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We glued together content moderation to stop soccer pirates

mux.com

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Re: We glued together content moderation to stop soccer pirates

#201

Post by bobdvb »

wirthjason wrote: post #186
crazygringo wrote: post #76

This article could use big improvements in both its tone and organization. People don't have a lot of love for greedy sports broadcasters, and tech people are often associated with a kind of "information wants to be free" ethos (for better or worse), so starting out your blog post with: > identify and take action against soccer pirates and other delinquents who try to stream copyrighted content comes across as pretty…

I wish they explained the cost model more rather than just vaguely mention they had $750,000 in unpaid bills in 2021. How much does one game game/cost them?

People used their service to run the illegal streams and then didn't pay for it. Or they abused a free trial credits and MUX got a takedown notice, so someone used their service for free and they got a bad rep for it.

As a side note, another way to look at this is like email spam relays. Illegal activity utilising public services to deliver content (although in this case those receiving it will actually want the traffic). It still hurts the reputation of the service provider with people who spend a lot of money. I don't work for MUX but I work in live sports and we certainly appreciate service providers who prevent piracy, as well as have a negative opinion of those that don't (e.g. Cloudflare).

I know my views are about as popular as health insurance providers among a significant number of people here. But ultimately I work in tech for a company that's investing a huge amount of effort into getting rights to consumers (based on what we've been able to license) and when people steal our work to profit from it, it sucks. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Re: We glued together content moderation to stop soccer pirates

#202

Post by bobdvb »

ronsor wrote: post #87
dilyevsky wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d be surprised how quickly a decently popular stream get dmca’ed these days (and in some jurisdictions your entire domain is autoblocked by isps). Content owners use automated tooling to scour the web for their IP

Can't they put their stream behind some kind of anti-bot CAPTCHA?

There are lots of methods that pirates use, their websites are an absolute nightmare to navigate sometimes and you can't be sure that the link you're clicking on is an ad, an extra referral hop, an embed, or the actual video.

There is a whole secondary market of paywalled pirate services which makes it harder to discover. But then the anti-piracy companies just join the telegram groups, subscribe to those services, and then get the links in order to issue the takedown notices. There's a lot of human intelligence as well as automation. Heck, a handful of agents in India can do a heck of a lot of manual link hunting in an afternoon.

It's also worth noting that a lot of illegal streams are syndicated, so you take down one source and it'll break 50 websites.

Re: We glued together content moderation to stop soccer pirates

#203

Post by bobdvb »

Symbiote wrote: post #134
anarchogeek wrote: post #82

People pirate streams of soccer matches because it's nearly impossible to pay for legally. The matches for a single team or league are spread out amongst a ton of different streaming providers. Sometimes there is no paid option at all because of region blocking and complicated deals. I happily pay Apple for MLS matches because there was no reliable way to get them here in New Zealand. It is still stupid because Apple…

Plenty of people also pirate to avoid paying, or to pay less. I knew someone in England who ran a pirate football streaming service. He had TV and streaming subscriptions to a rented apartment in Cyprus, and streamed from there to people who paid him in England. Customers were introduced by word-of-mouth, so supposedly it was difficult for the copyright holders to discover. The same matches were shown in England, but…

I work in the tech side of a sports streaming company.

A quoted statistic from a study that was made a few years ago suggests that around 30% of people consuming pirate content are "pay never". We've done some exercises that show that a proportion of people can be encouraged not to watch pirate streams, but a good proportion won't no matter the cost.

Interestingly, we did an event where we made a significant match available for free, you still had to register for a 30 day trial, but you could easily cancel and pay nothing. The piracy on that match was no different than any other match and the estimated pirate viewership (we have various ways of estimating impact) was NO LOWER.

