $1.5 billion, for example — residential pay-per-view sales still accounted for about $194 million in revenue for the UFC in 2015, according to internal documents.

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The demand for pay-per-views is one of several things that makes the UFC such a valuable commodity for ESPN. The latest extension of the deal in 2019 made ESPN the exclusive provider of residential UFC pay-per-views in the U.S., requiring viewers to buy an ESPN+ subscription to even have the option to buy a UFC event on pay-per-view.

Reliable estimates as to how much money the UFC and other combat sports promoters lose to pirated streams are hard to come by. In the past, some industry experts have estimated that as high as a third of the total audience for a pay-per-view fight might be made up of viewers watching on pirated streams.

The technology required to offer those streams isn’t particularly complicated, said Brad Parobek, senior vice president at anti-piracy firm Friend MTS. Sometimes all it requires is one legally acquired stream that can then be restreamed to thousands of other people. Other times pirates will use several different streams and piece them together, hoping to make the source of the leak harder to detect.

“It’s very simple,” Parobek said. “And that’s why there’s so little time delay between the actual stream and the stream that you’re seeing. It’s about the same delay as you would see for an NFL game on NFL Ticket compared to the live broadcast locally.”

Friend MTS specializes in the sort of “fingerprint” technology that can recognize pirated streams and quickly trace them to their source and bring them down. It handles broadcast security for sporting events like the English Premier League, among other live sports properties, and has worked with the UFC in the past, but not at present, according to Parobek, who said he’s reached out multiple times to White and other UFC executives with offers to help combat online piracy.

“Put it this way, the UFC is not happy with the result they had from this latest Conor McGregor fight (at UFC 257),” Parobek said. “UFC themselves, they know they have a problem. … It’s important to put something in place to inhibit restreaming, which is not what the UFC’s doing.”

What the UFC is doing, UFC senior vice president and COO Lawrence Epstein said, is taking a multi-pronged approach to the problem.

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“No. 1 has been education,” Epstein said, adding that the UFC has tried to find innovative ways to communicate to fans that watching pirated pay-per-views is effectively stealing. “No. 2 has been trying to work with vendors and technologies to figure out ways to identify people who are stealing and shut down these streams. And of course, third is working with our broadcast partners and figuring out how we can partner with them to knock this down. The most significant way that we do that is by trying to make some legislative changes to try to clean up the legal landscape. It’s a classic situation here where you have technology that’s run way out in front of the law.”

The legislative battle is one the UFC has been waging for years. Former UFC co-owner Lorenzo Fertitta testified about online piracy at a House Judiciary Committee hearing all the way back in 2009.  There he told lawmakers that UFC 106, an event with an estimated pay-per-view buy rate of around 375,000, had more than 140,000 views via unauthorized streams.

Legislative efforts got a boost recently with the passage of the Protecting Lawful Streaming Act of 2020, which was included in the COVID-19 stimulus relief bill that President Donald Trump signed into law in late December, making it a felony to stream copyrighted material for profit. The UFC worked with Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina to pass that bill, Epstein said, and getting it signed into law was “no doubt probably part of the equation” that prompted White to once again highlight the issue in public.

“We love the fact that Dana’s talking about it because that frankly gets more prominence to the issue,” Epstein said.

As for who the “we” is that White mentioned as engaging in ongoing surveillance of suspected online pirates, Epstein added: “It goes without saying, but I will go ahead and say it, everything we’re doing of course is legal. There’s nothing we’re doing that’s untoward in any way. We’re working with a variety of service providers and technology vendors that help us track where the illegal streams are coming from and use a variety of strategies and techniques that either take them down or let them know that we are at least watching what they’re doing. Most of this piracy takes place on public platforms. They’re hiding in plain sight.”

Though most of the effort in the private sector is on stopping online piracy, or at least offering ways for rights holders to disrupt it, data company MUSO has dedicated a lot of its energy to better understanding it. MUSO CEO and co-founder Andy Chatterley said his company tracked over 134 billion visits to piracy sites last year, encompassing everything from unauthorized film and TV downloads to live sports streaming — and even that only represents a portion of the bigger picture, he said.

Chatterley’s main thesis is that companies should think not only about preventing piracy but also about mining it for data about who their fans are and why they pirate in the first place. If they can understand it, he argues, they have a better chance of converting at least some of those freeloading viewers into paying customers.

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“The reasons people pirate really come down to potentially three reasons,” Chatterley said. “One is price. One is access, where it’s not available in their country. And the last one, which is probably less often the case, is they didn’t know it was illegal. Maybe I just clicked on a link from Facebook or Twitter and didn’t think about whether it was legal.”

