Published on January 15th, 2020 📆 | 4117 Views ⚑
0Twitch Has Become a Haven for Live Sports Piracy
As Liverpool soccer player Roberto Firmino clutched out the only goal of the club's December 21 FIFA Club World Cup match before a live audience of over 45,000, at least twice as many fans were tuned in somewhere better suited to FIFA 20, the video game: the streaming platform Twitch.
While the game roiled on, three of the top 10 livestreams listed in Twitchâs directory were simulcasts of the FIFA Club World Cup matchâwith 14,000, 33,000, and 53,000 viewers respectively. The usual Twitch suspects filled out the rest of the list: a couple of Fortnite streams, a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament and, a little cutely, a livestream of FIFA 20. The pirated sports streams were live for hours and hours.
The parade of copyright violations wasnât a Club World Cup anomaly. Twitch has been and remains home to illicit sports broadcasts; a late December boxing match attracted over 86,000 viewersâsome of whom spammed ACII genitalia in chatâand a mid-January soccer match drew over 70,000 over three livestreams. Although Twitch often stomps them out mid-match, plenty of livestreams posted by throwaway accounts with innocuous names like âUntitledâ slip through the cracks and garner tens of thousands of viewers.
Pirated live sports broadcasts have prompted hand-wringing from both government and private companies for over 15 years. At a stern 2009 hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Texas representative Lamar Smith noted the dramatic increase in the unauthorized distribution of live sports programming. âWhy buy the cow if you can get the milk for free,â he asked. âWhy pay the sporting event when you can watch it online for free?â
A senior vice president of Twitchâs predecessor, Justin.tv, testified back then that the company used special filtering software that matched live streams with copyrighted content and removed offending feeds. Virginia representative Bob Goodlatte contended that, compared to a platform like YouTube, the speed and simultaneity of livestreaming presents a slew of challenges when it comes to taking down, say, a pirated UFC stream before the damage is done. That was over 10 years ago.
"Itâs not the ideal viewing experience, but sometimes there are no options besides subscribing to a billion premium things."
Luis Paez-Pumar, Reporter
Increasingly, those links lead to Twitch, whose credentials as a mainstream platform make it a relatively safe optionâespecially after Reddit shut down the popular soccer piracy subreddit r/soccerstreams. âThe older days of streams (5+ years ago) was [sic] littered with ads and viruses,â says a soccer stream Discord moderator who goes by Tom. âeven though it is considered illegal, I see it being the same as watching porn and being under 18.â He adds that some of the hairier-looking piracy sites are still more popular, offer higher-quality streams, and have live chats that utilize Twitch chatsâ code.
The same subscription fatigue thatâs fueled the resurgence in pirating streamed television and movies appears to have hit sports, as well. âWhenever a game isnât on the biggest channels that I have under my subscriptions, Twitch seems to be the place to go to,â says sports reporter Luis Paez-Pumar. Paez-Pumar says he has access to NBC, Fox, ESPN and BeIN, yet once a week, heâll catch a game of soccer on Twitch. âItâs not the ideal viewing experience, but sometimes there are no options besides subscribing to a billion premium things.â
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