Whilst the industry talked about anti-piracy at ibc, over 300,000 people in the UK streamed 2 big UK Champions League matches illegally on Tue night.

Sep 18, 2015

The Champions League fixtures on September 15 2015 offered a good opportunity to review the impact of piracy management activity and developments in the digital landscape.

Shifts in consumer behavior in the digital age are notoriously difficult to identify as they happen, but we are seeing very strong indications that people are consuming increasing levels of content via unauthorized or pirate channels. Steps are being taken to attempt to limit this but the resources allocated are being mostly applied to automatic detection and the issuing of a DMCA notice which is having little or no impact.

Within the UK market BT Sport is the exclusive licensee of the Manchester City v Juventus and PSV Eindhoven v Manchester United games and these matches were heavily promoted on BT Sport. It was widely reported that BT invested ￡900 million in the Champions League rights.

 BT Sport and UEFA deployed anti-piracy activity based on detection of infringement and distribution of a DMCA style takedown notice. This is a standard approach within the sports broadcasting industry and primarily relies on pirates and platforms voluntarily removing material during the “live” window of the fixture.

Working with our digital video expert and former pirate, Boxing Guru, we decided to monitor and record a limited selection of the main high audience pirate channels as well as offer some estimated metrics on audience levels and losses.

Audience levels are estimated using cross referenced data from Alexa, Google trends direct streaming audience measurement tools and the real life experience of Boxing Guru. It is accepted that these tools do not produce precise accuracy but they do provide a clear guide.

The video linked below (with audio commentary from Boxing Guru) shows KLipcorp’s findings and our estimated UK pirate audience is 300,000 across these 2 matches. This audience was spread across 8 high audience pirate sites. The balance of pirate activity in the UK produced a further estimated 200,000 viewers showing the concentration of audience across the top pirate sites.

 We have estimated that 10% of the pirate viewers would have subscribed to BT Sport for the 9 months of the Champions League Season. The European Commission research was based on the closure in 2011 of kino.to and the subsequent behaviour of 5000 tracked consumers. For interest a main conclusion of the report published in 2015 was “Removal of pirated content can be beneficial to producers, however, if some of the consumers of copyright infringing content are willing to migrate to licensed versions of the product. Any anti-piracy intervention should therefore, as a minimum requirement, manage to convert unlicensed consumers into licensed ones for it to be justified.”

Taking an average of the ￡5 additional monthly cost for BT Broadband subscribers and ￡19.99 monthly cost for a standalone subscription to BT Sport KLipcorp estimate an average value per subscriber of ￡12.50.

Therefore (300,000 x 10%) x (￡12.50 x 9) = ￡3,375,000 loss / 30,000 subscribers

These figures are estimates and we would be interested to hear constructive comments on the methodology used.   

Our conclusion is that DMCA notice based activity is totally ineffective against the high audience pirate sites and a fresh approach is required. This conclusion is supported by other analysis KLipcorp have carried out of other premium sports rights such as Premier League Football.

According to KLipcorps rolling analysis since 2011 these DMCA notices have declined in impact due to a lack of follow up once a notice is issued and a growing misconception that merely linking to illegal content rather than hosting it means that there is no legal requirement to respond to a takedown notice. This may be due to incorrect conclusions drawn from the Svensson and Bestwater cases. A response from an unauthorised website is below;

This content is not hosted in our servers, neither the images nor the streamings. What you are seeing is just the indexation results that our search engine performs at any particular moment. As the results are not static but dynamic and are not introduced by hand, but automated by the search engine, there is no way to remove that content other that going to the source and erasing it. Once has disappeared from the source, the search engine will not index that content when it passes through that website, thus will not show up in the app.

Due to all above and also because there is precedent jurisprudence that support us, we are not going to modify our search engine.

Based on these findings rights holders might consider allocating resources away from detection and issuing notices to effective targeted follow up against high audience non-compliant pirates.