Certainly, some of the fight fans I spoke to who acknowledged watching illegal streams said they had fallen into that last category, at least at first. Others even acknowledged using phones or iPads to stream UFC events for family and friends, especially when social distancing guidelines kept them apart.

A group also said that regional restrictions or other barriers had driven them to unauthorized streams, like one fight fan in Israel who said that UFC pay-per-views were prohibitively expensive without a cable subscription of some sort, and all just to watch an event that typically starts in the predawn hours on a Sunday.

Most, however, know the streams they’re watching are illegal and also know how to acquire them legally. They say they simply don’t believe the events the UFC is offering are worth the $69.99 price tag, especially when they can so easily be acquired for free online.

Price and availability, according to a recent study in New Zealand, are still the biggest drivers of online piracy.

“The bit that only (UFC) can do is to really understand their pricing,” Chatterley said. “I think now, especially with an economic downturn due to COVID-19, for a lot of people $70 is a lot to pay for something that may only last a few minutes.”

But pay-per-view prices, particularly to view UFC events, only seem to be going up. ESPN has already hiked UFC pay-per-view prices twice since the start of its deal with the UFC, starting out at $59.99 in 2018 and increasing by $5 in 2020 and 2021, for a total increase of $10. In addition, the price of ESPN+ subscriptions — a requirement to purchase residential pay-per-views in the U.S. — has also increased, going from $49.99 for an annual subscription to $59.99.

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For a lot of fight fans who remember the good old days of paying $49.99 for UFC pay-per-views that they remember as better overall values and featuring more fighters they knew and cared about, the frequent increases smack of corporate greed. They point to an expanded UFC events calendar that stretches the talent pool ever thinner across pay-per-view events, and they rebel at the thought of paying premium prices for events in which they might only really be invested in one or two bouts.

As one fan told me: “The only thing really separating the tiers of UFC products is the paywall, which seems a bit backward to me. The product shouldn’t be special because it’s being sold for $70; the product should be worth $70 because it’s special.”

Understanding those types of fan sentiments could be vital for companies like the UFC, MUSO CEO Chatterley said. For last year’s UFC 246 pay-per-view, headlined by the always popular Conor McGregor taking on fan favorite Donald Cerrone, Chatterley said he tracked over 168,000 full event downloads. That’s people who downloaded the event after it was already over, which Chatterley said was indicative of a “massive interest” for something like a live sports event.

The “old way” of looking at online piracy, he said, was to write it off as a few select tech geeks in the 18- to 25-year-old male demographic. But as consumers become more tech savvy, not to mention more comfortable with and accustomed to getting more of their entertainment products via streaming services (whether legal or otherwise), the demographic makeup of the online piracy audience gets more and more diverse.

Instead of only focusing on punitive actions, Chatterley said, companies should be using piracy data as a guide, especially since some studies have shown that those who watch pirated material are often the most ardent fans of that content.

“I think it’s the biggest opportunity a company like UFC can have in terms of customer acquisition because you can grow your user base in a way that you didn’t necessarily plan on,” Chatterley said. “So personally, I think the problem with the (punitive) approach is that technologies will always change. As soon as you think you’ve got a handle on how to stop it, technologies will shift, as they always do, and you’ll spend the next five years dealing with how people are stealing it another way.

“I know this is our sales pitch, but I think you should view it not as an audience thief, but an audience to win over. We already know they’re engaged. We know they’re spending money in the wider ecosystem. So win it by changing the way you look at it.”

The UFC’s approach to combating online piracy has changed over the years. Back when Fertitta testified on Capitol Hill, there was no specific policy proposal on offer, but rather a general sense of frustration. At one point, the UFC even cut a deal with certain online streamers, reasoning that if they couldn’t be stopped then they might as well become partners on the pay-per-views in some limited form.

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Now the company is in business with ESPN, which opens the potential that it could benefit from Disney’s aggressive anti-piracy pushes via the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment. The possibility of help from those big players could be a significant factor in the UFC’s battle against online piracy, according to Andy Maxwell, who writes about piracy issues for TorrentFreak.

“When it comes to dealing with pirates, no entity has been more ruthless over the years than Disney,” Maxwell said. The ACE anti-piracy coalition has won some real victories, which could ultimately benefit the UFC if it continues, Maxwell added, but even those efforts have “hardly made a dent in illegal streaming providers, despite many significant victories. In piracy, damage tends to repair and reconfigure itself pretty quickly.”

