Foxtel threatens to sue as Facebook pirates plunder Mundine vs Green fight
Tens of thousands of fight fans have sidestepped Foxtel’s pay per view broadcast of the Anthony Mundine Danny Green rematch using Facebook’s live streaming capabilities in an act of mass piracy with Foxtel warning it will be taking legal action against those who streamed the event.
Facebook became a piracy platform for the Mundine/Green fight
Foxtel technicians were sent scrambling to cut off feeds one-by-one as audiences for some of the live streams topped 150,000 viewers.
One Foxtel customer recorded the moment he was called and told to stop streaming the event to more than 90,000 people.
“Some subscribers resorted to covering the Foxtel/Main Event logo on their TVs with fast food containers in a bid to avoid being identified by Foxtel technicians.”
Are people really this silly? The Foxtel technicians can just link their account to the name that is streaming it. Covering a logo does nothing.
It was nothing to do with linking names. What about people with common names, or fake accounts? Foxtel flashed up on the screen a unique identifier which enabled them to find the accounts.
Correct. You could see the code pop up briefly on bottom left of screen.
So cover the bottom left then.. got it!
I wouldn’t mind paying for the PPV however I don’t have Foxtel, I do have fetch tv and apple tv etc. Foxtel needs to make the PPV available on more devices, who knows they may actually make more money.
It’s easy for foxtel, hardly a technological challenge. It was PPV. The amount of people in Australia with duplicate names that had paid $60 for the event would be minimal. A quick search in their database to cross reference subscribers with those who had paid for the even would narrow it down to a handful. Then they started hitting the boxes with the command to put the several messages up we saw on most of the streams. That’s how they got them.
The fight was one of the most amateur pathetic boxing bouts I have seen. Only stayed watching to see mundane floored. They boxing world and promoters should be paying money to all who watched the pathetic excuse for a bout, compensation. Including the live streaming legends
What do Foxtel expect their pay Tv is already very expensive to get a decent package and then they want another $60 to watch one fight night on top of that.
No chance I would rather spend the $60 on grog over the bar to watch it in a pub and make a night out of it.
Everybody who has the top package or sports package should not have to pay to any extra to watch it and maybe $10 extra would be reasonable to pay for those with only basic pay TV packages.
This is just a result of Foxtel’s monopoly on Australian TV.
I’d never pay them for their service, as it has as many ads as free to air, content that consists of constant re-runs; and the few shows or events that I’d actually want to watch (such as game of thrones) either don’t air in alignment with the rest of the world, or you have to pay an additional obscene fee ON TOP of the already pricey service costs to view.
This is what happens when you bastardise and monopolise. People turn to piracy.
Piracy isn’t the issue, supply and demand is the issue.
“Foxtel’s monopoly on Australian TV”
You mean outside of…ABC, SBS, Network 7, 9, 10. Stan, Netflix, Amazon, Fetch, Optus, Telstra, Apple, YouTube Red, etc, etc….
I couldn’t watch the live streams cause i made a bad decision to watch the Nitro Athletics. Who comes up with these concepts?
All other major sports organisations around the world offer a live streaming option. You can buy an HD stream legally via YouTube for all of the UFCs PPV events. You can buy the SuperBowl as a stream.
The ones to be embarrassed here are the promoters. Boxing promoters are so old school, it’s most of the reason boxing is dying. They didn’t consider for a second that they might have a huge audience seperate to TV ppv. Offer it at ~$30 stream only, via YouTube, and I guarantee you a bunch of those 200k + who watched the FB streams would have paid for it.
Two things for me;
1) effing lol. A simple Facebook live stream feature on a smart phone caused this embarrassment for Fuxtel.
2) isn’t this a problem for Facebook? As publishers are demanding a share from Facebook for aggregating their produced content, isn’t this just allowing Facebook to prop their audience numbers up by facilitating this type of activity? I expect to see this happen more now that the football is around the corner.
I don’t see how this facilitation is any different to the pirate Bay. Torrents are legal, as is live streaming. Obviously what is being shared is the differentiator.
Technology is no longer a mystery, many more people today have the knowledge and the ability to use technology to their advantage.
Dollar crazy and full of bluster, the media art baggers have stumbled again. Free to air television is a wasteland of dollar hungry manipulators snapping at the fading light like a pack of rabid dogs, The media “pay as you hunger for content” brokers, are not much better.
Not a fan of piracy as such. But Foxtel were taking the absolute piss by charging such a HUGE amount for the fight.
They are used to scalping people, at least this event has made them realise they can’t treat people like shit and get away with it any more.
Shit service.
Shit price.
Shit availability.
Pick two of the three and people will end up pirating.
No responsibility for Facebook? They’re the ones benefiting from the audience.