The most pirate event in the history of the sport

At the end of August on the historic fight Mayweather – McGregor, where the prize of the winner was not less than 300 million dollars, a profit from broadcasting, tickets, and souvenirs sales was added to the guaranteed amount of 100 million. At the same time approximately 100 million users have watched this fight illegally, making it the most pirate event in the history of the sport.

People could watch the match legally (89,95 dollar in the usual quality and 99.95$ – in HD), or free: pirate streams were constantly appearing in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Satellite company Irdeto found 239 illegal broadcasts, 472 thousand people were connected at the same time to one of them: only those viewers would have brought to the organizers about 43 million dollars.

“This is the new reality. People are using pirated content so that right now is not possible to stop,” said Wayne Lonstein, CEO of VFT Solutions, which specializing in the fight against piracy.

The illegal sale of what is protected by copyright appeared long before the Inter net. But Internet made piracy a global network, in which books, films, audio recordings, and, of course, live broadcasts, including sports, are distributed. Statistics show that sports is not a leader in amount of piracy, music and films are in top. But the model of developed sports is that the income of clubs and development of leagues depend on the cost of rights to broadcast.

English Premier League pre-season-2016/17 signed a television contract for the right to show matches in the UK for 6.7 billion Euros – comparing to the previous contract the amount increased by 71%. At the same time, La Liga has sold the rights to broadcast the championship in Spain for 2.7 billion Euros (for 3 seasons), the Bundesliga – for 4.6 billion Euros (for 4 seasons).

With such amounts protection of selling content becomes a priority. And in the case of major Championships, the League which implements the rights, deals with the protection of the content.

For comparison: the cost of the rights to one season of the Premier League is 1.6 billion rubles, around 60 million euros for three seasons. In Russia the development of piracy and the fight against it are on completely different levels.

Their own automatic system for fighting piracy: experience of Spain.

La Liga began to fight with the pirates, when it realized that it`s impossible to catch up with the EPL without it. The New York Times wrote that due to digital piracy, the Spanish Championship is losing about 300 million euros per year.

Acting League President Javier Tebas called the fight against piracy one of the key tasks of the new team almost immediately after the election. And he already has a success. Javier Gomez, the General Director of La Liga, said that the volume of online piracy has decreased: now only 18% of the audience is watching illegal broadcasting, three years ago the figure was higher – 21%.

In March 2017, the League launched a campaign against piracy with the slogan “When piracy appears, football disappears” and the hashtag #ProtectYourTeam. Not only broadcasters from around the world, but also clubs joined the campaign.

When piracy appears, football disappears. ⬛️#ProtectYourTeam 👉 t.co/chpm2hemB6 t.co/g3QvtZZf9J

— LaLiga (@LaLigaEN) March 14, 2017

also clubs joined the campaign.
In February 2015, La Liga launched “Marauder”, a special system for the tracking of pirated content. According to the report, the system tracked 157 846 pirated videos during the past season, 98, 16 % of which was blocked.

Marauder is looking for broadcasts by keywords of search requests, identifying content by audiovisual features and watermark records, fixing the provider and the server from which broadcast is going, and automatically sends the platform a request to delete the stream.

“We have agreements with Internet companies around the world, and for the last two years, the speed of deleting content has increased greatly. As for broadcasts from abroad, we are not always able to block the stream immediately, but at least we limit the ability to view it in Spain,” – said Melcior Soler, Director of the audiovisual Department of the League.

Marauder also provides analytical reports and location maps showing where in the world pirate broadcasts are. This became possible due to watermarks.

What piracy can be?

Industry of illegal sports streaming is evolving and changing along with the users and their habits. Most importantly – it is constantly growing. The research of Irdeto showed that only from September 2015 to September 2016 the popularity of the sites with pirated sports streams increased by 20% – from 100 million visits to 120.

The illegal broadcast has long been associated with sites full of colorful banners that need to be closed every 5-10 minutes. Often the “close” button on some of the banners was false, and another site was open while button was pressed. Such projects, of course, still exist, but it is difficult for them to survive.

A significant part of the foreign market of pirate broadcasts focused on consoles. Media center Kodi becam e a big problem. It is a platform with a wide range of possibilities, from the creation of a “home theater” with comfortable systematized media library (movies, music, photos) to a comfortable viewing of IPTV. However, Kodi has an opened source code that allows developers to create different extensions. This provokes the appearance of add-ins that provides access to illegal content. For example, access to all the leading European football Championships can be bought for 20 euros.

According to the American Association of movie companies (MPAA), about 12 million people are using Kodi legally, another 26 million set up the media player for different types of piracy. Scammers sell consoles with pre-installed Kodi player and add-ons that allows you to watch live sports right on your TV`s big screen. According to experts, this is a big problem: people just don’t realize that they are watching pirated content, because part of the apps on the consoles is legal.

