Once again for those who didn’t know or forgot: just like with every other industry making the same complaint, when they say that it “costs billions”, that’s true in the exact same way as losing a random lottery ticket would cost me millions: completely hypothetically.
In their calculations, every person who watches an illegal stream would, had the stream not been available, pay their ridiculously high prices to watch legally rather than not watch at all.
In reality, the opposite is many times more common and it’s frankly journalistic malpractice that mainstream media always just regurgitate that claim as if it was indisputably true.
Like with copaganda, they’re covering for predatory practices, in this case charging much more than your target customers can afford and then using draconian measures against those providing an alternative solution that wouldn’t have been necessary if the product had been reasonably priced.