The piracy of sports broadcasts leads to the streaming services dedicated to it, as well as the competitions themselves, losing millions and millions. Therefore, it is not surprising that the world of football, for example, is turning to combat it. Now the good news is that it is confirmed that they have a new ally to lean on.
If we talk about fighting piracy, we can’t think of a better ally that football can have than an organization like the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship). This entity, one of the main names when it comes to high-caliber combat, has publicly spoken out against piracy and has shared the frustration it feels about the situation in which they find themselves.
Decades organizing combats
Although they are accustomed to the fiercest battles, the piracy issue is leading the UFC managers to a situation in which they consider it critical that more severe measures be taken. They have been in business for more than three decades, but until now they have never seen anything like it. They find that there are more and more pirate IPTV portals and services that offer free broadcasts of their fights, which results in them losing a large amount of money.
They talk about how subscriber numbers are reduced because there are illegal alternatives in which users can watch the fights without paying or paying less. But, above all, what bothers UFC managers is that the piracy of their sports content is so professionalized. This is where the situation becomes much more complicated than they could have imagined.
Who is guilty?
What they propose in the UFC is a slightly different approach than what has been seen lately. They argue that their main concern lies with the criminal groups that have organized to exploit the pirate retransmission of their content. It bothers them a lot that there are those who are profiting from it, which is something more serious than the detection of some people who watch content illegally from their mobile phones without paying. It affects them considerably, not only financially, to know that these criminals are pirating their signals to obtain advertising revenue or by selling access to their IPTV services. They consider it unfair and a serious problem.
They also say, with a lot of anger in their words, that it bothers them that these same pirates can advertise freely on social networks, attract clients or visitors and use different slogans such as “Watch UFC for free.” And, although they refer to how these signs end up being eliminated or disappearing, they also recognize that before that happens they have already managed to earn thousands of dollars at their expense.
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December 22, 2023 • 08:01
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What the UFC wants is for the system with which entities deal with piracy of live events to be more efficient. For them, when an organization like theirs makes a request to disable a web service for copyright reasons, this action should be immediate. But the reality is that these requests drag on for days and, by the time action is taken, the damage has already been done. Therefore, they consider that the measures being used to combat sports piracy are insufficient and a clear demonstration that there is a lot to change.
So that we can see the severity of the problem, the UFC shares statistics. They say that, for each of the sporting events they broadcast live, they end up sending an average of around 1,173 requests to eliminate live pirate broadcasts. In addition, they send more than 2,200 requests to delete recordings that have been published after the broadcast. After an hour after the issuance of these copyright infringement requests, they claim that 74% of the pages that have the event recorded are still online, while of the live broadcasts, 26% are still available. And that is without counting, logically, the number of users that there may be in each of those signals.
For all this, the UFC is trying to pressure justice just as associations and specialized services are doing around the world with other sports, mainly football. They want to be guaranteed more efficient anti-piracy measures and to introduce faster and more effective pirate website blocking resources. One way or another, they need this situation to be resolved as soon as possible.