It is clear that one of the surest ways of fighting piracy is the creation of a comfortable legal environment for the user. For example, “Sky” in 2012 launched a Now TV – an Internet TV that is available on multiple devices (smart TVs, consoles, computers, tablets, smartphones, etc.). A year later, came a pack of 10 sports channels of Sky which subscription is currently £ 34 (about 2700 rubles) per month. The service is available only in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

In Russia there is a similar application; “NTV-Plus” launched it in 2014. On a separate site you can buy theme packs including sports, and watch them on different devices. Now a subscription to a “Supersport” package, containing 17 channels, costs 499 rubles per month.

Ban of pirates with the help of watermarks: outsourcing experience of Germany.

The German football Association, unlike La Liga, is fighting against piracy by a third – party company NAGRA. Before the main field of activity of NAGRA was the security of digital cable and satellite television, however, with the development of illegal broadcasts in Internet the company has taken this are too. It made a laboratory for monitoring unauthorized use of the content through TV consoles, web sites and other streaming platforms, including illegal add-ons of Kodi and IPTV.

Under the contract, which is made for a season-2017/18, NAGRA should track the pirate Internet broadcasts of the Bundesliga and Bundesliga -2 worldwide.

“We use digital watermarks, automated and manual monitoring, scanning pages for illegal content, digital fingerprint, and automatically sending of notification, –Lucila Kominski, Manager of product marketing of NAGRA, said to Sport Connect. – Mostly, the authors remove the illegal content immediately upon notification of the potential legal consequences. The faster you stop the pirate stream the lower will be the trust of users for such content. Our web monitoring involves scanning social networks and forums; we are constantly expanding the number of monitored resources”.

According to the representative of NAGRA, the company is focused on the fight against sources of piracy. For example, when the offender is identified the system can give the evidence of improper use of the account to the platform on which the original stream was purchased. Usually the author of the stream pays for the broadcast, and then distributes it (that is illegal). Using NAGRA not only the pirate stream gets ban, but the user violated the user agreement.

“Watermarks is the key factor, they allow to quickly search and identify the content, explains Lucile Kominski. – When the system recognizes it, we send automatic notifications to the infringer or providers of commun ication services and channels. Our clients have access to the portal, which generates reports on any detected pirated content on-live.”

Social networks as an assistant of piracy and the rights holders

Social networks are becoming the most simple and accessible channel for pirated content. YouTube, Facebook, Vkontakte, Instagram and Periscope have their own system of dealing with illegal content, but the new translation appear in the same second. This is a significant difference between the piracy of live events from the illegal posting of films and music: sports events are appearing online and in large quantity.   

YouTube is doing everything possible to make it easier for people to report illegal streams. First, copyright owners can formally notify YouTube about the violation; the service checks the content and if it is really a pirate, blocks the page. After three violations, the user`s account is deleted permanently.

In addition, there is a Content ID tool that allows copyright holders to directly manage their content. The copyright holders give YouTube digital fingerprints of their content, and the system scans the video for possible violations.

Blocking in social networks does not change the behavior of the user who wants to receive content in a certain place. In the last year and a half there was revolution on the market of sports broadcasting; social networks began to buy the rights to broadcast.

Twitter agreed with Wimbledon, NFL, MLB, NCAA, and began producing special programs about the NBA and publish the highlights of the Premier League on Sky page. Facebook also shows MLB and fights for other rights, Amazon Prime, a subsidiary service of the giant of e-Commerce Amazon, already broadcasting NFL, and from 2018 will begin to show men’s tennis. YouTube actively cooperates with the leagues and the networks: in 2016, BT Sport showed the finals of the Champions League and Europe League for free, NFL gave the public access to 3 games of each team.

Russian social networks also follow the global trend: users of “Vkontakte” and “Odnoklassniki” also can watch the football championship of Spain and some major sporting events, the rights to which belong to TeleSport.

The League trust the buyer of rights: the experience of RFPL and “Match TV”

“Match TV” monitors illegal broadcasting in manual mode, it is done by the employees of the Department of corporate protection and legal Department, Andrey Titov, legal director of the GMF “Match” explained to Sport Connect. – We also use Content ID – online system of YouTube. It stores the digital fingerprints – the samples of content. All new videos published on YouTube are compared to the prints.”

“Match TV” came on YouTube in September this year, even from the beginning was relied to the RuTube service, affiliated with “Gazprom-Media”. This decision came from the desire to protect their content.

Now “Match TV” quickly places the video highlights of matches on its channel and using the YouTube tools to block illegal pages. According to TV channel, ContentID system has revealed more than 500 videos on YouTube with the content of “Match TV” in first week of work.

“Over the past calendar year, including October 2017, the illegal broadcast is locked on 750 resources, – said Andrey Titov. – We follow new developments in the field of protection of media content.
Igor Savochkin, head of intellectual property protection, was the head of legal service of OOO “LIGA-TV” before “Match TV” started to control “our Football” channel. In early 2015, he initiated and conducted negotiations with Verimatrix, a company that developed systems for the protection of media content. We use the results in distribution of relevant products. In the world practice some national leagues (such as England, Spain, and Germany) have tools to protect their own content themselves, including the fight against piracy. In Russia, the Premier League handed over to the “Match TV” all the rights.

 
SOURCE: SPORT CONNECT