Pay TV subs and revenues in the Middle East continue the decline that set in during 2016 amid little sign of the region’s piracy problems being resolved. The diplomatic dispute between Saudi Arabia and Qatar that erupted in 2017 has almost universally been pinpointed as the root cause of subsequent loss of pay TV revenues on the grounds that it precipitated the rise of BeoutQ which then perpetrated piracy on an industrial scale. The beIN Media Group, which has held supposedly exclusive rights to major sports across the Middle East, has claimed that BeoutQ’s piracy and retransmission of the signals in Saudi Arabia has cost it $1 billion, a figure endorsed in a report by MarkMonitpor commissioned by FIFA, the…