I have every sympathy with people who don't have access to content, and even for a portion of those who can't afford it. I certainly want everyone to get affordable content everywhere, I strive with my colleagues to make it better and deliver it in a cost effective way. But ultimately, we cannot ignore that too many people could afford to pay and don't want to. It's all well and good to point the finger at faceless corporations or the perception of the leagues, but ultimately its engineers like me who have to struggle with piracy, it's our work that's affected.

Re: We glued together content moderation to stop soccer pirates

#204

Post by bobdvb »

garbagewoman wrote: post #155
mig39 wrote: post #69

The best way to encourage pirates is expecting a Canadian viewer to pay $100 or more a month to watch soccer. I don't condone it, but hypothetically, the $7 a month I pay to stream illegally is a fuck you to the leagues and their rights owners.

You pay to stream illegally, yet still somehow feel self righteous? I could understand the sentiment if you were putting in the work yourself

It's also an FU to people like me who work on the legal side of streaming. My work is devalued and my efforts are stolen by pirates for their own profit. They get the privilege of profiting from the streams we make which requires massive infrastructure, yet we get vilified.

It's one thing to hate the way things are structured, it's another to think that it doesn't affect real people.

Re: We glued together content moderation to stop soccer pirates

#205

Post by bobdvb »

slackfan wrote: post #189
airtag wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference between a private copy for your own enjoyment and redistributing that on a larger scale. The first one is consuming something you were not meant to consume, with little or no cost to the rights owners. The second on is giving away something that someone else had substantial costs to produce. In my mind it's fair game to record and watch anything, if it's an unencrypted, freely available broad…

Is there? the advertising money already went back to the content producer, everybody got paid.

If the ad revenue isn't measured in terms of the consumption on the pirate streams then it's not ad revenue. Advertisers don't pay for eyeballs they can't quantify.

If content is consumed via an illegal streaming site then it's potentially hurting revenues elsewhere.

Re: We glued together content moderation to stop soccer pirates

#206

Post by elijaht »

lawgimenez wrote: post #60
emacdona wrote: post #8

Sigh... f*ck sports leagues/governing bodies. The reason some honest people pirate streams for sporting events is because they make it so annoying to pay for them. Some examples... I live in the US. I briefly took an interest in the EPL. If I wanted to watch all EPL games (or have the option of watching any particular EPL game), I'd have to subscribe to Peacock _and_ Fubo -- and I'm still not sure that gets me all ga…

As someone who's in Asia who loves to watch baseball, it is so hard to subscribe to live stream. I have no choice but to resort to illegal streams. MLB.tv outside the US will cost me $24.99 per month. What the fuck. The only option I have right now is Apple TV+ which has Friday Nights Baseball live, thank you Apple.

I don't get this complaint- there is no difficulty in watching the games. IIRC no game would be blacked out for you (besides the handful of national TV games?). You might disagree with the price, but streaming baseball outside of the US is quite simple.

Re: We glued together content moderation to stop soccer pirates

#207

Post by wirthjason »

bobdvb wrote: post #201
wirthjason wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish they explained the cost model more rather than just vaguely mention they had $750,000 in unpaid bills in 2021. How much does one game game/cost them?

People used their service to run the illegal streams and then didn't pay for it. Or they abused a free trial credits and MUX got a takedown notice, so someone used their service for free and they got a bad rep for it. As a side note, another way to look at this is like email spam relays. Illegal activity utilising public services to deliver content (although in this case those receiving it will actually want the traf…

I’m not making the argument that because it is cheap, or low cost, it is OK. Mux it’s totally right to do what they’re doing. It’s their service.

I’m curious in the economics of it. The people who are streaming have economics too, their time is worth something they could be doing something else with it. They are finding the source material, perhaps paying for it, finding a way to upload it, sharing links and distributing it, bearing whatever risks and consequences come, etc.

I don’t know much about the economics of pirate streaming. Are they doing this for financial gain, and if so what are the numbers? Or maybe they’re doing it out of the Robin Hood sense of justice, take the streams and distribute it for the greater good.

