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We saw in our previous article that, due to the platform’s policy and efforts, music wasn’t really a problem when it came to piracy on Twitch. However, live streaming of pirated matches (soccer, boxing, field hockey, basketball) is starting to blow out of proportion. 

For instance, in January 2019 alone, sports fans accessed sports piracy sites 362.7 million times, according to data gathered from Statista. If a few years ago, these sites were essentially independent sites (and their army of clones) the model has now changed: links are distributed on discord, and many them now lead to an ephemeral Twitch channel, created for the sporting event of the moment. These channels also have copies: as soon as one stream is deleted, another immediately appears.

Twitch has now become a mainstream website, perceived as safe by the users, especially since Reddit shut down the popular r/soccerstreams subreddit, which helped Internet users find links to pirated soccer matches.

Already in 2019, the Soccer World Cup final was watched on Twitch by over 90,000 people even though the match was not officially broadcasted there. Over the past few years, the platform has diversified from a bastion of video games to include all kinds of content, with sports taking center stage. Three channels accounted for the bulk of these 90,000 viewers.

The rise of the online sports events market

The sports broadcasting market in the USA is worth over 20 billion dollars, so it’s only natural that rights holders want to protect their investments as best they can. But sports piracy has become so commonplace that not even sports journalists are immune to the scourge. The soccer journalist Luis Paez-Pumar, who has subscriptions to NBC Fox, ESPN and Bein Sports, told Wired magazine: “Whenever I can’t find a game on one of the big channels I subscribe to, I go on Twitch.” He admits that he watches an average of one soccer match on Twitch per week. He hays that he knows that it’s not ideal, but sometimes there’s also no other option – apart from taking out an overpriced premium subscription.

We’ve already spoken several times about how the subscription offer is fragmented, which is becoming a problem. Sports broadcasting offers suffer just as much; this phenomenon and Twitch’s growing popularity makes the platform the new favorite destination for pirates.

Trials against Twitch: a powerful statement

Some sports federations have tried to get Twitch to stop these practices; other companies have taken the legal route, as in Russia. Indeed, Rambler, Russia’s third-largest internet company filed a lawsuit against Twitch in December 2021, for broadcasting a stream of the English Premier League. The company asked  for$2.8 billion in damages, alleging that Twitch had enabled 36,000 infringements of its rights during soccer matches. Rambler Group dropped the suit a few days later, but such a lawsuit is symptomatic: it  measures  sports piracy on Twitch has become a phenomenon taken seriously by rights holders.

Twitch assures that they are doing everything to counter the phenomenon, and has affirmed that the platform “will continue, as has always been the case, to deal effectively and swiftly with any breach of its terms of service by removing unlicensed copyrighted content. “

But like the others, the platform defends itself by claiming that it only provides access to users, and does not publish any content of its own, and cannot edit content posted by its users nor spot possible intellectual property infringements apart from music. Twitch claims, however, that it does everything in its power to eliminate all the infringements reported.

It’s very difficult to put a precise figure on the loss of revenue resulting from these pirated broadcasts. All we know is that it is a very significant loss, in a market that is quickly growing.

If you want to regain control of your sports streaming revenues an attractive offer is essential, but the help of a specialized company will be indispensable. While removing links from the Internet can be done (with a great deal of effort) on your own, live monitoring of a sporting event cannot be improvised. Specialized tools and a trained staff are essential.

Our process, developed over many years, enables us to remove illegal broadcasts of live events very quickly. In this field, time is of the essence, and we guarantee almost instant removal. Don’t hesitate to contact one of our account managers so that we can present our solutions to you!

Join us again in mid-June for our next topic: application and software piracy.