To understand the problem of illegal broadcasts, it is important to see that consumption patterns of sports content have undergone an extraordinary change in the last decade. The weight of classic, linear television (when we watch a match from start to finish) is constantly decreasing, and this is not a sport-specific, but rather a generational trend.
Based on BT Sports' own measurements, Tuesday's Champions League matches were followed by forty percent lessas in the previous season, The NFL predicted a 14 percent decline for the 2020 season.at the level of television viewership. However, the fans have not disappeared at all, they only follow the events through other platforms. Sky Sports, for example, although it reported a 13 per cent decline in traditional Premier League broadcasts, paid platforms Sky Go and Now TV saw a 31 per cent increase in the number of users. On one side of the migration are therefore consumers who are willing to pay for premium intermediation services.
On the other, on the other hand, there are clearly users of “pirate sites” who prefer to bypass official and paid channels. Nearly half of the 1,000 fans interviewed by the BBC said they had watched a match on an unofficial online channel at least once — a third a month and a fifth at least weekly. The BBC article stresses that the European Court of Justice continues to classify illegal monitoring of live sports broadcasts in the same punishable category as downloading copyrighted music, films and other intellectual works. However, it is one thing to regulate the law and another to enforce it.
Illegal streaming is booming more than ever.Thanks to technological advances, there are almost no entry barriers, for many it is worth the business. Due to the global spread of broadband internet and cloud solutions, it is possible to stream any content from anywhere in the world. And for users, speed and freeness override convenience: for many, it is worth clicking on a couple of unwanted ads if the received content arrives in good enough quality with minimal interruptions.
The seriousness of the threat of pirated content is constantly emphasized by the big leagues: According to a recent study, the Premier League loses £1 million in each match. as the statistics sent to sponsors do not show spectators following matches on illegal surfaces. In the same report, it was also calculated that, according to conservative estimates, It is estimated that 7.1 million people watch the struggles of the English teams in this form. La Liga has also reported dramatic effects, with losses amounting to €400 million a year caused to the Spanish economy by illegal mediation.
The damage is therefore already measured in millions of euros and is far from over. According to experts, first of all it is not the missed sponsorship revenue that is the problem, but the decrease in the sense of “exclusivity”. Hardly negotiated mediation royalties are at risk,This begs the question: why should television companies pay heavy money to rights-holding leagues if the value they transmit is simply stolen?
Experts interviewed at the SportsPro Live conference also agreed that the BeoutQ case in Saudi has risen to a level that affects the entire industry. The history of the most famous “camouflage channel”, gaining global attention, began with the blockade of Qatar. In response to a commercial action led by Saudi Arabia, the mini-state stopped broadcasting beIN Sports, which holds the best sports rights in the region. This made Premier League or Champions League matches inaccessible to tens of millions of sports fans, but soon the solution was born: capturing beIN's original, expensive broadcast rights and produced content, the set-top-box based BeoutQ launched with 10 channels.Recognizing the exceptional business opportunity, the devices began to be sold in stores, and in several countries of the Arabian Gulf region, matches are currently available virtually unchanged, in HD quality, with the difference that the subscription fee is collected by pirates. To this extent, set-top boxes that broadcast illegal broadcasts, on which thousands of channels are available, have never been sold commercially before - they have built their own brand based on stolen broadcasts.
The blockade of Qatar has been going on since 2017 the question arises as to how such an obvious fraud process of such magnitude can survive for more than two years. BeIN, of course, tries to put pressure on all official and unofficial forumsi to those affected and urges great efforts to work together against infringing behaviour. However, Saudi Arabia's diplomatic force has so far resisted all the actions.According to an article in the New York Times, the Saudis have been trying to compensate the victims in other areas since the scandal erupted: for example, they were also partly behind the previously discussed $25 billion FIFA bid (to host new international tournaments worldwide). In addition, it was no coincidence that the first “paid players” appeared in the Spanish league, that is, they put players of the Saudi national team on loan with La Liga teams in exchange for some money in preparation for the World Cup in Russia.
These “soft power” solutions continue. BeoutQ has not stopped, today hundreds of channels are available through them, among the damaged rights holders we find the NFL, the NBA, Formula 1 and all the major European football championships.Too many are affected and too many people are getting stolen content. Although the Saudis have launched the whole action mainly against Qatar and to compensate their own people, through the Internet now almost anyone reaches their broadcasts, so the scandal has risen to a completely global level.Rights holders seem less bothered by this: Liberty, which owns Formula One, is currently in talks with the Saudis about a possible start in 2021, and in the Arab country They also raised enough money to shake up the sports world JOSHUA—RUIZheavyweight boxing match rematch to be held in Saudi Arabiathis year IN DECEMBER. BeoutQ continues to live and thrive thanks to these steps: they even had the power to announce the new season of the Premier League with an official commercial - of course, they did not pay a penny for the clippings to the English or the official television companies.
