Sports is facing the same problem the music and movie industries are facing. For a long time, they were complacent. Sports is most valuable when it's live; pirates simply couldn't distribute sports fast enough.
But technology has caught up to sports. Now, live feeds of games are all over the net, and sports leagues can't stop them. They try, but many of them come from overseas, where copyright isn't enforced, or where the law protects consumers more than copyright holders.
I think they are going to have to loosen up the restrictions on online viewing. The NFL offers online viewing overseas, but not in the US. MLB has MLB.TV, but the local team is blacked out...and the blackout areas are ridiculous.
The reason they do this is to preserve the value of the TV rights, but in the long run, that's not going to work. Any more than the music industry's attempts to sell albums instead of individual songs worked. To combat piracy, they have to offer what the consumer wants - at a price low enough that piracy loses its appeal.