Every time I hear numbers about piracy they’re always vague, there’s no breakdown.

Re: We glued together content moderation to stop soccer pirates

#208

Post by teh_klev »

esharte wrote: post #31
emacdona wrote: post #8

Sigh... f*ck sports leagues/governing bodies. The reason some honest people pirate streams for sporting events is because they make it so annoying to pay for them. Some examples... I live in the US. I briefly took an interest in the EPL. If I wanted to watch all EPL games (or have the option of watching any particular EPL game), I'd have to subscribe to Peacock _and_ Fubo -- and I'm still not sure that gets me all ga…

If you lived in the UK, supported Tottenham and wanted to watch all their games in the 2021/22 season you had to: Subscribe to Sky Sports (around £50-60 a month) for the Premier League games. Subscribe to BT Sports (30 a month) for the Saturday early kick off Premier League games and the Europa Conference League games. Subscribe to Amazon Prime for the 3 random weeks when they are showing the Premier League games ins…

I'm not a football fan but that 3pm Saturday Blackout thing is so archaic:

"The football blackout is the rule that no Premier League, Football League or FA Cup matches be broadcast on live television on Saturday between 2:45pm and 5:15pm. Games may be played on that day and on that time, but they are forbidden to be televised – with Saturday televised kick-offs mostly occurring at 12:30pm or 5:30pm."

"This follows a rule set in place since the 1960s, when Burnley chairman Bob Lord successfully convinced fellow Football League chairmen that televised matches on Saturday afternoons would negatively impact the attendance of lower league games."

"He was convinced, for instance, that if Manchester United were to play Liverpool on Saturday at 3pm, fans of lower division teams would instead opt to watch the match on television instead of attend the match of the team they actually supported."

"As a result, the financial income of lower league football would be reduced."

"More than 40 years on, the rule is still in place. Foreign matches are also affected by the blackout – a broadcaster would not show the first 15 minutes of a match in La Liga that kicks off at 5pm UK time, for example."

Source: https://archive.is/DQwsk#selection-1539.0-1601.218

Re: We glued together content moderation to stop soccer pirates

#209

Post by wolrah »

standeven wrote: post #83

”If it is a false positive, they will press “Silence,” which activates another n8n workflow that adds the asset to an allowlist, so it won’t alert again.” So the secret is to first stream a safe video that will purposely trigger a false positive, and then switch to a pirate stream later on.

> So the secret is to first stream a safe video that will purposely trigger a false positive, and then switch to a pirate stream later on.

Or just make it look at a glance like a safe stream: https://www.polygon.com/2017/12/4/16733386/ufc-pay-per-view-...

That strategy would probably work for a lot of major sports.

Re: We glued together content moderation to stop soccer pirates

#210

Post by alistairSH »

emacdona wrote: post #8

Sigh... f*ck sports leagues/governing bodies. The reason some honest people pirate streams for sporting events is because they make it so annoying to pay for them. Some examples... I live in the US. I briefly took an interest in the EPL. If I wanted to watch all EPL games (or have the option of watching any particular EPL game), I'd have to subscribe to Peacock _and_ Fubo -- and I'm still not sure that gets me all ga…

Agree 100%. I'm a cycling fan and I refuse to subscribe to 4+ services to pick up the major races. I want the classics and big one-day races, the 3 grand tours, UCI XCO and DH, and all the world champ events.

As best I can tell... The classics and spring season are spread across Flo, GCN+, and Peacock.

Giro is GCN+.

le Tour is Peacock.

Road worlds is Flo.

Vuelta is Peacock.

And the UCI mountain bike stuff is (mostly) on GCN+ (used to be Redbull, maybe)

I'd happily spend $300/year or so to get it all in one place. Instead, I end up watching highlights on Youtube. I don't torrent because I have an iPad, so I can't (without jumping through hoops) - but I'm tempted to grab a cheap PC just to torrent cycling.

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