[crazygringo]

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 tone-deaf for the intended audience. Delinquents? What's next, are they going to tell me not to copy that floppy, or ask if I'd download a car?

What's crazier is that they actually have good justification but don't put it until the end of the article -- that pirates are using the service to broadcast streams that become super-popular (racking up charges) and then don't pay their bills for bandwidth and processing, losing near a million dollars in a year. Talk about burying the lead.

This article is a great example of what not to do. But it's a great learning opportunity for the rest of us. Always start your article with why the article subject matters. Don't wait until the end, don't just assume the reader is on your side.

...And also maybe don't call people delinquents when a decent proportion of your readership probably watches some of these same pirated streams...

[mmcclure]

Not the author, but I am a Muxer with edit access. I agree that the "delinquent" bit isn't hitting the intended tone there so I went ahead and made a quick edit to at least address that piece. I think the author intended as a reference to the payment kind of delinquency, but I can see why it wouldn't read that way.

Thanks for the feedback!

[Mashimo]

Someone who pirates content, does not pay his bills and probably earns money through adverts I don't mind calling a delinquent.

[crazygringo]

The sentence easily read as calling consumers of streams "delinquents", and that's how I had read it. Because the verb "to stream" can be used to refer to both the server and client, same as "pirate" refers to both distributor and consumer. I had definitely read it as them calling the viewers of soccer streams being delinquents and pirates, since no further context was given.

This was my point -- the actual context isn't explained until the very end. And even then, it doesn't unambiguously clarify who is being attacked at the top.

[TheHappyOddish]

I don't get your point. You understand those sports games you like are for profit, right?

Pirating is illegal and unethical. I do it - most of us do - but pretending it's a moral high ground against "greedy broadcasters" is just weird.

It seems very reasonable for a streaming company to have issue with people who abuse their services and cost them time and money.

[wirthjason]

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?

[bobdvb]

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.

[wirthjason]

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.

[bobdvb]

Exact numbers, I can't easily give, but I will breakdown the process and some of the scale.

Setting aside distribution which is a common problem between illegal and legal streaming. Production for legal streaming costs thousands of dollars per hour just to create the feed. A dozen cameras at the stadium, with camera operators pointing them. Vision directors, audio folk, production folk and a multi-million dollar truck or three to run the production from.

You're talking about fibre links around the world to move the media from the stadium to the transmission facilities. Playout systems to add extra polish to the look and feel (otherwise half-time would look rough), folks doing commentary (either at the stadium or remotely). Further fibre links to the cloud, Encoders, packagers and caches.

Almost every piece of equipment or software, is run in duplicate or triplicate to ensure that it's insanely reliable. There's not one fibre, but four, linking our two transmission data centres to the cloud. People don't expect much from a pirate site, but they'll threaten your life if you break the stream of their favourite sports team.

The pirates subscribe to us for just a normal consumer subscription and then rip off our content. They either use trial accounts or buy some credit on a public cloud under an assumed name. Sometimes they operate from compliant cloud providers who likely know what they're involved in (usually in countries with lax legal enforcement routes). The feeds themselves are usually separate as a business from the websites. The content acquisition is one activity, the hosting of streams is another and the hosting of the linking websites is another. On the black market pirates can get access to the source streams at some level or another and host them on a website. There is a mesh of money changing hands for access to content (sidenote: yes, crypto currency transactions are traceable to an extent).

Most sites are funded by advertising and link referrals, it's pretty old school. Some sites operate as closed paywalls which you need to get into by talking to the operator over Telegram and other sites. Those sites are slightly harder to track, but people like to brag about their favourite sites for watching on, so anti-piracy intelligence companies track those discussions.

Folk who share content on social media for their friends? We don't greatly care about them. But it still gets enforced because YouTube and the other social media sites aid us with Content ID matching, because if we didn't then people would use that and get that monetised at scale. Plus account sharing is still revenue loss.

As for whose doing this and why? The biggest operations are run through criminal rings, this is an organised crime issue. But it's also mixed in with a good number of ambitious and smart individuals who want to make a buck. Because companies crack down on it, there is a degree of money laundering and other financial crimes on top. One of the interesting things is how many of the apps used for piracy are also loaded with malware, which can be productive for these gangs in many other ways. LTT did a video about this recently which is worth a watch.

I'm doing a great deal of work at the moment which will increase the security of streaming, not because I want to screw over the consumers, but because I want to protect our efforts. Security and anti-piracy are just a small aspect of the effort we make, and it's all about protecting what we've got. I will also say, one big aspect of anti-piracy is that you don't want to look like a leaky ship to the rightsholder and to the competition. You don't want your competition to point at you and say "Bob's product is a liability, the rightsholder should give the rights to us." and you want the rightsholders to think you're the best place for their content. As a rightsholder, it's not just about protecting revenues, it's also about protecting the brand. Have you seen these pirate sites? They're junk and advertising all sorts of weird scammy crap. It's not a good look for them to have their content on there.