Today, there was a little bit of a skirmish between two professional
YouTubers. Our dear old friend Logan Paul and KSI had an actual boxing
match at the Manchester Arena where 15,000 tickets were sold (!!!!!!!!)
for an event that ultimately ended in a draw and vows for a rematch.
The action onstage wasn’t the only place where viewers could get a look
into the action, there was a $10 pay-per-view stream on YouTube, but
more people seemed to end up watching pirated streams on Twitch with
boxing fight streams reaching over a million concurrent users at one
point. Streams also popped up on Twitter-owned Periscope and there were a
few unofficial streams popping up on YouTube as well.
Now, forget the parties involved and the topic and the motivations for a
moment if you can. I understand if it might feel more than a little
difficult to feel remorse for the parties involved, that has been a
common refrain for pirated content popping up from whatever group for
whatever reason though.
There’s obviously a big difference between free curiosity and $10
curiosity for an event like this but it seems pretty apparent that
having access to a free stream on an easily-accessible mainstream site
probably dissuaded some people from paying for the event on YouTube.
While people may have previously scoured the web for pop-up ridden sites
to view something like this, Twitch and other services unofficially
served it up on a platter.
There are plenty of events similar to this one, but so often the refrain
is made that people have to turn to pirated streams because the
alternative is paying for cable or something that is really against the
spirit of these easy-to-access platforms. Well, here’s an example of
something that falls far outside that argument.
It’s impossible to squash all of the pirated streams, but Amazon’s
Twitch is a bit too mature to be hosting pirated streams in such rampant
numbers without being a little more proactive — instead of just relying
on user reports to police pirated content that was fairly hard to avoid
stumbling upon on the platform.
Even as tech companies continue to try and crack live content, services
like Twitch that don’t proactively search out users hijacking streams of
big events like this really serve to complicate and deter their own
goals of eventually finding a way to monetize big events like this.
https://www.geezgo.com/sps/36365
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