Illegal options also have lot less resources (revenue, service providers who are willing host/facilitate illegal activities, and so on) so it’s a fair comparison in my opinion.

> service providers who are willing host/facilitate illegal activities

At least for NFL pirate streams, it seems they tend to use "burner" tenants from Azure and AWS. Of course they get shut down, but how hard is it to spin up another one?

They still have to put it behind a privacy-friendly proxy to hide their IP address from litigators right?

Yup. Also a bit more latency since it's effectively restreaming unless it's someone at the actual event.