Lucas Shaw Los Angeles
TWITTER’S video-streaming application Periscope enabled people to pirate Saturday’s fight between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, getting the thrill of the year’s biggest bout without paying the $100 (R1 205) pay-per-view tab.
Many of these users posted about being able to watch the event on Twitter, where Dick Costolo, the social-media company’s chief executive, pronounced Periscope the night’s victor.
Executives from HBO and Showtime asked Periscope and other live-streaming services such as Meerkat to take down the streams as the fight was happening, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified while the matter is being investigated.
While Saturday’s piracy is unlikely to dent the millions made by Time Warner’s HBO and CBS’s Showtime, which partnered to produce the fight, it augurs a potential problem if more people use live-streaming apps to watch pay-TV. HBO previously asked the service to take down streams of the season premiere of its hit show “Game of Thrones” when it realised people had used Periscope to stream it for free.
“I watched last night’s fight by just browsing through different Periscope streams,” Shelly Palmer, an adviser to media companies such as Viacom and 21st Century Fox, said. “This kind of live piracy is going to be hard if not impossible to regulate.”
People watching the fight, some of whom paid for it, used their mobile devices to capture the video and stream it for others to watch on Periscope. Periscope is one of a number of apps with this capability, and the most prominent given Twitter’s ownership.
A representative for Showtime declined to comment on the use of Periscope during the fight, while a spokesman for HBO did not immediately respond to a request for comment. – Bloomberg