This is what has typically limited the usefulness of the punitive approach in combating online piracy. The network of offerings is so vast, spread out all over the world. Passing laws in one country doesn’t necessarily help you in another. Even pinpointing exactly where the pirates are isn’t always easy or precise, and prosecuting them across multiple jurisdictions could quickly become unwieldy.

To at least some extent then, rights holders rule with the consent of the governed. If there’s a way around every paywall (including the one protecting this story), then at some level part of the battle becomes convincing people that they should want to support your content to keep it coming, rather than merely being dragged over the paywall by a lack of other options.

According to UFC COO Epstein, the UFC’s efforts on that front have mostly focused on convincing fans that piracy isn’t a victimless crime.

“On March 6 we’ve got multiple people on that (UFC 259) card that are partners with us on that event,” Epstein said, referring to the fighters — typically champions — who get a share of pay-per-view buys as part of their payout for the event. “We’ve tried to do some education on that and let people know that you’re not just stealing from the UFC, you’re stealing from the individual fighters that are our partners on these events.”

Still, many fans I spoke to cited the comparatively low share of company revenue that’s paid out to UFC fighters as one of the motivating factors in their decision to stream events. At the very least, it seems to be the main factor in assuaging any guilt they may feel over the transaction.

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It’s true that the portion of fighters who receive a cut of the pay-per-view money is minuscule when compared with the total UFC roster. Internal documents made public during the ongoing antitrust suit against the UFC have revealed a concerted effort to keep fighter pay from creeping up above 20 percent of revenue, a fact several fans pointed to in explaining why they refuse to pay for UFC events.

“I try to support fighters directly when I can, like buying their merchandise or supporting their sponsors when I know they see a piece of that,” said one fan who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “But when I see 80 percent of the money going to (the UFC) instead of the fighters, I don’t feel bad about not giving them more of my money.”

To Showtime Sports president Stephen Espinoza, who’s been a part of major boxing pay-per-views like the one that pitted McGregor against Floyd Mayweather to the tune of more than 4 million domestic pay-per-view buys, that explanation seems more like a justification than a reason.

“I think it’s fairly well known and generally accepted that a larger percentage of the revenues go to the fighters in boxing and in boxing pay-per-views,” Espinoza said. “But I haven’t seen any data or any information which suggests that knowing that has resulted in fans streaming illegally any less.”

Instead, Espinoza said, he believes most fans who are looking for free content will find it where it’s available regardless of where their sympathies lie. At the same time, he pointed to the array of streaming apps most people subscribe to as proof that paying for the content we want isn’t necessarily becoming less ingrained as sports and entertainment adjust to new technologies.

“Whether it’s NBA League Pass or premium streaming services, to OnlyFans and even Twitter potentially launching a paid portion of their site, this generation is in some ways more used to paying for things that they want than at any point in modern media history,” Espinoza said.

As for how to combat piracy in a way that maintains pay-per-view as an effective model for combat sports, he pointed to the example of the music industry, which seemed to hit a crisis point in the late ’90s and early 2000s as it confronted file-sharing sites like Napster and LimeWire.

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“To their credit, the music industry came up with a solution that was consumer friendly and economically viable for the industry,” Espinoza said. “And they’re better for it. It doesn’t mean there’s no more music piracy, but both in terms of streaming and live events, the music industry is relatively healthy, certainly in comparison to when it was at its bottom. So it’s making sure that we, as an industry of combat sports and paid content providers, are delivering the content as efficiently, effectively, in a high-quality manner when and where the consumer wants it and at a price point that they’re willing to pay. It may seem a little bit naive, but I believe, having seen what the music industry has done, that the problem can be solved.”

Of course, to the thousands of fans who will watch UFC 259 on Saturday without paying a dime, it probably doesn’t seem like there’s any problem to solve.

They’ll go to one of their favorite streaming sites, maybe turn on their VPN and enter an email address, and they’re off and running. Premium content for free, or very close to it. What no one can say with any certainty is how much longer it will stay that way, or what might come next in this never-ending game of high-tech cat-and-mouse. Even the UFC president isn’t kidding himself about that part.

“They’re never all going to go away,” White told reporters earlier this year. “They’re going to be out there, and we’re not trying to get rid of all of them. I just want to catch a few. That’s all I’m looking for. You can’t shut the whole thing down. That piracy industry is going to go on forever. Let me catch a few and watch what happens. And I will. Oh, it’s coming.”

With three title fights slated for Saturday and a heavyweight title rematch scheduled for later this month, the waiting — and the watching — continues.

(Illustration: Stu Ohler / The Athletic)