Boxing Promoter Continues Its Fight Against Piracy As Periscope, Meerkat Flex Their Muscles

As TechGraphs readers commented, it didn’t take much digging to find a free stream of the Pacquiao/Mayweather fight from the weekend, despite HBO and Showtime’s legal jabs. And for the first time on a grand level, sports is dealing with pegged-leged and eye-patched mauraders in the form of social media live streams via Periscope and Meerkat.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Top Rank Inc. will seek legal action against individuals that it determines illegally streamed the fight and the companies that provided the platforms for them to do so.

“We’ll have to pursue any people who are allowing people to distribute something that is behind a proprietary wall,” DuBoef told the Times. “We’ll have to challenge those technology companies that are facilitating it and we’re going to have to take a legal position against them.”

Twitter, which owns Periscope, contends it respected intellectual property rights and disabled “dozens” of illegal streams of the fight. But a tweet from Twitter’s Dick Costolo, chief executive, seems to have discredited the company’s sincerity in fighting the piracy.

And the winner is… @periscopeco

— dick costolo (@dickc) May 3, 2015

Christina Warren, a writer at Mashable, shared her experience exploring the different Periscope streams. It’s a great read which you should check out for yourself.

Tapping into a few streams, it was quickly apparent that some were just standard Periscopes of friends at a fight-night party, while others were focused intently on television sets or computer screens playing the fight in real time.

The number of streams was almost overwhelming. Some Periscopers were shooting in portrait mode (as is standard for Periscope), while others were shooting in landscape to capture more of a TV screen.

Some streams featured commentary from parties and shots of friends; others focused almost completely on the fight itself. Some streams were in crowded rooms, other in almost empty homes.

Based on the map on Periscope, I saw streams from all over the world. There was even a stream of the fight from a police department in Africa. The Pacquiao-Mayweather fight was a very global story, and this was evident from the Periscope streams.

Warren noted that it did seem someone was shutting down the streams. If a specific stream received too many favorites, it’d get shut down. But Warren would just find another. She said the stream she watched half the fight in had more than 10,000 people at one point. In an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Periscope co-founder and CEO Kayvon Beykpour layed out his team’s direct work with the content providers to shut down streams. Bekypour said he took down 30 of the 66 requests, with the others already having stopped streaming on their own. He said they are brainstorming with content partners on ways to better handle piracy.

TechGraphs has been at the forefront of reporting how these apps could affect sports. In March, our own David Temple opined as to possible ways these mobile apps could affect sports broadcasts, namely with streams live from an event or game. A day before the fight, my cohort David Wiers touched on the Meerkat Android app release and wrote:

These are urky broadcasting rights waters we’ve waded into. From takedown notices, muted streams on Twitch.tv due to music rights to being wary of narcs taking you down in person for an illegally stream boxing match, the gap between producers and end-users appears to be widening.

Shortly after Wiers posted his piece, news came out that the PGA Tour revoked a reporter’s credentials for the rest of the season after she streamed a practice round – which no one owns broadcast rights to. The NHL has banned used of the apps and warned reporters not to use them.

@davidwiers Up your post’s alley. https://t.co/9BLIe42NBR

— Seth Keichline (@SethKeichline) May 1, 2015

@SethKeichline @awfulannouncing ridiculous.

— David Wiers (@davidwiers) May 1, 2015

It’s one thing for big boxing, the UFC or the WWE to fight these live streams. Their business model depends on pay-per-view buys, and while Warren and others that watched these social media live streams likely weren’t going to buy the fight anyway, it is a legitimate concern that a percentage of anticipated revenue could soon be slashed. It’s a completely different other thing for leagues and content distributors to overreact to what amounts to a second-screen social experience for most.

(Image via Nicolas Raymond)