Leagues from the NFL and NBA to Ultimate Fighting are finding it nearly impossible to block pirate video sites from streaming live events
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It's Saturday, Feb. 5, at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas, and 11,000 screaming fans are watching as barefoot brawlers pummel each other senseless in the latest bouts of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the popular mixed martial arts league. Edward Muncey is engaged in fierce hand-to-hand combat, but not in the ring; he's at a keyboard in a room a few hundred feet away that reverberates with the percussive roar from the nearby arena. Dressed in a black pinstripe suit, the UFC's vice-president of new media and technology pitches forward on an uncomfortable hotel chair before three computer screens, tensely trawling the Internet to find and shut down unauthorized live broadcasts of the evening's matches.
It's an almost impossible task. As the night progresses, unauthorized video streams of the event sprout across the Web like weeds on an endless lawn. Although Muncey has contracted with several anti-piracy firms around the world, he personally identifies more than 200 illegal broadcasts of the fight playing on a single site: Justin.tv, the live video streaming service, based in San Francisco. He's able to shut these down quickly using a Web tool that Justin.tv makes available to copyright holders. He has less luck with videos of the event he finds on SopCast.com, a Malaysian peer-to-peer network; vShare.tv, a Dutch streaming site; and dozens of other far-flung sites and blogs. Muncey and his team fire off hundreds of threatening e-mails to the operators of these websites, demanding that they take down the illicit feeds. Many comply, but others respond slowly or not at all. "It's like someone stole your car and is celebrating by doing a donut on the parking lot next door," Muncey says.
Sports leagues once viewed the Internet's disruption of other entertainment industries from a relatively safe perch. The Web was terrific for sharing digital music and television programs, but it wasn't really great for games in progress?when outcomes are still in doubt and fans are most interested. Now the technology has improved and pirates can easily divert authorized broadcasts from TV networks onto their own websites. They have powerful computers, fast broadband connections, and operations in countries such as China, Sweden, and the Netherlands, which have less rigorous copyright protection laws and anti-piracy enforcement. This past National Football League season, for example, fans could find and watch almost any game they wanted to see, as long as they didn't mind inconsistent video quality and the occasional inconvenience of having to find a new stream when the one they were watching shut down.
"We all knew this tsunami was coming," says Eric Goldman, an associate professor of law at Santa Clara University and an adviser to Justin.tv, who does not speak for the company. "Some of the businesses that leagues had in the past are going to get much harder to control."
It's not as if sports leagues haven't contended with piracy before. For years, rogue bar owners purchased pay-per-view or satellite feeds and displayed them to their clientele without making the proper payments. But this new kind of Internet piracy could be far more difficult to stop and strikes right at the heart of leagues like the UFC, which asks fans for $45 to watch a night of action on pay-per-view television?or via its own website. With thousands of Internet users able to watch a single unauthorized broadcast and countless illicit channels springing up across the Web, the potential financial losses for leagues such as the UFC are devastating.
The country's major sports leagues are all vulnerable, but in different ways. They make billions selling exclusive broadcast contracts to TV networks and high-priced stadium seats to fans, then go to great lengths to protect those lucrative businesses. For instance, in most cities, Major League Baseball does not allow fans to watch the games of their hometown team online, because local broadcasters fear it might damage the TV ratings of televised games. And the NFL blacks out games in the city of the home team if the stadium is not sold out. Piracy undermines the leagues' effort to create such artificial scarcities. It also gives a fan interested only in the Baltimore Ravens, say, a reason to avoid paying $300 a year or more for satellite provider DirecTV's NFL Ticket package, which includes every game each weekend.
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