The experts of the SportsPro Live conference highlighted that there has also been no consensus among the owners of premium rights as to who is the “owner” of the problem.The market demand for quality live sports broadcasts remains high, but user behavior is changing and they are increasingly open to the possibilities offered by non-traditional televisions. The entry of Facebook or Amazon also favors rights holders:to them, thanks to the new players, the rights holders are still in such a state of calm that they can charge a constantly increasing price for their “porteca”. However, piracy is a serious threat to the entire system.
This is why the more forward-thinking rights holders have sided with the official intermediaries and are collectively trying to enforce the legal regulations with which sites are closed or criminal groups are detected.ABundesligaFor example, in August of this year, it announced that it had invested in “Righties”into a technology company called, whose mission is to search and find the illegal platforms that broadcast matches of the German championship through any internet-based solution (social media, IPTV, websites). TheNBA with 400,000 subscribers r/NBAstreams reddit The site was closed by the authorities due to copyright infringement. The difficulty of the fight is well indicated by the fact that they watched and gathered evidence for three seasons before the actual action took place.
Bureaucracy drives water to a pirate's mill. La Liga, for example, received outright punishment for trying to protect its own interests.According to the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD), the league violated local data protection laws by searching through an application the bars and public places where they broadcast their Spanish champions without paying royalties. As the telephone application did not ask for adequate permissions to record the microphone and camera images, La Liga was forced to stop its action and pay a fine of 250,000 euros to the authorities.
Despite the obvious crime these platforms can only be terminated by the competent authority in the local country, Those responsible are facing criminal prosecution. Legislation is also different, in the United States they act much more strictly on this type of crime, one of the main reasons for which is that other sectors of the entertainment industry (film, music) have already traveled this path once. In the era of the boom of “copied discs” and large download sites, an example has been set, and the culture of consumption of intellectual works has also changed: it is no coincidence that most people in this country are willing to pay money for digital content.
Better information for consumers can lead to a solution with strict action by the authority. The experts agreed that Users also need to be aware that every time they click through the ads of pirated sites, they enrich criminals and help maintain this system. And a set-top-box purchased from an uncertain source carries a huge risk: when you hear about spyware being installed on household IT products (e.g. routers), it is not at all advisable to buy unauthenticated devices from a foreign country.
However, much remains to be done in this area. In the film industry, for example, it is customary to indicate at the beginning of works that copying and distributing certain content is a crime: in live sports broadcasts this is unthinkable. Set-top-box devices that broadcast a fake image are often provided by the official intermediary (e.g. It is equipped with the logo of BT, Sky), deceiving the consumer.
Informing and “educating” viewers is very important, but faster results can be achieved by putting ISP partners on the side of the case. The beIN Sports expert, for example, highlighted that although the action of the Saudis is very spectacular, Half of all pirated content is uploaded to the World Wide Web by major European Internet service providers. However, at the moment there is no legal tool in their hands. They see one of the keys to the solution in working with these large providers to introduce technological innovations that can be used to filter and shut down pirated platforms in time.
The vision is given, but since we are now talking about an Internet-based industry and a global problem as a whole, here everything changes very quickly. Pirates are also using increasingly sophisticated solutions (such as hidden IP addresses)and they use several sources at once: BT, for example, regularly searches and “cuts off” the path of pirate broadcasts, finding the point where they catch their signal. However, it is a common experience that, even if one of these actions is carried out, the illegal intermediaries find another signal within half a minute, from which they continue to broadcast the broadcast unauthorised. In some major markets where official intermediaries do not have the authority to terminate pages or cannot be solved technologically, They interfere with broadcasts available on illegal platforms. The “graininess” that appears periodically, the degradation of the broadcast image, is often not at all accidental: they deliberately interfere with the broadcast and thus degrade the quality of illegal streaming sites.
Experts agreed that as much as it may seem like a windmill fight, the protection of the content should continue. In addition to the intermediary channels, it is in the elementary interest of the rights owner leagues that exclusivity is not further undermined.Paid content such as pay-per-view boxing matches is already difficult to sell to consumers globally, so prices for these special events are likely to drop. In addition, in the next two or three years, premium live sports will come to a kind of turning point: as competition for fresh capital brought by new players (DAZN, Amazon, Facebook) slows down, rights holders will be in a worse bargaining position.
And if there are fewer royalties to be collected from broadcasts, the teams/athletes themselves can plan with a smaller budget, so that in the long term only those who have been able to take a hard line against pirated content can maintain their competitiveness,and helped their intermediary partners in the fight. The exorbitant amount of money collected from royalties every five years, that is, the strategy of reaping and satisfied “lying back” has definitively failed - and this is perhaps the only positive that the sport owes to pirates.
